I find Alise inside, watching the news. She’s from Latvia and used to work at St. Michael’s but quit because it got too depressing for her. I visit her when I want company but don’t necessarily want to talk. Or when my brain is like Maisie’s monitor, spewing out crazy nonsense. She goes into her room and comes back holding three large, unlabelled bottles. Then she starts spraying recklessly in my direction.
“Hey? Does this smell like Eternity to you? Obsession?”
I duck and go and lie down on the sofa. Alise is now a perfume salesgirl. Her job is to persuade people that these are original designer perfumes, available at a fraction of the usual cost because of the plain bottles.
I think of my mother’s phone call again. We were all rushing to get ready for work. After the news about my cousin, there was an aside about the Major’s house getting burgled. Apparently the crazy old woman had a lot of gold and now it’s all gone.
I mute the television and cover my eyes as Alise tells me about an imitation Wonderbra that she got from a Bulgarian friend.
I think of the last letter I had from V. It was about five months ago. He said that since I’d started working at St. Michael’s, it was as if I’d caught a bug.
I said the world is full of sorrow and we are insignificant. He said the opposite was equally true.
I feel a light spray on my fingers. Alise is kneeling by the sofa and I notice, for the first time, the prominent joints of her fingers. I think of V’s long, broad fingers and fat nails. I cover my face again and turn my back to her.
“Do you like this one? It’s Obsession. Speaking of which, did you get a letter from your boyfriend yet?”
“Got one five months ago.”
“Five months ago? What did it say?”
I hear her pacing around the room, spraying the cheap perfume everywhere. She’s laughing hard as she does this. She comes and squeezes onto the sofa and puts her arm around me.
“And you’ve been writing to him, haven’t you?”
“One of my friends in Nepal told me no one has seen him at all. She lives in the same neighbourhood. He’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
Alise gets up and I hear her opening a drawer.
“I didn’t even want to give you this. I hate how you’re always waiting for his letter.”
I take the envelope but I don’t open it. I’ve come out in a cold sweat.
“Just show me that bra.”
“But I didn’t realise it had been that long. Don’t you want to open it?”
“I’m done talking about him.”
I hear her cackling laugh as she goes back into her room. When she comes out her shirt is unbuttoned and she is wearing a black push-up bra.
“Don’t I look like Eva Herzigova?”
I nod absently.
“But seriously, shall I order you one of these?”
*
I sleep at Alise’s all day and it’s late by the time I get back on the DLR. The shortest way from the station to Wells Road is through a large field. My brother tells me not to take that route at night but I do anyway.
It’s a bright night, the moonlight shining through gaps in the clouds. In the day, there are horses grazing here. Under the all-night downpour, the hard ground has come lushly, greenly alive, the wetness hovering above the grass in a fine mist. The pearly fragments of clouds seem very far away.
I walk along the diagonal slash pressed into the ground. There is a sprinkling of daisies on either side of the path. The white fence and the silhouettes of houses start coming into view.
I stop to take the envelope from my pocket and pull out his last letter.
The field is empty, the sky is empty, and the world is empty. I look at the blank sheet of paper for a moment and start walking again.
Battles of the New Republic
Prashant Jha
Prashant Jha is an author and journalist. A former columnist with The Kathmandu Post and Nepal correspondent for The Hindu, he is well-known as a keen observer of and commentator on Nepali political issues. Battles of the New Republic – A Contemporary History of Nepal is his first book.
BEING NEPALI
It took me a while to realize that there was something different about us.
I used to study at the Modern Indian School in Kathmandu, and remember clinging to my mother, who taught English there, in the bus on my way to school.
In class and outside, we usually spoke in Hindi. India was the reference point in most of our subjects and conversations. Mahatma Gandhi and the Panchatantra were as much a part of our consciousnesses as The Jungle Book and Mahabharata serials on Doordarshan; Independence Day was 15 August and Children’s Day was 14 November. The prayers we chanted during school assemblies were old Indian bhajans. Many of my classmates were Marwaris and Sikhs – making me infinitely more familiar with Indian-origin ethnicities than the multiple surnames which punctuate the Nepali social landscape.
