I bought Sunil’s motorbike and he bought a new one. Three weeks after the teddy bear bombing I rode it 140 miles west, through towering jungle-covered hills to Baglung, to try to meet some Maoists. In most of the neighbouring districts they’d declared ‘people’s governments’, but Baglung was still supposed to be in the state’s control. At the district headquarters, in the bare hotel where I stayed, the local reporters gathered to welcome me, but none of them wanted to leave the safety of the town. Instead they found a primary school teacher called Chandra who agreed to be my translator.
Chandra’s home was outside the town anyway, so he shared my room that night and in the morning we went there together, to pick up a spare shirt and say goodbye to his wife. Then we set off on foot, along a deep valley of shining greenery. Everything was bright. The path was a highway of school children and porters, an army patrol, people carrying invalids in baskets on their backs; passing in and out between the district headquarters and the villages. There were Maoist slogans painted on the cliffs.
‘Informants, be careful.’
‘The people’s war continues! Long live the C.P.N. (M)!’
In a few hours we reached a stretch of rutted track, apparently unconnected to another road at either end, where a public jeep was running. We travelled out faster, past gurgling irrigation channels through terraced fields. The tape in the car was playing folk music. The passengers wrapped scarves around their faces against the dust and swayed together to the holes in the road. I probably didn’t realize, because I didn’t know that the Maoists had recording studios, but they must have been Maoist songs on the tape. Between the tracks a piercing male voice shrieked, ‘The government kills innocent people, the Maoists kill only the police and army.’ According to the voice, the blame for Nepal’s misery fell first and second on the government, third on the rebels and last on the people themselves.
In the jeep we met a young health worker called Binod, who was travelling home with his silent young wife. They became our companions. That night we slept in a smoky guest house, on straw mats under heavy blankets, then walked all of the next day. The way followed the valleys through jungle, and the paths were busy. It was hot and damp. Binod questioned the people passing us on their way in about the troop movements further out. At a bend on a muddy, steep stretch we came upon a startling sight which remains fresh in my memory, because I’ve never seen anything like it again. A striking woman with high cheek bones, her hair covered by a scarf, appeared on horseback. She stood still for a moment, looked at us, then kicked her pony and clattered through the trees.
Nepali hill villages are almost always picturesque, bearing no relation to how sad they are. There are rows and clusters of sturdy stone cottages with low slate roofs, flowers planted at the front, winding paved pathways and mossy steps, artfully arranged in the huge green landscape. Chandra found a teacher who had been tortured by the army.
‘They tied my eyes and hands and they beat me with sticks for forty to fifty rounds,’ he translated. ‘Nineteen hours was my unconscious period.
‘I think the Maoists are also not good,’ the teacher said. ‘Mr Madhav Malla. They killed him. In my opinion he is innocent. In Maoist opinion he is connected with army.’
Madhav Malla had been a landowner, who was beaten to death with hammers a month earlier. The teacher pointed out the shuttered shops in the village bazaar, whose owners had been driven out by the rebels. They had sold things to soldiers after an army camp was built on a hill above the village. Our teacher had become the headmaster after his two predecessors fled, and now he was leaving too, because neither the army nor the Maoists trusted teachers.
The teachers led us around the village introducing people whom they said I should interview. Afterwards they told us things about these people that the people hadn’t said themselves. We were taken to a tailor in the bazaar who had been arrested by the army. Bolts of striped cotton and dark polyester, for making the villagers’ shirts and trousers, were leaning against the front of his house. His shop was still open. The army had released him, but the teachers said he really was a Maoist. Congress party members had vouched for his innocence and got him out, because they knew if he was killed the Maoists’ revenge would be on them.
I had lunch in the camp. From its eminence, surrounded by barbed wire, the captain and I looked out over the huge forested hills, above us and below us, half covered in cloud. The landscape would have been full of menace to him.
‘Look at the geographical conditions,’ he said. ‘We have no resources . . .’
He trailed off. I asked if he was afraid.
‘Why not?’ he said. He was smiling, young, a bit sheepish. ‘They are not the enemy,’ he continued. ‘They are also Nepalis, our brothers. We have to make them join the correct path.’ He turned to the village below. ‘Have you seen our poor people? They have to work very hard . . . these fields . . . it’s tough.’
After lunch, in the village, they talked about the army. There was a water pit up there, they said, in which the soldiers tortured people. ‘Sometimes they catch an innocent person and they ask random questions, and sometimes, though they are innocent, they give wrong answers. After getting reliable proof, they kill. The radio broadcasts information of Maoists killed in encounters and we know – they have killed that one and that one.’
