By Bimal Devkota

I was born in Pokhara, in a city that sits beneath the Himalayas and teaches you, without meaning to, that some things are larger than yourself. I arrived in England in February 2022, twenty-four years old, with five hundred pounds and an address written on a piece of paper. I am now a Senior Care Assistant in Farnham, and the author of my first book, a memoir called The Universe in Her Eyes.

I want to write here about both halves of that sentence — the care work and the writing — because for me they have never really been separate.

I did not arrive in England planning to work in care. My first months here were a series of ordinary jobs: washing pots at McLaren in Woking, working a chicken and grill shop, a pizza place, a café inside a post office. Each one taught me something — patience, speed, how to read a face in the seconds it takes to pour someone’s drink. But something else was forming underneath all of it. I enrolled in a Level 3 course in health and social care while I worked, without fully knowing why. I only knew I could not imagine standing still.

When I finally walked into a care home twelve minutes from my front door, I did not know anything about care in the way the job would come to define it. What I knew was people — how to sit with someone, how to listen, how to stay in a room when staying is the only thing you can offer. That turned out to be the most important qualification I had.

I have since sat beside residents in their final hours. I have held hands that were letting go of everything. I have also laughed with residents over something as ordinary as an unironed dress, because care is not only the solemn moments — sometimes it is exactly that, reminding someone, in the middle of an ordinary day, that they are still someone worth laughing with.

This is the part of British life that rarely gets written about by the people actually doing it. Care work here is carried, in large part, by people who left everything they knew to do it — Nepali, Filipino, South African, Eastern European, each bringing an entire other life into a British corridor and starting again. I work alongside colleagues who spent decades as nurses and professionals elsewhere before learning a new rota, a new set of forms, a new way of being useful in a place that did not yet know their names. It is quietly extraordinary work, and it is rarely celebrated.

That is why I started writing — not because I set out to become an author, but because I could not carry what I was witnessing without putting it down somewhere. I wrote sentences in the staff toilet between tasks, in the corner of a corridor on my phone, in the few minutes a night shift allows. Slowly, over months, it became three hundred and eighty pages: The Universe in Her Eyes, published earlier this year. My writing on night carers has also recently appeared in the Big Issue.

Being Nepali shapes how I write, whether I mean it to or not. My grandmother taught me to pay attention before I understood I was being taught anything. My mother’s voice — telling me to come back early — is somewhere in every chapter, even the ones that have nothing to do with her directly. I think that is simply what it means to carry two places inside you at once: Pokhara does not leave you, even while England is teaching you who you are becoming.

I did not expect care work to become the subject of a book, and I did not expect a book to become part of how I understand my own life here. But that is what happened. Pokhara made me. England has revealed me. Writing is how I have made sense of the distance between the two.

Bimal Devkota is a Senior Care Assistant in Farnham, Surrey, and author of The Universe in Her Eyes (available on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/08pUe9Bf). His writing has also appeared in the Big Issue: “The invisible night carers holding up the system” — https://www.bigissue.com/life/health/invisible-night-carers-care-system/