Life was comfortable, for there was a seamless linguistic and cultural homogeneity between school and home.
My parents spoke to each other, and to me, in English and in Hindi. I spoke to my brother in Maithili. My grandfather, Tatta as we called him, used to listen to both Nepali and Hindi news on the radio as we played with him in the evenings. Games meant cricket and Saturday afternoons were reserved for watching Hindi films on television. Aunts from Patna visited us during their summer holidays; in December, it was our turn to go to Delhi and spend the long winter holidays with our mausis. We occasionally made the eight-hour drive down to meet relatives in Rajbiraj which, we were told, was our hometown in southern Nepal.
I remember being conscious that Nepal and India were different countries; that they had different prime ministers; that Indian and Nepali news were broadcast in different languages; and that I was a Nepali, which meant that I was not an Indian like many of my cousins.
But the lines were too blurred, and I was too young, for these national distinctions to mean anything. It was as normal and happy a childhood as one could have.
There were some unnatural moments, however. When we used to go out to New Road to shop or Papa used to take us out for a meal, anyone speaking in Hindi was immediately hushed up. It is a memory that has stayed with me; there was something wrong about being ourselves, and speaking in the language that we felt most comfortable in, when others were around.
And then, in Class 5, when I was eight years old, my parents shifted me to a new school – Loyola.
The first day was a blur.
We were having lunch in the common mess. Two classmates who I had seen but not spoken to in the morning were sitting opposite me with their plates.
One of them asked where I was from.
Kathmandu.
He asked, “Jha pani Kathmandu ko huncha? [Can a Jha hail from Kathmandu?] He is Indian.”
The other immediately chimed in, “Euta aru dhoti aayo. [One more dhoti has arrived.] The maade will get a friend now. Ha ha!”
I smiled weakly, not knowing what either dhoti or maade meant, and continued eating.
But there appeared to be a connection between being made fun of because of my surname, and being told that I was Indian. And I realized that there was a reason why my father asked us not to speak in Hindi. It was important to run away from who you were, when confronted by outsiders, by normal people, by the “true” Nepalis.
In hindsight, there were possibly two reactions a child could have had to what was a bit of a scarring conversation – go into a shell, or try to be more “normal”. And for some reason, perhaps due to the typical schoolkid instinct of recognizing where power resides in a classroom, I decided to do the latter.
So I hung out with the cool Kathmandu kids. I could not hide my poor Nepali, but fortunately the school had a speak-only-in-English rule which was quite strictly enforced. I joined the others in calling those with Indian-sounding surnames – Bararias, Agarwals, Mishras, Chowdhurys – dhotis, which I learnt was a generic, derogatory term to d
ismiss anyone “Indian”, or maades, which was short for Marwaris. Cultural religious practices within my family were at odds with the other “Nepalis”. On Dussehra, we turned vegetarian; they feasted on meat. At the end of the festival, the elders of the family blessed others with tika, which was a big event in the calendar; we did nothing of the sort. But I did not tell my new friends that and pretended that we did the same at home.
In a few years, I left to study in Delhi. And I felt far more at home than I did in school in Kathmandu, where I had not only constructed a divide between school friends and home, but also created a web of lies to sustain the fiction that I was as “Nepali” as any other student in the classroom.
But the problem did not disappear, and the first thing classmates in Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya asked was how I could be a Nepali – “You don’t look like a Nepali at all.” Or “Are you a Bahadur too? We have one who guards our apartment.” A bit older by now, I had developed a somewhat more coherent response – you could be a Nepali without being a “Bahadur” or “looking” Nepali. In the common perception, Nepalis always have Mongoloid features.
