Sharjah: The start of every fall semester on campus is marked by swathes of fresh faces walking into classes with first-year syllabi. They drive through doorways like herds of lamb, wide-eyed and side-by-side, asking: ‘First floor? Up the stairs? The bathroom?’
It’s two weeks before anxious faces finally relax into caffeinated smiles. The new students weave in and out of their morning classes confidently for the first time since tumbling out of their high schools. Still, there’s more to discover. They’ve heard rumours of a fast food restaurant somewhere on campus. And then there’s the question of the future, of life’s true meaning, but that misery is spared until junior year.
One newcomer remains silent in the din. Walking alongside the crowd, a young face gazes out blankly from atop a small body. Glossy red lips sealed shut, tired brown eyes lined blue and long black hair pulled back. Three months into the semester and Kanchan Sunar has not taken a single class.
She walked onto the American University of Sharjah campus a year after graduating from the Sri Akalai Laur Secondary School in Nepal, two months after her twentieth birthday and a few days after settling into her new home at a nearby labour camp.
Now, she cleans. She mops the floors of her would-be classrooms, picks up the garbage dropped by her would-be classmates and rides the bus at dawn every morning to her would-be university.
Despite her age, no one ever confuses Sunar for a student. Her uniform deftly signals to others that this girl, whatever dreams she may have, whatever likes she might share, is not one of them.
Sunar is a shadow, an ever-present figure flickering in the background of the university hubbub. She is also a kind and patient young woman, one who graciously helped two bumbling students cast a light on perhaps the most literal example of someone being so close, yet so far.
We find an empty classroom to conduct our second interview with Sunar, who, wary after the first time, watches bemusedly as I assemble a makeshift office out of school desks. She’s slow to take a seat, unsure which end of the wooden panel should be lifted to get into the chair. Once settled, we delve into the past.
Sunar was born on July 19, 1995 in a rural village in Abu Khrani, an area housing roughly 20,000 located between dense thickets of green in Central Nepal. At home, she and her four younger siblings live off rice and lentils farmed in their village and the plentiful milk provided by their two buffalo and six goats.
Her father is an industrial worker. He works ten-hour shifts at a beer factory, an hour away on foot. A caring father, he encourages his children to get educated. When she graduated the eighth grade, Sunar began riding the bus to the nearest secondary school, a ten-room building, away from the village. She was one of the top ranked students in her class.
Smiling, she tells us that her favourite subject was mathematics. Had things happened differently, she would have been a teacher — a dream, she says, which was inspired by one of her own instructors, a man whose fondness for teaching touched Sunar and her classmates.
Every night after dinner, Sunar would sit down with her siblings to tutor them. She enjoyed it. Her brothers and sisters shared her penchant for learning, taking after their sister’s tenacious spirit.
Evil entered the house then, just a short while after Sunar began secondary school. It settled on the back of her mother’s hand: a malignant black growth.
Sunar calmly recalls the dreadful year that followed - the five-hour bus trips to the closest hospital in Kathmandu, the confusion, the medicine that would not work, the pain that would not stop, the missed school days and the slipping grades. The blackness first ate away at her mother’s hand, and then at her family’s expenses.
When doctors finally pinpointed the cause, the hand was amputated. But it was too late; the cancer had spread.
“I never thought she would leave us,” Sunar says, explaining how she watched her mother spend the last six months of her life in agony. “I’d never thought I’d be without her. I had to see her suffer a lot, and now I’m all alone.”
Although her mother could not talk in the time leading up to her death, Sunar remembers the last words said to her: “Take care of your siblings, help them with their schooling.”
It’s been three years but the changes that took place in the household remain.
“My mother used to tell me to be a teacher and to teach all the children in the village,” Sunar says.
But, after her death, family took precedent. Seventeen-year-old Sunar took up her mother’s mantle as caretaker, cleaning, cooking and looking after her siblings and the house. Upon graduating, she decided to help her father pay off their medical bills, a whopping 200,000 Nepalese rupees (Dh6,937.80).
She heard of work in the UAE through a cousin who was employed as domestic help in Dubai. Like any proud parent sending their firstborn off to college, Sunar’s father accompanied her to the Tribhuvan Iternational Airport five hours away.
“It was very sad,” she says. Her father didn’t want her to leave but she insisted. They needed the money and his monthly salary of 25,000 Nepalese rupees wasn’t enough.
Now, she’s here, sitting in the back of an empty classroom, the sun illuminating the side of her face, her earring, a small studded hoop, twinkling in the light — a piece of her mother.
She makes Dh900 a month as a cleaner, which is about 25,000 Nepalese rupees and says that even when the debt is paid off she plans to continue working in Sharjah. Of the money she receives, Sunar keeps only enough with her to buy the necessities; the rest goes back to her family.
Sunar’s youngest sister is at the top of her class now. The older of the two brothers, after seeing what their mother went through, wants to be a doctor. They’re hardworking, she says. But so is she, a victim of circumstance.
Dusk is approaching. Students have all but deserted campus until next morning. Sunar walks out the door.
Danna Abrahim is a journalism student at the American University of Sharjah.
