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nineteen.’
    ‘Nineteen!’ I said, playing along with him. ‘Oh, that’s very young. So young for somebody so much older!’ Mani seemed quite taken with the idea.
    ‘In Nepal many wives younger than man. I have to work hard, make much money, build house. If I do, I catch mother’s eyes, if she happy, then I can marry daughter. But it takes long time and all woman married before twenty-five years—so I only get young girl.’
    ‘So you have to prove yourself!’
    ‘Yes. If I am doing well, no drinking, then I get better type wife!’
    I chuckled. ‘A better quality wife?’
    Mani found it amusing as well. ‘Yes, a better type wife. If I am working bad, save no money, I get no wife or wife not so good kind.’
    We both looked off into the distance and contented ourselves with our separate thoughts. I felt guilty to be thinking it, but I now wondered if Mani was a virgin. He must be!
    A few minutes passed and then almost instinctively we rose at the same time to begin trekking again.
    Mani set off well ahead of me and led the way out from the comfort of our shelter, back into the blistering heat. My feet were starting to feel the pinch of this forever-uphill trail, and I tried to distract myself by thinking of other things.
    Why, at thirty-eight, hadn’t Mani been married yet? His references to not drinking or smoking weed as his main challenge in winning a young lady—or her mother—had seemed overdone. Isn’t that what all mothers want? Observing Mani, he didn’t strike me as somebody who had skeletons in his cupboard but perhaps I was wrong. It made me question if there was more to Mani’s ‘bad luck’ than just being unfortunate. Bad luck was not something that I believed in now; over time I had convinced myself it didn’t exist. When I was younger though, rather than do anything about my ritual praying, I’d thought, if I could only have a stroke of luck then I’d wake up one day and the damn praying would have gone away. But I’m not lucky!
    It all began when I was about six. Very young. I started not sleeping at night. I couldn’t seem to switch my mind off. I used to lie in the dark visualising terrifyingimages in the shadows. I wouldn’t intentionally try to scare myself; at first I would be trying to picture Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse—happy things that would help me relax. Gradually, though, the images would change and before I knew it, Santa would be wielding a sharp knife and Mickey would have transformed into the devil. It scared the life out of me. But as soon as I’d snuck into bed beside my little sister, Sarah, or youngest brother, Sam, the images would disappear and I would be asleep in seconds. Their rooms had the same shadows, the same darkness—that didn’t matter as long as I was in beside somebody else.
    At the beginning my parents must have thought I would soon grow out of it. Why wouldn’t they think that? Many kids are frightened to sleep on their own. But at age thirteen I was still creeping in beside Sarah or Sam. It was embarrassing. I was older than both of them for Godsake. How weird was it to be sleeping with your brother or sister at thirteen? It was like still wetting your bed.
    Then, almost overnight, I suddenly became obsessed with germs. I started washing my hands in a strange way; repeatedly and methodically for hours at a time. I had to be convinced that all possible germs had been removed. It was insane—but there was nothing Icould do about it. And it worsened. Every time I had to wash my hands it was as though a brick wall formed inside my mind and the only way I could break it down was to precisely and correctly perform the washing. The frustration was unbearable and I was always stressed and agitated.
    Then shortly after I’d started the hand-washing ritual I developed another ritual involving my feet. A sensation would come over my foot which required me to rub the other foot over it until this sensation was gone. There was nothing physical about