It was only much later that I realized that I was not unique. I was privileged, for I came from an upper-middle-class, upper-caste family which sent me to Delhi to acquire a better education. My class allowed me to escape the handicaps that came with my identity, and access the best opportunities available.
All I had to suffer for my surname, for speaking in Hindi and Maithili, for being a “dhoti”, for having relatives across in India, were a few taunts.
But for precisely the same reasons, millions of people in Nepal have had no access to power, have been subjects of systemic discrimination, have remained deprived of services, and have lived everyday with the burden of having to prove that they are, indeed, Nepali.
We are the Madhesis of Nepal.
THE MADHESI MUTINIES
Lahan can pass off as just another small decrepit town on the East–West Highway in Nepal’s southern plains. But unlike the other anonymous bazaars that punctuate Nepal’s arterial road, Lahan is central in the consciousnesses of the travellers who cross the Tarai.
Long-distance buses travelling from Kakarbitta – a town on Nepal’s eastern border with Siliguri in West Bengal – to Kathmandu stop here so that passengers can refresh themselves; truck drivers halt here for the night; and ramshackle private buses from Janakpur to Biratnagar wait here the longest, with conductors screeching to attract the most passengers. A hospitality industry – from small dhabas serving daal-bhaat to “premium” hotels like Godhuli – has sprung up to cater to a diverse clientele.
But despite its small size – Lahan is all of one long road with a few small lanes branching off it – the town is more than just a passenger stopover.
Major government offices are located in Siraha bazaar, the district headquarters fifteen miles off the main highway to the south, right at the border with Bihar’s Jainagar district. One of Nepal’s best, the Sagarmatha Chowdhury Eye Hospital is on the main road. Most local journalists, and NGO representatives, use Lahan as a base to cover neighbouring districts like Saptari and Dhanusha. The landed classes of the nearby rural areas, professionals of Siraha origin, and workers from the region in Malaysia, India and the Gulf, who send money back home, all want to buy land or a house in Lahan.
Perhaps it is the constant movement of vehicles, and the mixed demography, with both people of hill and plains origin, which lends the town an unexpected energy, discernible in district politics if not in the stagnant economy. Influential locals meet every evening over paan and chai to exchange gossip – be it about the new government official who has just taken office, the big construction contracts in the pipeline, property disputes wrecking prominent local families, the newest caste-based power alliance, or the political machinations in the distant capital.
It was here, right in the middle of the highway town, that Ramesh Mahato was killed on 19 January 2007.
1
Three days earlier, 240 legislators – including eighty-three Maoists who had been nominated to an interim Parliament – had adopted a new interim Constitution.
For seven months, ever since the end of the second Janandolan, major parties, especially the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Maoists, had engaged in tough peace negotiations. At the end of November, an intricate Comprehensive Peace Agreement had been signed, formally marking the end of the war. In mid-December, the interim Constitution was negotiated, which declared that Nepal’s “unitary structure would end”.
Nepali politicians, mostly of hill origin, had spent all their time fighting each other, then fighting the king, and finally arriving at a multiparty alliance. Immersed in the divides between the monarchy, the parliamentary parties and the Maoists, and blind to the fact that it was six hill Brahmin – and a couple of Chhetri – men who were making all the decisions, they could not sense the simmering discontent on the ground – showing how disconnected all of them, including the Maoists, had become in the capital.
There was a backlash of unexpected ferocity from an unexpected quarter, challenging long-held notions of nationalism and putting Nepal firmly, and perhaps irreversibly, on the path to federalism.
*
Upendra Yadav – a schoolteacher turned mainstream Left politician turned Maoist sympathizer turned semi-underground regional leader – burnt a copy of the interim Constitution at Maitighar Mandala, an open green space in the middle of Kathmandu’s power zone. In its vicinity lies the army road, home to the Nepal Army (NA) headquarters and its adjunct offices – the road was closed to the public after the military was deployed in the war against the Maoists. The Supreme Court and the Nepal Bar Association are a minute’s walk away. And half a kilometre away is the Singha Durbar, the secretariat complex which is home to key ministries as well as the Parliament where the interim Constitution had been promulgated the night before.
