The ‘Namaste’ Boy from Tatopani village, Langtang Region, Nepal

I trekked the Tamang Heritage Trail, in Langtang, Nepal in October 2016. In Tatopani village, I met this little Nepalese boy. He seemed very busy that morning, chopping up a wooden stick with a kind of knife. When he noticed me, though, he stopped right away. He gently leaned forward and solemnly greeted me with a polite “Namaste.”

I grabbed my camera right away and quickly took some pictures of him. As I was trekking for six days, I used a compact, light camera – a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-HX300 (20.1MP), easy to carry and with a 50x optic zoom. For shooting this photo, I used: ISO160, aperture priority – f/4.5, focal length – 25 mm, and exposure time – 1/60 seconds. I haven’t altered the photo by any means, I have just resized it to fit the current requirements.

Even now, when I look at this photo, I remember his smiling face. He would have wanted to say so many things but, due to our language barrier, he was unable to express all of them in such a short amount of time. His twinkling eyes, though, hide a huge curiosity behind his little hands: “Who are you?, Why your skin is so white?, What are you doing here?, Where do you come from?” are questions he would have liked to ask me if he could. He offered me a subtle smile instead, expressing everything he couldn’t put into words. Eventually, I failed when I tried to find out his name. He only wanted to greet a stranger with a traditional “Namaste.”

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