The story below was awarded Runner Up n the 2026 Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition Non-Fiction category, written by Babi Rani Poudel.
Babi Rani Poudel (she/her) is a trans woman from a remote village in western Nepal, now based in Melton, Melbourne. A chef, community support worker, writer and storyteller, she advocates for trans, non-binary and LGBTQIA+ people, people living with HIV, asylum seekers and marginalised communities. Drawing on her lived experience across Nepal, India and Australia, Babi champions dignity, inclusion, compassion and hope, particularly for people whose voices too often go unheard.
If I close my eyes in Australia, I can still hear the rivers.
In winter they whispered. At night, water slipped over smooth stones with a soft, tinkling sound, as if someone were playing a hidden instrument in the dark. A cool breath rose from the river, passed through the bamboo and entered our house. I fell asleep inside that sound.
During the monsoon, the rivers roared.
Long before I knew the names of cities or countries, Harun Khola and Dab Khola taught me everything about life. One taught me gentleness. The other taught me strength. Between them stood our remote village in the green hills of Nepal, where I was born in 1972, far too early, in a place without roads, electricity or hospitals.
My mother told me I was small enough to lie across her two palms. There was no doctor to examine me, no incubator to warm me andno ambulance waiting beyond the door. There was only my mother, the women of the village and the old knowledge carried from one generation to the next.
Some people quietly prepared for my death. My mother refused.
She wrapped me in cloth and walked from house to house, looking for women who were feeding newborn babies.
‘Could you spare a little milk?’ she asked.
Those mothers had very little. Their houses were made from timber, mud and stone. Their days were measured by harvests, animals, rain and firewood. Still, one after another, they shared their breast milk with a baby who was not theirs.
Before I learned language, I learned generosity.
An entire village kept me alive.
People often ask where I come from. I usually say Nepal, but that is only part of the answer. I come from between two rivers.
In the dry months, Harun Khola and Dab Khola moved calmly through the valley. Their clear water turned around stones and gathered in small pools where fish flashed beneath the surface. At night, their music joined the sound of insects, buffalo shifting in their sheds and wind moving through leaves. The village slept without streetlights, traffic or television, but it was never silent.
When the monsoon arrived in June, the rivers changed their faces. Rain could fall for four days, sometimes seven. Dark clouds swallowed the ridges. Roofs drummed without rest. Brown water rose through the gorge, carrying branches, tree trunks, rocks and pieces of mountains loosened by landslides.
‘Do not go near the river,’my mother warned, ‘Today the river is angry.’
We stood above the bank and watched. The current moved so fast that the surface looked folded and torn. The ground vibrated beneath my bare feet. It felt as though thunder had become trapped inside the valley.
There were no bridges, buses or vehicles. When both rivers flooded, our village became an island.
If somebody became seriously ill, we waited.
If a woman went into labour, everyone prayed.
Nature decided everything.
Yet my mother never treated the river as danger. She understood that the same water that frightened us also kept us alive. After the heaviest rain passed and the river lowered, she repaired the small channels that guided water towards our fields. She placed stones by hand and shaped the flow, so it moved from the upper rice paddy into the lower one.
I followed her barefoot along the narrow muddy edges. Cool water curled around my ankles. At the end of an upper field, we fixed a small woven fish trap where the irrigation water dropped towards the terrace below. Sometimes tiny fish came with the current. The river fed the paddy, the paddy fed us, and even the water moving from one field to another carried a small gift.
The rice seedlings began as delicate green lines. Weeks later, each one seemed to become a giant. The terraces shone deep green after rain, then slowly turned golden as harvest approached. From the top of the hill, the fields looked like stairways built for the mountains.
Those terraces were our roads, our garden and our playground.
The narrow footpaths curved between rice paddies and vegetable plots. We called the cultivated dry land bari and the rice fields khet. Along the edges grew maize, black beans and lentils. Mustard flowers covered sections of the hillside in yellow. Beneath the soil waited potatoes, ginger, garlic and turmeric. Taro leaves opened wider than my chest.
In the early morning, clear drops of water rested on the taro leaves. My mother sometimes bent one gently towards me.
‘Drink,’ she said, ‘nature has given it to you.’
The shining drop trembled before rolling into my mouth.
Cold. Pure. Gone in a second.
