Lhakpa made breakfast sandwiches for the girls as her 18-year-old son, Nima Sherpa, left for community college in nearby Hartford. Each time she stepped out into the hallway of her building, one of her daughters would jump up and deadbolt the door behind her. When she walked them to their respective schools she doesn’t drive or read or write, though she’s learning Lhakpa kept her cell phone charged and remembered to stay alert, just as the women who took her in at Interval House, a local shelter for victims of domestic violence, had told her to do.
Lakpa Sherpa awoke before dawn on a cold Connecticut morning in January 2015 and shuffled into the kitchen of her two-bedroom apartment in West Hartford. The walls were covered in drawings and coloring-book pages of Disney princesses shaded in crayon and pencil by her two daughters, ages 8 and 13. She brewed up a small pot of coffee rather than the milk tea she grew up on in Balakharka, a village in the Makalu region of the Nepalese Himalayas. The apartment was clean, the girls’ toys packed away against the walls, and the building, though older, was more or less in good repair. It seemed secure.“I’m very sad inside, but I never show people sad,” she said. “I’m all the time happy.” I asked whether she was sure she wanted her story told. She was.