It was the outermost army camp. The areas where we might find rebels still lay ahead, up the valleys that led north-west. At dusk I wanted to push on to the next village, but then we heard about an army patrol and stayed put. It only gradually dawned on me that I was not simply travelling towards them; I had been surrounded by the Maoists’ friends since the beginning of the journey. That night, sitting on the mud floor in a candlelit kitchen, we drank raksi and ate curried minnows, and Binod made a speech in his broken English.
He would accompany us to the edge of the high country. His village was out there.
The army had gone up one valley and in the morning we took the other, which led to his home. His had been a love marriage, an inter-caste marriage. As we approached their village his wife produced an immaculate red sari from her small bag and, wearing it, drifted about ahead of us. When we had been walking for a while we would come across her again, sitting on a rock beside the path in her perfect clothes. The trees were smaller and so were the rivers, which ran steeply over stones. Binod began disappearing and leaving us to wait while he went to greet his relatives and hers.
We found the Maoists at the top of the valley. Binod’s father, who was a teacher, took me to a house where a commissar’s wife was hiding with her baby. I waited there alone, while Chandra and Binod went to the school. Perhaps they were sending more messages.
The commissar’s wife was a pretty woman, surrounded by other women also with babies. Apparently she was a fighter herself, on maternity leave. She said that soldiers had been to her home and killed her family’s animals. They told her she would be doing everyone a favour if she killed her baby too. We didn’t talk much. After a few hours her husband arrived. He was an earnest young man in a checked shirt and glasses, who had a naivety about him, or innocence, which sat quite easily with the menace of an organisation that kills people. He was suspicious to begin with and he had an aggressive bodyguard, who was dressed in a tracksuit, with a towel wrapped around his head.
The interview was conventional and dull. The commissar joined the party after seeing the good work it did for the people. It was their policy to oppose American imperialism and develop a new society for the poor. His rebel life brought him no hardship because ‘the main thing is thought’. He read my notes as I made them, sitting beside me on the bed. ‘I have a clear thought of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and Prachandapath and the party line is clear and correct,’ he confirmed.
Afterwards I bought some noodles and the commissar produced a bag of roasted maize. ‘Tiffin,’ he said.
We shared the food. The bodyguard took two homemade grenades from his bag, which they called socket bombs. They were pieces of steel pipe, with fittings screwed to seal the ends, a few inches around and a few inches deep. He showed me how, if he removed a piece of tape and held the bomb upside down, a pin like a matchstick dropped out a little. He demonstrated how he would pull it with his teeth and throw, if he and the commissar needed to escape. The tape didn’t stick back on again so I gave him a sticking plaster. Then I gave him the rest of my medical kit – minus the condoms (‘not necessary’) and (‘does it cure acne?’) the sun-block.
Excerpted with permission from Kathmandu by Thomas Bell, Published by Random House India; September 2014; Rs.599; 496 pages
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Chandra’s home was outside the town anyway, so he shared my room that night and in the morning we went there together, to pick up a spare shirt and say goodbye to his wife. Then we set off on foot, along a deep valley of shining greenery. Everything was bright. The path was a highway of school children and porters, an army patrol, people carrying invalids in baskets on their backs; passing in and out between the district headquarters and the villages. There were Maoist slogans painted on the cliffs.
‘Informants, be careful.’
‘The people’s war continues! Long live the C.P.N. (M)!’
In a few hours we reached a stretch of rutted track, apparently unconnected to another road at either end, where a public jeep was running. We travelled out faster, past gurgling irrigation channels through terraced fields. The tape in the car was playing folk music. The passengers wrapped scarves around their faces against the dust and swayed together to the holes in the road. I probably didn’t realize, because I didn’t know that the Maoists had recording studios, but they must have been Maoist songs on the tape. Between the tracks a piercing male voice shrieked, ‘The government kills innocent people, the Maoists kill only the police and army.’ According to the voice, the blame for Nepal’s misery fell first and second on the government, third on the rebels and last on the people themselves.
In the jeep we met a young health worker called Binod, who was travelling home with his silent young wife. They became our companions. That night we slept in a smoky guest house, on straw mats under heavy blankets, then walked all of the next day. The way followed the valleys through jungle, and the paths were busy. It was hot and damp. Binod questioned the people passing us on their way in about the troop movements further out. At a bend on a muddy, steep stretch we came upon a startling sight which remains fresh in my memory, because I’ve never seen anything like it again. A striking woman with high cheek bones, her hair covered by a scarf, appeared on horseback. She stood still for a moment, looked at us, then kicked her pony and clattered through the trees.
Nepali hill villages are almost always picturesque, bearing no relation to how sad they are. There are rows and clusters of sturdy stone cottages with low slate roofs, flowers planted at the front, winding paved pathways and mossy steps, artfully arranged in the huge green landscape. Chandra found a teacher who had been tortured by the army.
‘They tied my eyes and hands and they beat me with sticks for forty to fifty rounds,’ he translated. ‘Nineteen hours was my unconscious period.
