Prakash Thapa lived above a kebab shop in Southall, in a narrow room with a window that stuck when it rained. The window faced an alley, where bins overflowed and foxes prowled at night. The room smelled of old oil, cumin, and sometimes vinegar from the chip shop next door. There was a small table with one leg shorter than the others, a mattress on the floor with a faded blue cover, and a kettle that wheezed and clicked when it boiled. On the wall, he had taped a postcard of the Annapurna range—its edges curling slightly with time. He had lived there for three years, and every winter the damp crept up the walls, leaving faint marks that never quite faded.

He worked in a hotel kitchen near Paddington Station. Six days a week. Sometimes seven, when someone didn’t show up, which was often. He boiled potatoes, sliced tomatoes, chopped herbs, peeled carrots, cleaned trays, and scrubbed the floor at the end of every shift. The chef was a large man from Serbia with a limp and a voice like gravel. The dishwasher was from Ghana and sang old highlife tunes under his breath. A young Polish waiter came and went, always in a rush and always asking for extra shifts before disappearing again. Prakash listened and did the work. He didn’t talk much. People said he was serious, even distant. That was fine with him. He had not come to London to talk. He had come to work.

Every month, on the first Friday, Prakash sent money home to Nepal. He used an app called MoneyTO. It worked easily and never gave him trouble. The interface was simple, the fee low. He liked that. No one else at the hotel had heard of it. That was fine too. He didn’t need to explain. The money went directly to his mother’s account. He always sent a little more than he said he would. Sometimes he skipped a meal or two near the end of the month. It wasn’t a problem. He was used to hunger, in brief and quiet doses.

His family lived in a village high in the hills above Pokhara. The road was steep and wound through pine and rhododendron forests, opening at times to sudden, breath-taking views of the white peaks. His father had been a teacher once, in the village school with a tin roof that rattled in storms. Now he was sick—something with the lungs, maybe from years of chalk dust and cold mountain air. He coughed often and slept during the day. His mother ran the house, tended a small garden, looked after the goats, and listened to old radio broadcasts in the evening when the reception was good. His younger sister, Nirmala, was studying to be a nurse in Pokhara. She was clever and quick with numbers. Prakash believed in her. He had paid her tuition for two years now. He never told her when he couldn’t afford something for himself because of it.

Sometimes, when the shift ended late and his legs ached, Prakash walked along the Grand Union Canal and watched the lights of the city smear and stretch on the water’s surface. He liked the stillness of the water and the way the wind shifted along it, even in winter when the cold pressed hard against his coat. London felt far away from the hills, but he had grown used to it—the grey sky, the buses, the shouting on the street, the silence that came only after midnight. He smoked on the fire escape sometimes. Just one cigarette, then sleep. It was his ritual. A way to end the day.

He rarely spoke to neighbours. The man across the landing was from Karachi and worked night shifts. They nodded in the hallway but never exchanged names. A woman downstairs always played the same Hindi song on Sundays, loud and proud as if it were a prayer. Prakash didn’t mind. It reminded him of festivals back home—of colour, of warmth, of sweet things shared between neighbours.

His weekends, when he had them, were spent doing laundry at a coin-op near Ealing Broadway, writing short messages home, and sometimes buying lentils and rice from a shop that stocked goods imported from India and Nepal. The owner once asked him why he never smiled. Prakash had smiled then, just briefly.

One Wednesday, the call came. His father had collapsed again. It was not the first time. But this time felt different. His mother’s voice on the phone was thinner, slower. There was a silence between her sentences, as if she was trying not to cry or run out of breath. Prakash didn’t ask many questions. He said he understood. After the call, he stood at the window for a long time, watching the alley fill with rain. He could smell the wet bins, the damp bricks, the faint smoke from a distant fire.

That week, he sent more money than usual. He took on an extra shift. He didn’t say anything to the others in the kitchen. He worked the same. Chopped the onions, washed the pans, took out the bins. The Serbian chef barked orders. The Ghanaian dishwasher sang an old song about mangoes and rivers. The work was repetitive, but it kept his hands busy. That was what he needed. When his hands moved, his mind stayed still.

On Sunday, Prakash bought a card from the corner shop. It had a photo of a small boat on still water, with reeds in the foreground. He stared at the picture for a long time before buying it. He wrote a short note to Nirmala in neat Nepali script. He told her he was proud of her. He folded a ten-pound note into the card and told her to buy something sweet after her exams. He signed it with just his name. No flourish, no extra words. He didn’t believe in embellishments. He believed in things done simply, and well.

He drank strong tea and sat on the edge of his bed. The wallpaper peeled in the corner near the window. The sky outside was grey and moving, clouds drifting low and heavy. He thought of the wind in the hills, how it curved around the house at night, and how the roof still leaked in monsoon season. He remembered lying awake as a boy, listening to the drip of water hitting a metal pot. He would fix that someday. He would stand on that roof with hammer and nails. But not yet.

He had work in the morning. The same shift. The same noise of pots and hissing oil. The same quiet ride on the bus at dawn, with the city still asleep around him. But for now, the kettle whistled, and the postcard on the wall stayed still, mountains silent and white in the fading light. Prakash sat quietly, the tea warming his hands, and waited for the night to pass.