Despite its proximity to state power, or because of it, the Mandala had emerged as the favourite site for protestors, from those organizing peace rallies to groups challenging the authorities. The democratic government post April 2006 usually deployed additional police, but treated protestors indulgently, perhaps because those running the government had themselves been on the streets till very recently.
But not this time.
Yadav, along with his supporters of the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF), then a cross-party forum, were immediately arrested, shoved into a van, and taken to Hanuman Dhoka – the capital’s police hub familiar to most political activists, all of whom had spent a few nights locked up there at some point or the other in their careers.
Few people in Kathmandu knew either Yadav, or the MJF’s, background.
The MJF’s protests were not sudden. The Forum, as it came to be popularly known, had repeatedly warned of protests if the interim Constitution did not make a firm commitment to federalism. Madhesis – people who live largely, but not exclusively, in Nepal’s southern plains; speak languages like Maithili, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Hindi; and maintain close linguistic, cultural, ethnic ties with people across the border in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh – felt a deep sense of resentment against the Nepali state, and the hill-centric political elite’s discriminatory practices. They had historically seen regional autonomy in their own territory, the Tarai, as the only way of political empowerment.
The ambiguous phraseology in the interim Constitution about “ending the unitary structure”, while remaining non-committal about the future state structure, was perceived as another way to concentrate all power in Kathmandu. Ironically, it was the Maoists who first pushed this demand, but they did not make it their central plank after coming over ground. The MJF also asked for greater political representation from the Tarai in Parliament and the future Constituent Assembly (CA) through an increase in electoral seats.
A month earlier, the only established party claiming to speak for Madhesi interests, the Sadbhavana Party, had made similar demands. A Sadbhavana minister was in governm
ent. Their strike in the western Tarai town of Nepalgunj opposing the interim Constitution had led to a riot-like situation between people of hill origin, backed by the local police, and Madhesi activists of plains origin in December 2006. This was perceived by Madhesis across the Tarai as yet another instance of the discrimination, the insensitivity and the racism of the state – compact discs containing videos of the “Nepalgunj riots” were being circulated across Tarai towns.
But the government did not pay heed, smug that these groups were too small to affect macro politics. The Maoists felt that disillusionment with the state would translate into support for them, little realizing that there was also widespread resentment against the former rebels for not having pushed the federal agenda enough. Powerful social groups in the Tarai, who had suffered during the insurgency, and other political rivals were instrumental in painting the Maoists as “betrayers” along with the “pahadi” state which was projected as an “oppressor for the past 240 years”. In what was to be a costly political error, the Sadbhavana did not resign from the government or launch a mass movement.
No established political force was able to read the signal from the Tarai, no one could read the agitational mood that was building up. And this allowed the relatively anonymous Upendra Yadav to occupy the political vacuum and emerge as the face of Tarai politics, whose seeds had been planted more than five decades earlier.
2
In 1951, soon after the first democratic revolution against the clan-based Rana oligarchy, a Tarai leader, Vedanand Jha, disillusioned with the Nepali Congress (NC), had formed the Nepal Tarai Congress.
Its main demands included the use of Hindi as an official language, and autonomy for the Tarai. In the mid-1950s, when the then government decided to introduce Nepali as the sole official language of the country, there was resistance in the plains, even leading to clashes in Biratnagar in the eastern Tarai between groups supporting Nepali and Hindi. Those supporting Nepali were largely people of hill origin, pahadis, who were recent migrants to the Tarai; those demanding Hindi were people of plains origin, Madhesis, and Marwaris. The medium of instruction in educational institutions in the Tarai till then had been Hindi, with teachers from neighbouring areas of Bihar running schools. Locals feared that the imposition of Nepali would not only block the growth of their languages, but also disrupt livelihoods and reduce opportunities for growth.
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