‘I think the Maoists are also not good,’ the teacher said. ‘Mr Madhav Malla. They killed him. In my opinion he is innocent. In Maoist opinion he is connected with army.’
Madhav Malla had been a landowner, who was beaten to death with hammers a month earlier. The teacher pointed out the shuttered shops in the village bazaar, whose owners had been driven out by the rebels. They had sold things to soldiers after an army camp was built on a hill above the village. Our teacher had become the headmaster after his two predecessors fled, and now he was leaving too, because neither the army nor the Maoists trusted teachers.
The teachers led us around the village introducing people whom they said I should interview. Afterwards they told us things about these people that the people hadn’t said themselves. We were taken to a tailor in the bazaar who had been arrested by the army. Bolts of striped cotton and dark polyester, for making the villagers’ shirts and trousers, were leaning against the front of his house. His shop was still open. The army had released him, but the teachers said he really was a Maoist. Congress party members had vouched for his innocence and got him out, because they knew if he was killed the Maoists’ revenge would be on them.
I had lunch in the camp. From its eminence, surrounded by barbed wire, the captain and I looked out over the huge forested hills, above us and below us, half covered in cloud. The landscape would have been full of menace to him.
‘Look at the geographical conditions,’ he said. ‘We have no resources . . .’
He trailed off. I asked if he was afraid.
‘Why not?’ he said. He was smiling, young, a bit sheepish. ‘They are not the enemy,’ he continued. ‘They are also Nepalis, our brothers. We have to make them join the correct path.’ He turned to the village below. ‘Have you seen our poor people? They have to work very hard . . . these fields . . . it’s tough.’
After lunch, in the village, they talked about the army. There was a water pit up there, they said, in which the soldiers tortured people. ‘Sometimes they catch an innocent person and they ask random questions, and sometimes, though they are innocent, they give wrong answers. After getting reliable proof, they kill. The radio broadcasts information of Maoists killed in encounters and we know – they have killed that one and that one.’
It was the outermost army camp. The areas where we might find rebels still lay ahead, up the valleys that led north-west. At dusk I wanted to push on to the next village, but then we heard about an army patrol and stayed put. It only gradually dawned on me that I was not simply travelling towards them; I had been surrounded by the Maoists’ friends since the beginning of the journey. That night, sitting on the mud floor in a candlelit kitchen, we drank raksi and ate curried minnows, and Binod made a speech in his broken English.
He would accompany us to the edge of the high country. His village was out there.
The army had gone up one valley and in the morning we took the other, which led to his home. His had been a love marriage, an inter-caste marriage. As we approached their village his wife produced an immaculate red sari from her small bag and, wearing it, drifted about ahead of us. When we had been walking for a while we would come across her again, sitting on a rock beside the path in her perfect clothes. The trees were smaller and so were the rivers, which ran steeply over stones. Binod began disappearing and leaving us to wait while he went to greet his relatives and hers.
We found the Maoists at the top of the valley. Binod’s father, who was a teacher, took me to a house where a commissar’s wife was hiding with her baby. I waited there alone, while Chandra and Binod went to the school. Perhaps they were sending more messages.
The commissar’s wife was a pretty woman, surrounded by other women also with babies. Apparently she was a fighter herself, on maternity leave. She said that soldiers had been to her home and killed her family’s animals. They told her she would be doing everyone a favour if she killed her baby too. We didn’t talk much. After a few hours her husband arrived. He was an earnest young man in a checked shirt and glasses, who had a naivety about him, or innocence, which sat quite easily with the menace of an organisation that kills people. He was suspicious to begin with and he had an aggressive bodyguard, who was dressed in a tracksuit, with a towel wrapped around his head.
The interview was conventional and dull. The commissar joined the party after seeing the good work it did for the people. It was their policy to oppose American imperialism and develop a new society for the poor. His rebel life brought him no hardship because ‘the main thing is thought’. He read my notes as I made them, sitting beside me on the bed. ‘I have a clear thought of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and Prachandapath and the party line is clear and correct,’ he confirmed.
Afterwards I bought some noodles and the commissar produced a bag of roasted maize. ‘Tiffin,’ he said.
We shared the food. The bodyguard took two homemade grenades from his bag, which they called socket bombs. They were pieces of steel pipe, with fittings screwed to seal the ends, a few inches around and a few inches deep. He showed me how, if he removed a piece of tape and held the bomb upside down, a pin like a matchstick dropped out a little. He demonstrated how he would pull it with his teeth and throw, if he and the commissar needed to escape. The tape didn’t stick back on again so I gave him a sticking plaster. Then I gave him the rest of my medical kit – minus the condoms (‘not necessary’) and (‘does it cure acne?’) the sun-block.
Excerpted with permission from Kathmandu by Thomas Bell, Published by Random House India; September 2014; Rs.599; 496 pages
