Tell your daughter the door is open

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash On Tuesday, a jury in Virginia did what Mamta Kafle Bhatt’s family had waited more than two years to see. It found her husband, Naresh Bhatt, guilty of first-degree murder and of concealing and defiling her body, which has never been found. She was twenty-eight when she disappeared in July 2024, a pediatric nurse, a daughter of Nepal, the mother of a one-year-old girl. After the verdict, her family was seen embracing in the courtroom.

His sentencing is set for 12 March. I am not going to retell what the court heard about her last hours. She is not a spectacle, and the details are available to anyone who wants to be disturbed. I want to write about something else: the long road that leads a woman into a house where no one is allowed to ask what is happening inside.

Let me be careful about what I know. I never met her. I do not know what she wanted or feared in the last year of her life, and I will not invent an inner life for a woman who can no longer correct me.