How many of us have watched our mothers suffer in silence?
We know the sounds. The joke at the dinner table that lands at her expense. The way she goes quiet at a party when he talks over her. The gathering where the men fill the room and the women serve them, and nobody notices that half the people present have agreed not to exist as individuals.
We know the sentences, too. You can travel wherever you want once you’re married. Get your master’s degree, but ask your husband first. You’re too opinionated; no one will marry you. Did you see her drinking at the party? She must be too modern. Why take the job or accept an offer from your dream university when you could simply change your name and live for someone else? And on her twentieth birthday, the clock starts ticking. A girl is expected to build a family before her brain has even fully matured.
I have heard every one of these, and so have you. I hated them every time. People said them as if they were advice. They never were.
This week, in Virginia, a man told a jury that he had disposed of his wife’s body.
Naresh Bhatt testified that he found his wife, Mamta Kafle Bhatt, unconscious beside vomit, pesticides and pills. He claimed she had died by suicide and that he subsequently dismembered her body. He admitted concealing her body but denied murdering her. The jury has yet to return a verdict. His account contradicts what he told police and reporters after she disappeared. Jurors will decide which version is true. I am not going to.
I want to look at what else they heard, because that is the part that is not new to any of us.
Mamta was a 28-year-old nurse who married through an arranged match and moved to the United States. Her brother testified that he had advised her against marrying Bhatt. Months before she disappeared, she sent him photographs of her bruised face and asked him to keep them safe. A friend testified that Mamta had stayed with her for more than two weeks. In a video Bhatt recorded himself, Mamta says that her husband had taken all her documents. Bhatt told jurors that he opposed her calling the police because it would look bad.
A brother objects. A daughter documents her injuries. She leaves, then goes back. She asks for her papers. At each of those moments, someone could have said: Come home.
Similarly, Chandra Maya Poudel-Rimal was strangled in Ohio in 2024, allegedly by her husband. Tika Dhimal was killed by her husband the same year. Last year, in Dallas, police said Lalit Pradhan shot his wife, Ranjana Shrestha, and their three-year-old son. In June, a Nepali man in Saitama, Japan, was arrested for beating his wife to death with a metal rod. Police quoted him as saying he did not like that she was laughing at him.
Laughing. According to the police account, a woman was killed for laughing in front of her husband. Tell me again that the dinner table has nothing to do with it.
Police in Nepal have recorded 528 women killed by their spouses at home over six years. I could find no corresponding figure for Nepali women killed by their husbands abroad. The 2022 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey found that 27 percent of married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced emotional, physical or sexual violence at the hands of their current or most recent husband.
Worldwide, the UN reports that of the 83,000 women and girls intentionally killed in 2024, 60 percent were killed by intimate partners or family members. Among male homicide victims, the corresponding figure was 11 percent. Men are most likely to be killed by someone outside the home; women, by someone inside it.
Consider what a Nepali girl is prepared for. I use ‘grooming’ in its plain sense: shaping a person, from an early age, towards a particular future. She learns to cook, to serve, to stay quiet in other people’s houses and to adjust. Her education is celebrated as long as it does not get in the way. Her purpose is to marry on time and raise a family. Anything she does before that is treated as a delay.
We say a daughter is given and a daughter-in-law is brought: chhori dinu, buhari lyaunu. A son is the one who acts; a daughter is the one who is handed over. At weddings, many families perform kanyadan, the ritual of giving away the daughter. Most parents mean it as a blessing, and I do not doubt them. But scholars writing about North Indian marriage have linked the ritual to the older saying that a girl is paraya dhan, someone else’s wealth, raised for another household. A child who learns that she is someone else’s wealth also learns that she is only a temporary resident in her own home.
Follow the grammar to its logical conclusion. If a woman is given, someone must have received her. If her home is the one she is leaving, then returning to it becomes a failure. This is why ‘come home’ is perhaps the hardest sentence a Nepali family can say to a married daughter.
Once she is in her husband’s house, a second vocabulary takes over. The qualities we praise in a wife are precisely those that keep her there: sahanu, to endure. Adjust garnu, to adjust. Ijjat, the family’s honour, which in practice often means the family’s silence. A woman who stays and suffers is called strong. A woman who leaves is called difficult.
The Kathmandu Post reported that a former colleague had witnessed what was happening to Mamta and urged her to leave, but Mamta decided to give her husband another chance. The newspaper’s editors noted that Nepali women who seek help are often pressured by family members or partners to settle matters quietly. The pressure is gentle. Someone says, ‘Think of the child.’ Others say every marriage has difficult years. A friend offers to mediate. Each speaks out of love and fear of gossip, and each takes away an exit.
The state speaks the same language. Ishwari Bhujel, a woman serving in Nepal’s army, reportedly complained to police that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her. She was told it was a minor domestic dispute that they should settle between themselves. She was later killed. Gharelu jhagada, a household quarrel: a phrase that turns a death threat into weather.
When Mamta went missing in Virginia, police initially treated her as an ordinary missing person, without assigning her an elevated risk. The procedures were different. The underlying belief that a wife’s safety is a private matter was the same.
I have heard women, some of them women I love, say that feminism is unnecessary. They say they have everything: a degree, a job, a supportive husband. Listen to the verbs. Given. Allowed. Lets me. Each describes a condition set by someone else. They are not describing freedom. They are describing permission, and permission can be withdrawn on any random Tuesday.
Mamta had a degree and a job, too. She was a nurse, and she was alone with a man who, according to her own words in a video he recorded, held her documents.
I do not blame those women. They are describing the best deal available to them, and they have often worked hard to earn it. But feminism was never a demand for more gifts. It is the claim that a woman does not need anyone’s approval to be a person: to travel, to study, to accept an offer or to leave.
The usual proposals are laws and awareness campaigns, and Nepal needs both. But a law is something we apply to other people’s marriages. The harder work is ours, and it starts with what we say.
Stop saying a daughter is given. Stop calling her someone else’s wealth. Ask about a groom’s temper, his history and how he speaks to women before you ask about his income or his visa. Teach sons what to do when a woman says no, and accept that no is a complete sentence. Stop praising endurance as a virtue. Let maiti mean a door that stays open without questions, whatever the neighbours say.
And when a daughter shows you a bruise, do not ask what she did. Ask what she needs.
The jury will decide what happened to Mamta. Her mother, Gita Kafle, sobbed in the courtroom this week as Bhatt testified. She had spoken to her daughter every day. Whatever the verdict, the question Mamta’s case leaves behind belongs to all of us who grew up hearing those sentences: How many warnings does a family need before it believes its own daughter?
