by Cam Simpson
The young man’s name was Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar. Like Kamala, he was the baby of the family. Jeet was twenty years old and had four siblings. His last two names, “Thapa Magar,” signified his ethnic group, which was the same as Kamala’s. All his brothers shared his second given name, “Bahadur,” passed down from their father and meaning “courage.” Because a woman formally joined the family of her husband upon marriage, learning about the rest of the family perhaps mattered more than learning about one’s groom.
Jeet’s late father ascended to the most prestigious station of life achievable by someone from the hills. He had served in the British Army’s legendary Brigade of Gurkhas, an elite force whose roots extended to the early nineteenth century during the height of the British Empire, when British forces suffered heavy casualties during an invasion of present-day Nepal, despite far superior numbers. The local warriors rained down the mountains and upon their foreign enemies, wielding their famous eighteen-inch curved knives, called kukris. The warriors were so fearsome that the peace treaty ending the Anglo-Nepalese War included a provision allowing their conscription into the British ranks, where they have remained for two centuries. A famous Indian field marshal serving as a British Army officer once declared, “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or a Gurkha.” About forty-three thousand of them died fighting with the British in two world wars. Gurkhas were stationed all over the world courtesy of the reach of the British Empire.
To this day, the entrance exam for finalists for the Brigade of Gurkhas includes a race held not far from Kamala’s village. It is known as the Doko, which is the Nepali word for the large basket that farmers sling over their backs and strap across their foreheads. Recruits must run up the side of a steep mountain with a doko containing almost eighty pounds of rock. Owing to how difficult it is to gain a spot in the brigade, the family of any Gurkha is revered. Service also comes with something more precious in the hills than status: a pension from the British Army. Although far less generous for fighters in the generation of Jeet’s father, it still provided a stable monthly source of cash for his widow and those living under the roof of her stone farmhouse.
Although identical in style, Jeet’s house was smaller than the one where Kamala grew up. Rather than building a bigger home, Jeet’s family had invested its cash in farmlands on the horseshoe’s western ledge and down into the valley. Fields promised security in a way a bigger home never could. The military pension also afforded a rarity in the horseshoe ridge: money for small extras, such as an extra change of clothing, a pair of shoes, maybe a pair of earrings or a necklace, even a transistor radio.
Day after day, Sati filled in more details, interrupted only by the braying of the youngest beasts or questions from Kamala. Kamala’s bulls reared their heads and stared squarely into her eyes, dead still and silent, as if waiting for her to answer.
Jeet had lived in India as a young boy with his elder brother, amid the beauty and tragedy of Kashmir, and in the capital, New Delhi. His brother had enlisted in the Indian Army’s Gurkha Brigade, another stable income-earning job for men from the Himalayan foothills. (The Indian version evolved from the British brigade following Indian independence in 1947.) But Jeet always yearned for the village on the ledge, and Sati told Kamala that the village loved Jeet like none of its other sons. His music, his talent for playing, singing, and dancing, made him the first guest everyone invited to weddings, bartamans, or any other gathering.
Kamala finally agreed to be “taken,” the rough-sounding euphemism in Gorkha for eloping. The moment would come during the Holi festival, the most joyous holiday on the calendar in Nepal and India. Known as the “festival of colors,” Holi is a national street party marking the end of winter and the coming of spring. Friends, enemies, and strangers douse one another in powdered dyes as they dance in the streets. It is one of the few occasions when all the residents of every village and cluster of homes along the horseshoe ridge gather in the same place, a ledge just below the primary school, on the eastern leg of the horseshoe.
Kamala sat terrified with some of her girlfriends at the festival and waited for her unknown future to arrive. A few hundred farmers, their skin daubed brightly in red and gold and blue, heaved and pulsed and surged all around her. Kamala stayed almost completely silent, straining to imagine the life awaiting her on the other side of the valley with a man she had hardly seen. Until that moment, she believed in the rightness of her choice, as did her friends, but in order to keep her plan hidden from her stepmother, Kamala had not told any elders from her family about it. Now she feared they might ostracize her as a result.