At the time I laughed. Now I think about how easily that drop could have fallen to the ground. Perhaps life is like that: held for a moment on a green leaf, bright enough to reflect the whole sky, yet always ready to fall.
Morning belonged to my mother. Before sunrise she had already stepped outside. The rooster called across the valley. Buffalo moved heavily in their shed. Cows waited near the wooden posts. Birds crowded the bamboo with song while mist rested across the terraces.
Then sunlight touched the distant snowy mountains.
The peaks turned gold.
As a child, I thought every person in the world began the day beneath golden mountains.
I carried a metal bucket while my mother milked the buffalo and cows. Warm milk struck the bottom with a steady rhythm. Back inside, she poured it into a blackened pot over the wood fire. Smoke gathered beneath the roof and made our eyes water.
She crushed fresh ginger on the grinding stone, added tea leaves, milk and a little sugar brought from the market. Steam filled the kitchen.
No tea in Australia has ever tasted like that tea.
Perhaps it was the buffalo milk. Perhaps it was the smoke. Perhaps it was because I drank it beside my mother while morning opened across the hills.
After tea, we went for dhara ko pani, water from the spring. The dhara was not a modern tap. Water emerged from the hillside and travelled through a piece of bamboo shaped into a pipe. It ran continuously, day and night, into the stone basin below.
We carried metal containers and shining brass pots down the path. When we placed them beneath the bamboo spout, water struck the metal with a clear ringing sound. I held my hands under the stream. It was so cold,my fingers hurt.
‘Drink,’ my mother said.
I drank deeply, without filtering it, boiling it or questioning it. The water tasted of stone, shade and the inside of the mountain.
Then we climbed home with the full pots. Every step had to be careful. The path was steep, and water moved heavily inside the vessels. A slip could spill the morning’s work onto the earth.
The houses in our area were separated by fields and slopes. Another home might stand five hundred meters away, then another beyond that. We did not need telephones. People called from one ridge to another.
‘Kanchi! Ghar chhau? Saanjh ma aau hai!’
The voice travelled across terraces and arrived clearly at our door: Little sister, are you home? Come this evening.
Everyone recognized every voice. Nobody needed a street number. The mountain itself carried our messages.
My mother worked constantly, but she never called it work. She went to the bari with the end of her shawl ready to hold whatever she picked. I followed her between the plants.
A cucumber hung beneath the broad leaves.
‘Mum, can I eat it?’
‘Yes,”’she said.
I smiled, twisted it from the vine and bit into it without washing it. It was crisp, cool and full of juice.
My mother gathered okra, bitter melon, chillies and greens in her shawl. Back in the kitchen, I watched her cook. She ground chilli, ginger, garlic and turmeric into a paste. The spices hissed when they touched the hot pan. She added the vegetables and stirred them until they were dry, fragrant and bright.
Rice bubbled in one pot. Lentils simmered in another. Fresh milk cooled nearby so the cream could rise. Later, she collected the cream, churned it into butter and heated that butter into ghee.
Nothing was wasted.
Everything mattered.
The forest gave us what the fields could not. My mother carried a doko, a woven bamboo basket, supported by a namlo across her forehead. She cut long green grass for the buffalo and pressed it into the basket. I collected dry branches from the forest floor. When the basket was full, she tied a bundle of wood across the top.
The load looked impossible, as though she were carrying half the forest on her back.
‘The mountain makes us strong,’ she said.
We walked home slowly along the goretto, the small footpath cut into the slope. Looking down, I could see terraces falling away beneath us. Looking up, I saw forest, sky and the path still waiting.
Some days we bathed beneath a small waterfall. The water struck my shoulders so cold and hard that I shouted, then laughed. Sunlight broke into pieces across the spray. Moss covered the stones. My mother washed beside me, and for a little while there was no work, no market and no fear of the rivers—only falling water and our laughter.
The forest was also our orchard. Wild raspberries hid in bushes. Guavas grew close to the path. Mangoes, peaches, pears, litchis, bananas and jackfruit came with their seasons. Sometimes I climbed higher than my mother wanted.
‘Be careful,’ she called.
But I believed the sweetest fruit always grew on the highest branch.
On Sundays, my mother left before dawn for the Hat Bazaar at Arunkhola. The walk took about two hours each way. She carried ginger, chillies, vegetables, bananas or whatever our land had produced. Sometimes she went barefoot. In the monsoon, mud pulled at her feet and the footpaths became slippery.
