When Nisha Gurung first arrived in America, she wore her red tikka with a casual pride, like the other Nepali women she’d grown up around in Pokhara. Her husband had been working in IT on an H1B visa in Dallas for three years before she joined him, tagging along as a dependent—her own education in business back home barely a footnote in her paperwork.

Life in Texas started quietly. Nisha learned to drive. She navigated Walmart, Target, even the DMV with a mixture of anxiety and fascination. She missed Momo, her mother’s soft voice, the clustered smell of incense and rice from the puja room. Her husband, Suresh, was busy—always “heads down,” as he liked to put it. She took a job at a local grocery store to fill her days and sent WhatsApp photos home of her new life.

But marriage, like the visa, came with its own expiration date. Suresh grew distant, colder with every year. The divorce, when it came, felt like a formality. No one fought; there was nothing left to say.

With her dependent status, Nisha found herself suddenly floating. She moved in with an older Nepali couple she knew from the temple. Her life shrank to a few rooms and a jumble of paperwork. That’s when she met Linda at the grocery store—a smiling, talkative regular who invited her to church one Sunday. Nisha went out of loneliness at first. The hymns were easy, the people warm, and soon she found herself drawn into the orbit of Linda’s world: Bible study, potlucks, a steady drip of Fox News on the TV in the church lounge.

Linda’s friends, mostly retirees and young mothers, embraced Nisha as one of their own. They told her, gently at first and then with conviction, how America was “losing its way,” how “immigrants needed to assimilate” (never quite recognizing the irony as they offered her their version of salvation). Nisha, vulnerable and longing for community, found their certainties oddly soothing. She was tired of always being the outsider, the one who didn’t belong. They offered a new identity: American, Christian, Conservative. The boundaries were comforting.

She got baptized in a small service at the local river. She stopped eating beef, but only because it made her stomach hurt; otherwise, she let go of the old taboos. The cross around her neck became a small, defiant badge. In time, her English grew sharper, more colloquial, and her social media filled with posts about “traditional values,” “American greatness,” and memes she half-understood about guns and gas prices.

When Donald Trump came to town for a rally, Linda brought Nisha along. The crowd was loud, fervent—angry, but also weirdly welcoming to a new convert like her. Someone handed her a “Women for Trump” sign. She waved it. She shouted. She told herself she finally belonged, not to a husband or a distant home, but to something bigger, brash, and unmistakably American.

Back in her small apartment, sometimes at night, she still missed Momo and the sound of her mother’s voice. But in the bright light of her new community, she told herself she was free. The woman in the mirror was no longer Nepali, not really—not in any way she’d been before. She was a Texan, a MAGA supporter, a Christian, and in her own way, finally a true believer.

But that illusion cracked the first time she overheard Linda’s husband call her “that girl from God-knows-where” when he thought she wasn’t listening. Or when someone at church, smiling kindly, told her, “You’re one of the good ones, not like those other immigrants.”

It hit hardest at a Fourth of July barbecue. People joked about border walls and “shithole countries.” Someone nudged her and asked if her family back in Nepal still lived in mud huts. The laughter stung more than any slap. She smiled along, too tired to correct them, suddenly aware of how flimsy her belonging really was.

Nisha started noticing the walls—the ones that would always be there, no matter how well she spoke English or how loudly she sang hymns. She saw the way people changed their tone when politics came up, the way her new friends bristled when she tried to talk about her old home with pride. They loved her as long as she played along, but she’d never be “one of them.” Not really.

Alone that night, she scrolled through old photos: her mother’s hands rolling dough for sel roti, her little brother laughing on the streets of Pokhara, the blue sky over Fewa Lake. It hit her how much she’d given up—how much she’d tried to erase, just to fit into a world that would always see her as foreign.

The cross around her neck felt heavier. For a moment, she wished she could start over—find her own place without letting anyone else define her. But the truth was, too much time had passed, and the bridge back to herself was long and uncertain.

She realized it too late: no matter how hard she tried, she’d always be Nisha from Nepal—immigrant, outsider, survivor. She’d traded away her roots for a seat at a table that would never fully welcome her.

That night, she whispered a quiet prayer in Nepali, the words awkward and old on her tongue. For the first time in years, she felt honest. And for a moment, she wasn’t trying to be anything else but herself.