As midnight and the end of the festival approached hand in hand, Jeet sauntered toward Kamala with a small group of friends and family. Sati ushered them over, smiling her enthusiastic smile. “Let’s go,” someone said. Kamala stepped away from her friends and followed Jeet’s party. The group turned and headed together into the bend of the horseshoe and its darkness, staying silent as they cut below the Three-House Street, past the pasture where Kamala had met with Sati, and then around the bottom of the valley. They passed the large, open water well at the base of Jeet’s village, where two taps extended from a wall cut into the side of the mountain beneath a canopy of ancient trees and spilled water out onto flat stones set in the basin. They hiked up the steep trail into the village on the ledge, where the breezes never seemed to ebb, to Jeet’s farmhouse, which stood near the top of the ridge.
One at a time, members of the wedding party climbed the creaky wooden ladder that was leaning against the far corner of the house and that led to the second-story balcony. Just inside, someone had painted the walls of the main bedroom with bright red mud for the newlyweds. Everything Kamala owned was on her body: the blouse on her back, the flip-flops on her feet. She had borrowed the sarong hugging her hips from her stepmother.
The young couple spent the night in the twisting candlelight, alternately kneeling and crouching on the floor, immersed in the prayers and rituals that bound them together as husband and wife. Before dawn, one of Jeet’s female cousins came into the room and placed a single strand of red beads around Kamala’s neck, a symbol that she was now a wife. The sun rose across the other side of the ridge, lighting the peak of Manaslu. Kamala had not slept a moment the entire night.
Kamala and Jeet lived together silently at first, almost complete strangers on the precipice of a new life. She could not bring herself to speak, and could barely even look his way. Over time, though, they began to connect through accidental glances. Kamala felt something terrifying and exciting flash between them in these moments, and then something similar but more electric, as when the skin of his bare arm gently brushed against hers while he slipped past her in their tiny bedroom, or when she caught the sweet smell of the jasmine oil he combed into his thick dark hair, as his head rested just below her face on the coolness of their pillow.
Jeet was short, with a thicket of black hair; soft, dark, smiling eyes; rosy cheeks; and a slightly mischievous grin. Despite a small paunch that spilled over the waistband of his trousers, he had the strength of a farm boy. He stood firmly, like a fist; his hands and forearms, heavy with muscle, hung by his sides. Outside the farmhouse, Kamala saw how children ran to greet her new husband. Elders shuffled over to touch or hold his arm. Everyone lit up when they saw Jeet approaching, and slowly Kamala started to as well.
Jeet had been three weeks old in 1982, on the day his father collapsed to the floor of their home from an apparent stroke that left the retired British soldier paralyzed. “I had to take care of the children and my husband while I was still recovering” from childbirth, Jeet’s mother remembered. Her husband never improved, dying when Jeet was only eighteen months old, the same age Kamala would be when her mother died in the small hospital not far from their village.
The couple’s nearly identical losses, and all that they carried in their lives as a result, created a bond. Sometimes they saw it in each other’s faces, as when a vis
itor summoned a memory of Jeet’s father or Kamala’s mother. Neither voiced it, but Kamala knew they both understood.
When the couple eloped, Kamala met Jeet’s mother only briefly. She was petite and rail thin. Age and sun and cigarettes had loosened and worn the skin hanging from the old woman’s arms and face. She occupied the corner bedroom on the ground floor of the farmhouse but filled all three stories with frenetic energy. The old woman’s daughter had just given birth in Kathmandu, and the newborn was ill, so Jeet’s mother welcomed Kamala with a bony embrace that first morning in the house before excusing herself to rush out toward the footpath that would lead over the far hills to the bus that would carry her to the new, ailing grandchild. She returned a few weeks later, exhibiting for Kamala a kind of warmth that the young woman had not felt since Maya left their home on the Three-House Street. She brought Jeet a small gold chain and a pair of earrings to give to his new wife. Along with the string of red beads, these, for Nepalese women, were akin to a wedding and engagement ring.
