The palace, with its Potala-like central tower, Hindu temple shapes, Tibetan loggias, red-brick skin and clusters of concrete columns that hang down without touching the ground, seems to have been built in a style that might best be described as Himalayan Fantasy. Which might also apply to the rest of the day.
The King takes his place behind a red, padded leather desk, which makes him look a bit like a hotel receptionist. At a given signal his subjects begin to move forward and he sets to work applying tika to the nation’s foreheads. Having so recently seen the Dalai Lama work a line, I know that it’s possible to combine gravitas and jollity, but King Gyanendra maintains one expression throughout, and that is a sort of jowly glumness, as if being ruler of Nepal is absolutely the worst job in the world.
The line is slowed down ahead of me by a succession of middle-brass army officers whose huge, peaked caps have to be pushed back before the tika can be applied, then repositioned to enable them to salute. It all takes time and the King looks even more bored by the time my turn comes. Pratima moves forward to introduce me. I don’t know what’s said, but a flicker of animation crosses the royal features and after applying the royal tika to my deeply incised brow, the King extends a hand (his own) for me to shake and, leaning forward, wishes me a happy stay in Nepal.
‘It could be the highlight of his afternoon,’ says a Brit, working in the country. ‘He needs all the friends he can get.’
Whatever his personal popularity, the institution of monarchy seems strong enough to attract a queue of people that extends all the way back to the heavy iron gates and for a few hundred yards out along the road, and those at the end of the line must be among the poorest in the kingdom.
No sooner are we back in the Yak and Yeti looking at laundry lists for the first time in a week than word comes through that a special ceremony, happening only once every 12 years, will be taking place in the heart of the old city later tonight. It’s being kept very secret because it involves the King, who, because of the fear of attacks from the Maoist guerrillas, rarely goes out in public within the city.
It sounds a long-shot but we follow it up and make our way to Hanuman Dhoka, the Old Royal Palace. Although it is dimly lit and hard to distinguish individual buildings, the complex of streets and squares has an extraordinary atmosphere. I’m reminded of walking at night in St Petersburg or Rome. There is a theatrical unreality to the place. Astonishing buildings, unlike anything I’ve seen before, are silhouetted against the night sky. Towering pagodas with long wide-eaved roofs, stacked one above the other, are topped with Hapsburg-like spires. Deep balconies cantilever out on long poles, the lintels and sills of the windows are thick timber beams. A fairy-tale kind of architecture, the more magical for being first encountered at night.
The general public seems conspicuously absent. We walk through empty squares until we come upon a small crowd that seems to consist mainly of flak-jacketed military, armed police and press photographers in dark suits.
The authorities look nervous, their eyes constantly scanning us and each other. Nigel grabs a camera position a few feet off the ground beneath a lamppost, and defends it against all comers as we wait for the production to begin.
After some time a procession can be heard approaching. Led by women with lamps and incense sticks and musicians playing cymbals and drums, a group of masked figures enters the square. The masks are big, elaborate and brightly coloured and their arrival provokes a mad rush as the press photographers, closely ringed by police, scoot across towards them like a squad of black beetles, thrusting people aside with their cameras as they try to get close. The masked dancers, some of them with towering headdresses and wearing animal skins like African witch doctors, seem to have been at it some time, and they twist and turn to the music as if in a trance.
There is still no sign of the King. The photographers have taken their pictures, the dancers have made their spectacular entrance and by the time the royal motorcade looms out of the darkness, the energy and spontaneity have all but evaporated. Army, police and plain-clothes security men with fingers at their ears move in around the King and escort him forwards. The most impressive of the masked figures, a representation of the goddess Bhadrakali, with a blue face, staring eyes and scarlet lips, moves up close to the King. She blesses him with divine powers, hands over a sword, flashbulbs erupt and moments later it’s all over.
The press pack close in; the King, tiny and insignificant beside the great blue head of the goddess, gives a brief and nervous smile, before being rushed back to his Mercedes and away.
This combined display of paranoia and celebration puzzles me greatly. Why was it so important to take such a risk with the King’s safety? If it was so important why weren’t the public invited? What is it that frightens King Gyanendra so much?
Perhaps I shall learn more as we go along. If this is the overture, my stay in Nepal promises to be a very rich piece indeed.
Day Forty Six : Kathmandu to Lekhani
Kathmandu airport is busy. Next door to the long, modern, red-brick sweep of the international terminal, domestic flights are checking in at a functional, concrete building with yellow-stained walls. The slip-slap of sandals mingles with the ring of discordant announcements as tiny Nepali porters carry in the bags of strapping Western hikers bound for the mountains. We’re travelling to nearby Pokhara on Buddha Air, one of a string of local carriers with vaguely unconvincing names, like Cosmic Air, Shangri-La Air and Yeti Airlines. The crowds here this morning, indeed the existence of the airport itself, are still a relatively new thing for Nepal, which was only opened to foreigners in the 1950s.
