Hisila Yami went to school on the IIT Kanpur campus from Class 7 to Class 11, from 1971 to 1976. She loved sports from the start. She was good at hockey, badminton, table tennis, and swimming.
When she was only thirteen, she won a prize playing against grown women at a club in Kanpur. She got a big leather bag as a reward. I still remember that bag.
I remember watching her play table tennis with older girls at the hostel. Between games, this little girl would play badminton with the IIT Kanpur boys on the court set between the large dormitories. The net was quite high for someone her size, so she had to jump high every time to reach the shuttlecock—smashing it back with powerful shots. Boys watching from the verandas and rooftops would shout and cheer every time she landed a good hit. She kept getting better. She won badminton matches for her school, then for the whole city, then for the state. She won many trophies. In the end, she reached the national level and came second in the whole country. But while all this was happening, I was scared.
Studying at IIT Kanpur was already very hard. On top of that, I was always afraid something bad would happen to Hisila when she traveled for her matches. We had just come from Nepal. I didn’t understand how these school tournaments worked. All I knew was that my little sister kept going far away by bus and train, and I was supposed to look after her.
I went to the school principal many times, crying, asking him not to send her. I even went to his house. I would ask him, what will I do if something happens to her? He always told me sports were good for her. But I was too scared to listen.
Some of this fear came from my mother. The year she died, Hisila and our brother Kayo went to stay in Darbhanga for winter break. Even though our mother was very sick, she made me write letters to our older sister there. In every letter, she told me to say the same thing — watch the children closely, don’t let them go out alone, someone might take them. That fear stayed in me. It came back strongly during my years at IIT Kanpur.
Here is what I didn’t understand back then: I never gave myself time to deal with any of this.
I was studying hard, and I was also carrying constant fear for my sister’s safety, all at the same time. I never stopped to ask what this was doing to me. I didn’t rest. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, except crying in the principal’s office. I just carried it every day and thought that was normal.
Looking back now, I understand something important: if you don’t take care of yourself, you end up paying for it later — through tiredness, stress, or sickness. I was living through one of the best times of my sister’s life, but I mostly remember it as fear, not joy.
It took me many years to see the truth. Those tournaments gave Hisila something Nepal could not give her at that time — confidence and experience that helped her for the rest of her life. It really was one of the good things that came from our years at IIT Kanpur. I just couldn’t see it then, because I was too tired and too afraid.
If I could talk to my younger self now, I wouldn’t tell her to stop caring. That fear came from real love and real loss. But I would tell her: take care of yourself too, while you take care of others. Don’t keep all that fear locked inside. Taking care of your own health and mind is not something you can put off for later. If you do, life makes you pay for it in a different way.