The gold necklace’s flattened chain links were nearly as thin as paper; a clasp shaped like a twisted snake joined the two ends. Kamala had never seen a piece of jewelry so beautiful. Although it was almost weightless, she took comfort in the feel of it resting over the back of her neck and across her chest. She rarely took it off, not even when she bathed at the community well.
Jeet’s mother saw that Kamala had settled easily into the farmhouse and its daily running, along with ably assisting Jeet in tending to their fields and animals. Through her raspy laugh, she told Kamala, “I can die in peace now that I’ve found a good wife for my son.”
Jeet seemed sympathetic to Kamala’s struggle with the suddenness of her new life. It took just twenty minutes by foot to reach her own village, yet she was afraid to venture back to face the potential wrath of her family for having eloped. She knew virtually no one else in the village on the ledge, except Heera, an acquaintance from school who had moved back in with her parents after her husband died in an accident in India. Kamala felt anxious the first time she bumped into Heera. What do you say to such a young woman, just a girl in many ways, already a widow? If anything, Heera seemed even more nervous. Hindu widows learn quickly how they are viewed: as carriers of ill fortune, or with suspicion, especially by married women. They are infidelities in waiting, temptresses, even whores. One of the terms in Nepalese for a widow, randi, is synonymous with prostitute. Kamala didn’t feel that way, but the two nonetheless shared only uncomfortable silence. Outside their respective homes, both remained isolated in the village on the ledge, but their lots did not otherwise compare. The villagers would begin greeting Kamala warmly, as a new daughter. The eyes of many turned away from Heera, or worse. They would speak ill of her, and behave rudely toward her in the small everyday exchanges of life. She became something akin to invisible, living among them but treated as if she didn’t exist.
Although Jeet gave Kamala space and time to overcome her fears, he rarely missed a chance to woo or gently tease her. He sang to her when they worked in the fields, and all day around the farmhouse. He chipped away at her reticence by making her smile, as he seemed to do with everyone. He even found a way to make her laugh when they argued about how soon to start a family. He wanted to do it right away; Kamala wanted to wait. “If we wait too long, I’ll be so old that I’m going to have to lean against the walls of this house to walk while our children do the same as they take their first steps,” he told her. He chased her around the three stories of the farmhouse like a schoolboy. As the night air of early spring held on to winter’s chill, only a straw mat covered their wooden platform bed, but Kamala could feel Jeet’s warmth radiating beside her when he lay down to sleep.
Before two months had passed, she was pregnant.
Kamala’s labor began just after sunrise on a cool winter day at the end of 2002. Neighbors started gathering early that same day for a wedding party on a flat pitch cut into the hillside just above Jeet’s farmhouse. It was a small public space akin to the village park and hosted some of the most extraordinary views across the three valleys. People from all around the horseshoe who were coming to the party would be in and out of the farmhouse all day to greet Jeet’s family, especially because they knew a child soon would be born. This could put the family in a tricky spot vis-à-vis the social etiquette of the hills. It’s considered bad luck for a marrying couple if a child is born nearby on their wedding day. And no one wants to jinx or spoil someone’s wedding. Kamala’s labor started on the farmhouse’s first floor, in the main room, near a wood fire burning in the kitchen, but her mother-in-law decided to scoot her up to the couple’s second-story bedroom. “Try not to scream too loudly,” Jeet’s mother instructed. “I know it hurts, but there are a lot of people passing by, so try to keep as quiet as you can.” Secrets were nearly impossible in the village, but they would try, at least for one day, to keep quiet the birth of a child.
Kamala’s contractions grew more frequent as the party picked up. Her pain deepened and lengthened, and her wails grew louder. Her mother-in-law fetched the family’s portable transistor radio—a Chinese-made box about the size of a lunch pail, with a built-in shoulder strap—and placed it in the first-floor window, aimed straight at the wedding party. She rotated the bottom dial, tuning in to the familiar sound of Radio Nepal, and then turned the volume knob as far and as loud as it would go. Kamala’s wails were drowned out somewhere between the noise of the wedding party and the Nepali music blaring out the window. About two hours before sunset, a baby girl was born into the spindly arms of her grandmother inside the same bedroom where her parents had been married and where she had been conceived.