At the market, she sold our harvest and bought what we could not grow: salt, sugar, soap, detergent, black pepper and coffee, which she loved. If money remained, she bought cloth for clothes.
That was luxury.
We did not discuss electricity bills because there was no electricity. We did not worry about internet access because no such thing existed in our world. Our worries were whether monkeys would reach the maize, whether the river would rise, whether the crop would survive, or whether a tiger might attack a buffalo during the night.
Fear was practical.
Hope was ordinary.
When trouble came, nobody faced it alone. If a roof leaked after days of rain, neighbours arrived with grass, bamboo and rope. If a family fell behind during planting, extra hands appeared in the paddy without being asked. During harvest, sickles moved from one field to the next until everyone’s rice was safely gathered. Children carried water, older people sorted grain, and somebody always brought tea.
The animals belonged to this shared world too. A buffalo breaking loose was not one family’s problem. Voices travelled across the terraces, feet ran along the paths and soon the animal was guided home. If monkeys entered the maize, everyone shouted, clapped and threw stones towards the trees. We protected the harvest together because hunger did not stop at one doorway.
Nobody wrote down who had helped whom. There were no invoices, appointments or promises of repayment. The village remembered in another way. One day you received help; another day you gave it. That was how people survived between the rivers.
Festivals changed the rhythm of the village. During Teej, women dressed in red and gathered to sing and dance. Their voices travelled across the terraces. Sisters, neighbours and cousins moved together beneath the open sky, clapping and turning while old songs came alive again.
During Tihar, the Festival of Lights, we had no electricity, but the village glowed.
My mother rolled cotton into small wicks and placed them in leaf bowls or clay diyos filled with ghee or mustard oil. One by one, we lit them along the veranda, beside the doorway, near the windows, around the cowshed and down the footpath.
The flames stood in a line like a small army guarding the house.
Orange marigolds hung beside purple makhamali flowers. Yellow, red and deep kalaji-coloured blooms brightened the doorways. The oil lamps trembled in the night air, and our dark village became a field of stars brought down to earth.
Even now, I think it shone more beautifully without electricity than many cities do with millions of lights.
Our school also belonged to the open air. There were days when we had no uniform, no shoes, no bag and hardly any books. A wooden board served as a blackboard. White chalk scratched across it while we sat beneath the sky.
When wind came, dust lifted and paper flew.
When rain arrived, nature ended the lesson.
The system was poor, but education still entered my life. Today I understand its value more deeply. Learning did not begin with a building, a uniform or a computer. It began with somebody holding a piece of chalk and believing that something was better than nothing.
When I look back from Australia, people sometimes feel sorry for the child I was.
They should not.
I grew up among rivers that sang, mountains that turned gold, terraces that fed us and neighbours who became family. I drank from a bamboo pipe, ate cucumber straight from the vine, carried firewood from the forest and watched my mother turn milk into tea, cream into butter, butter into ghee, seeds into food and danger into survival.
I learned that wealth is not only money.
Wealth is hearing someone call across a valley and knowing the voice.
Wealth is a mother sharing milk with a baby who is not her own.
Wealth is a brass pot filling beneath dhara ko pani.
Wealth is rice water moving from one terrace to the next.
Wealth is a line of diyos burning in darkness.
Years later, I would leave Nepal. I would carry loads through Kathmandu, survive hardship in Mumbai and eventually build a life in Australia. People would call me a migrant, a refugee and a survivor.
Those words are true, but they are not where my story begins.
My story begins with my mother walking from door to door, carrying a premature baby and refusing to surrender hope.
It begins with Harun Khola whispering in winter.
It begins with Dab Khola roaring in the monsoon.
One river taught me gentleness.
The other taught me strength.
Tyo khet.
Tyo bari.
Tyo jangal.
Those fields. Those terraces. Those forests.
They are not places I simply left behind. They are still growing inside me.
When I hear running water in Australia, I close my eyes. The city disappears. I hear water striking brass beneath the bamboo dhara. I smell ginger tea and wood smoke. I feel cold mud between my toes. I see my mother walking ahead of me, a doko full of grass on her back and firewood balanced above it.
Beyond her, the terraces fall towards the rivers.
Harun Khola whispers.
Dab Khola answers.
And I am home again, between two rivers.