The men with swords had been there before. In the calm Nepali night, they huddled outside Suman Rai’s home, their faces lighted only by the molten glow of their cigarettes, and shouted “Long Live Mao!”
Then a knock — two knocks — and a dozen of them burst through the door.
The face of the young political radical before them was familiar, but it was Mr. Rai’s voice — the one that ricocheted through the town square, the one that threatened to spread anti-communist calls to the mountains — they knew best.
The men circled Mr. Rai. Forget the past, they said. Join our cause. When he refused, they threw him down and punched him into an unconscious haze.
Shortly after that harrowing summer night in 2007, Mr. Rai, 27, who worked as a guide near Mount Everest, decided to end his days as a pro-democracy organizer in Nepal. He stuffed his bag with photos of his wife and daughter and fled to America.
Mr. Rai went to Atlanta, where he worked on an assembly line at a telecommunications company before moving to Los Angeles to take a restaurant job.
But even in the middle of a multicultural city, he felt lonely. He often thought of his family: his wife, Saraswati, a nurse, and their daughter, Fortune, now 4; his father’s permanently panicked face; the day he came home with wounds after a political rally and his mother resolved to fast until he left for Katmandu.
Sensing his isolation, the owner of the restaurant gave Mr. Rai the phone number of a Nepali friend living in New York. The two talked for hours, debating the rift between communists and democrats in Nepal and thinking of ways to help from afar.
“There is still not peace in my country,” he said. “This must change.”
A year and a half ago, Mr. Rai made the journey to New York. Finding a steady job proved difficult. He approachedCatholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The agency gave him money for aMetroCard and access to English and cultural classes.
Mr. Rai this year started working as a cashier at a hardware store, where he earns $1,200 a month. He tries to send $200 to his family each month, but he is paying off a $4,000 fee to a lawyer who helped him get asylum in the United States.
He lives with three roommates in a cramped home in Elmhurst, Queens. There is a television, a Nepali flag, a subway map, a bottle of soda and not much else.
At night, Mr. Rai sits in the glow of his laptop, chatting online with his wife and daughter, who plan to join him here sometime next year. He has also returned to community organizing, helping form an association of Nepali immigrants in New York. “Do, do, do until die,” he said. “That is my philosophy.”
In September, as Mr. Rai struggled to keep up with his bills, the Neediest Cases Fund provided $500 for one month’s rent.
“Everybody has different kinds of problems, different kinds of troubles,” he said. “I’m happy to not have to worry about the present, to be able to think about a future.”
Not so long ago, it was difficult for him to imagine his future.
Shortly after that summer night in Nepal, the thugs returned — this time in Katmandu.
They posed as reporters from the daily newspaper, he said, and asked to hear his life story. At the end of the conversation, one of the men held a pistol to his head. “Do not talk to anyone about your history!” the man shouted.
Another slapped his wife to the ground and lifted his daughter above her crib, Mr. Rai said, threatening to drop her. That night, he decided to leave Nepal.
“When I saw my infant daughter’s life in danger I wanted to run away,” he wrote in his application for asylum. “My boldness evaporated and I felt my legs shaking uncontrollably. Somehow I wanted to offer them peace and security and hope of good life ahead.”
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