Under the hot afternoon sun, Devkumari Thapa Magar walks among the crowd at Kathmandu’s Basantapur, carrying a thermos and disposable cups. Every now and then, she stops in front of strangers, and asks them if they want tea. 

This has been Magar’s life for a decade now. Her day starts at five in the morning, when she leaves her home with four thermoses filled with tea to serve the people visiting Basantapur, most of them on their morning walks. She continues her work until ten and returns home. By four in the afternoon, she is back at Basantapur with her thermoses. Her work ends at nine, and it’s the same routine the day after.

Born and raised in Nuwakot district, Magar got married at the age of 15, and by 18, she was already a mother of two. 

She tells me she never went to school. “Girls were never really encouraged to study. It was not common in my village for a girl to go to school. So it never occurred to me that education was important,” says the 50-year-old.

With no education background and already a mother at a young age, Magar depended on the income of her husband to raise the family. Her life changed when her husband remarried. Magar decided to leave and lead her own life. 

“I wanted to take my children with me, but they didn’t want to live with me,” she says. 

It was painful for the young mother to see her children turn their mother down.

Magar started farming to eke out a living. She says no one turned up to help her, not even her own parents. As a single woman, she says, she had to deal with inappropriate behavior from many men.

After years of struggle in Nuwakot, Magar finally decided to take a huge leap in her life and came to Kathmandu in 2012. 

She rented a room at Basantapur, where she has been living ever since.

“It’s never easy for a single woman to make a living without facing abuse and harassment,” Magar says of her experience working as a tea seller.

She says many men come to her with ill intentions knowing that she is a single woman.

 “Some men would come ask for a cup of tea, and then something more,” she says. 

How does she deal with such men, I ask her. “It’s never easy,” she says. “But over the years I have learned to avoid them. I don’t even sell them tea.”

As we talked, I was following her everywhere she went in search of customers. She politely asks people if they want to drink some tea. Some people ignore her without so much as acknowledging her presence, some decline her politely and a few agree to buy tea from her.

Magar smiles at all her customers, even if they are rude. “It’s part of my job,” she says.

I follow her for about 15 minutes, observing her, before we finally sit down to resume our conversation.

“One thing I am happy about is that my children are settled now,” she tells me. “I never got to spend time with them when they were growing up. But they have finally accepted me.”

Her daughter is married with kids, and her son is working in Dubai. Knowing that her children are doing well puts her at ease. She also feels that she is finally getting to bond with her children. 

“My elder daughter comes to visit me often. Maybe after becoming a mother herself, she understands my struggle,” she says. 

Magar has struggled for most part of her life, but she feels proud of where she has come.

“I’m still struggling but I'm also happy,” she says 

Sometimes, Magar tells me,  she wonders how her life would have turned out had she been educated. 

“They used to say girls would elope if they went to school,” she scoffs. 

“If only I was allowed to go to school, my life would have been different than this.”

But Magar has made peace with the way her life turned out. She is proud of the fact that she made it this far without anyone’s help.

She is not sure for how long she will continue to sell tea. Her sales number has dropped over the years. There was a time when she used to sell up to ten thermoses of tea in a day. 

“I hardly sell four thermoses these days. It’s getting difficult, but I don’t know what to do,” Magar says.

She takes her life one day at a time.

“I will continue working as long as I can. Beyond that, I have no idea,”  she says.