Kamala and her baby were moved back downstairs. Kamala lay down on a wicker mat beside the warm kitchen fire cradling her newborn. Someone fetched Jeet from the wedding, where he’d been playing his drum and singing. It seemed impossible Kamala could have given birth so quickly, and he was bursting with shocked joy as he entered the front door and saw the two in the firelight. Because Hindus believe a woman bleeding, whether from menstruation or childbirth, is “impure,” Jeet was forbidden from making any physical contact with Kamala for seven days, but he flouted the commandment and sat by and caressed her as she held their daughter. His mother quickly plunged a small piece of gold jewelry into a pan of water, thereby rendering it Hindu holy water, and frantically flicked it at Jeet and all around the house to “purify” it from his peccant behavior. At first Jeet gladly suffered these showers with little more than a grimace, but he soon avoided them by holding his wife only when his mother wasn’t looking or when he and Kamala were alone.
In the days ahead, a priest would consult the heavens and give their baby her formal name, based largely upon the position of the stars at the moment she came into the world below, but as was the custom, the family also bestowed an informal name she would go by: Kritika. As Kamala’s pain began to subside, she felt her chest swell with a kind of love she had never experienced or dared to imagine.
* * *
Many Americans view globalization through an understandably local aperture. They watched U.S. companies move factories overseas and export jobs to nations with far lower labor costs, but they benefited, at least superficially, from the importing of inexpensive consumer products, such as cheap blue jeans or flat-screen TVs for every home and budget. Only after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and the disappearance of easy second mortgages and other readily available credit, did many realize that their American dream had been artificially inflated beyond their livelihood. Now millions feel they learned too late that they were globalization’s losers, that they were deceived by their own elites into believing that this particular brand of international capitalism suited their interests. To this day, however, most Americans remain almost completely unaware of the millions of people living on the other side of the world who lost out to the very same system in ways that were more immediate and more sinister.
Globalization looked very diffe
rent in the rapidly developing countries of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Rather than exporting jobs, increasingly wealthy nations were importing the cheapest labor they could find to do work that few of their own citizens were willing to do anymore. This meant that by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a growing number of governments in the Eastern Hemisphere were actively importing millions of people from some of the world’s poorest countries. Some of these people worked on factory lines. Many more cleaned toilets, dug ditches, did laundry, cooked food, unloaded trucks or railcars, chauffeured women and children, worked on oil rigs, changed diapers, cleaned homes and hotels, and performed virtually any other form of menial labor imaginable—work that could no longer be bought cheaply in these rapidly advancing countries.
The tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, the world’s richest nation thanks to natural gas reserves, stood at the extreme end of the demand side. Migrant workers made up an estimated 88 percent of the population in a country with the world’s wealthiest citizenry.5 But the global shift under way by 2001 reached well beyond a single petro-monarchy: from the 1990s to the 2000s, twenty-three countries in developing regions of the world went from having net population losses to being net receivers of migrants.6 Joining Qatar on the list of nations aggressively and cumulatively importing millions of migrant workers were Bahrain, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Although relatively small, Nepal rose rapidly on the supply side of those charts, quickly entering the world’s top ten nations in terms of the number of people leaving—not just on a per capita basis, but also in sheer volume.7 Because there were no income-earning opportunities in Nepal, then one of the world’s least-developed countries, Nepalis were heading abroad in droves to dig the ditches, cook the food, clean the toilets, unload the trucks and railcars, and work on factory lines for a few dollars a day.8 The vast majority were men. By 1999, the money these men sent home accounted for 12 percent of Nepal’s entire economy, and 66 percent of its foreign-exchange earnings. Because of that, the Nepalese government actively promoted this new trade. No one, however, could foresee the exponential growth to come in the years ahead, or just how rapidly the Nepalese people themselves would become their nation’s top export.9