I had gone to Kathmandu Model Hospital with a Kantipur TV crew who had spotted Bhawana with her hair mole spread across almost half her face. She was there with her father and volunteers from CWIN who had arranged for her to get a surgery done by Dr Shankar Mani Rai.[break]
During the interview, her father, Kalu Man Thami, was telling us how her classmates in school and people in the village called her a monster, boksi and ugly to her face.
Those words used to hurt him so bad and he could only imagine the pain his nine-year-old daughter had gone through all the while as she faced contempt from everyone through no faults of hers.
Just as he was narrating this, Bhawana, who had remained silent throughout, had tears welling up in her eyes and that was the moment I captured.
Later, I showed the photograph to a colleague. It was a powerful shot, he said, and I too hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind. Whereas he went forward to do an article about Bhawana for print, I decided I would pursue Bhawana’s progress after her surgery.
Coming from a poor economic background, Bhawana’s family did not even have a proper mirror in their house. When Rajendra Manandhar, a fellow photographer, had clicked her picture and shown it to her some years ago, her father told us she had been scared of her own image and gone off crying.
During first phase of surgery that was done a couple of months ago, her face skin with the growing hair mole had been replaced by skin from her thighs.
We later found out that if she had not been operated in time, the rare skin disease could have turned cancerous. As she recovered, right after the bandages was removed, she was given a mirror and she didn’t’ let go of it for fifteen minutes – she just kept looking at herself.
Her story, “Hope,” that I present here, I would say is still incomplete. The story is her hope and mine, and that things will be better for her. She still has some more surgery to go through. I want to see it all through with her.
I want to go to her village Dusikharka which is almost a two-day walk from Dolakha, I hear. I want to see the reactions of the villagers and how she blends in. Until I’m assured that she has achieved some sort of acceptance in her life and the confidence to walk with her head held high, I don’t think my job will be complete.
And it all started with this photograph. I am no longer pulled towards Bhawana’s story as just a photographer. It’s a different attachment that I feel towards her and her father now, and I cannot detach myself from them, not yet.
About Narendra Shrestha
Shrestha has been working as a photojournalist for 15 years. He started his photographic career as a teen working for the Samacharpatra daily. He is currently the deputy photo editor at the Kantipur daily and photo correspondent for Nepal at EPA (European Pressphoto Agency).
Shreshtha was the winner of the Second Megabank Photo of the Year Award for Bhawana’s photographs. He also won first prizes in three other categories of the photo competition.
As told to Ujjwala Maharjan
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