A twin-prop Beech 1900 carries us out over the Kathmandu Valley, the widest valley in the Himalaya. Over a third of Nepal’s urban population lives here and more are moving all the time; from the air the buildings expand along the main roads like concrete tentacles squeezing the green out of the rice paddies.
On our starboard side the peaks of the high Himalaya drift tantalizingly in and out of cloud cover, and by the time we begin our descent the cover is burnt off and the long, irregular, snow-capped ramparts of the Annapurna Ridge define the northern horizon.
In the days to come we shall be walking up there but today, as we skim down over the glittering lake, which, combined with the mountains, lures the tourists to Pokhara, we have only time to transfer our bags to vehicles and move on.
We are heading away from the tourist trails into the mountains west of Pokhara to the rural heartlands, where one of Nepal’s most famous exports comes from. Described variously as ‘tough’, ‘hardy’ and ‘indomitable’, the Gurkhas have long punched above their weight in the British Army. Since the first battalions were formed in 1815, these Nepali mercenaries have been fierce and faithful servants of the Crown, with a reputation for unwavering loyalty and unquestioning ruthlessness.
There are 3500 Gurkhas in the British Army at the moment (and 50,000 in the Indian army) and they have served all over the world, including recently in the Falklands and Iraq. The Nepali government allows a certain number to be recruited each year and Lt-Colonel Adrian Griffith, the Gurkha Chief of Staff in Nepal, has suggested we accompany him to the village of Lekhani to see how the recruiting process works. Adrian, slim, straight-backed and a couple of decades older than he looks, is the epitome of the decent Englishman abroad. At the age of eight, he first read the Johnny Gurkha stories in Victor magazine and the fascination that developed led him to join the regiment 15 years later.
Until recently there were no roads west of Pokhara and among the predominantly poor farmers in this inaccessible network of valleys and foothills one of the world’s few surviving Communist parties is alive and well.
Succoured by poverty and feeble administration, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) demands the removal of the monarchy, the setting up of a constituent assembly and the re-writing of the constitution. Since 1996 they have chosen to pursue the class struggle through guerrilla warfare. Over 7000 people have been killed, 10,000
injured and many more forced out of their homes as they took on the police and the army. No-one seems quite sure what their leadership is up to at the moment. Prachandra, leader of the insurgents, has sounded more conciliatory recently and they have observed a ceasefire for the Dasain festival. But that, as I know, ended the day before yesterday.
It’s a soft, warmish morning. We stop at a police checkpoint. Beside the road a group of women in saris are breaking rocks. (Female road gangs were quite common in north India, but this is the first I’ve seen here.) At Baglung the good road runs out, and we have to pull over for a moment while our Gurkha escort checks out reports that a bomb has been found on the track ahead. We order a cup of chai from a roadside shack. A woman with a jewel in her nose sloshes milk from a kettle into a saucepan thick with ancient deposits, adding spoonfuls of sugar from what looks like an old tin of black paint. This is all boiled up with a touch of cardamom and, I presume, some tea inserted at some stage. It tastes rather good.
West of Baglung the road becomes a slow, muddy, rutted track. In the absence of drains or culverts, water runs off the paddy fields and onto the road. At one stage my driver refuses point blank to take his nice, clean four-wheel drive through a lake of unspecified depth.
One of the Gurkha officers has a quiet word with him, then a slightly louder word, after which he drops all his objections and drives through the lake.
After two hours of painfully slow progress the track runs out. Everything is unloaded and re-packed in cone-shaped wicker baskets, dokos, which are then loaded onto the backs of porters and, looking like something out of the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, our 44-man, and one woman, procession, complete with everything, including the kitchen sink, sets off across the hills to find Lekhani. Worryingly, its name doesn’t appear on any of the maps I have and the Sherpas who are organizing our transport are from a completely different part of Nepal. Local enquiries have to be made, which usually means chatting up someone half-buried in a paddy field.
Eventually, winding down across slippery, vertiginous rocks, between terraced fields of sorghum and millet, we come to our village, with attractive stone houses, some thatched, some tiled, spread along the hill, between spurs of rock running down to a valley far below. On the northern horizon a spectacular panorama of Annapurna, Machhapuchhre with its distinctive twin summits and the 26,750-foot (8150 m) Dhaulagiri massif looks sublime in the late afternoon sunlight.
The only disadvantage of this precipitous location is that there are only two unoccupied flat places in Lekhani. One is a sports ground, where the recruiting will take place tomorrow, and the other is an old cow patch, corrugated with dried mud. This is where we pitch our tents.
Day Forty Seven : Lekhani
It’s not just dried mud I was sleeping on last night. As I made my way to the makeshift toilet, my torch picked out evidence that a menagerie of beasts had been easing themselves on our campsite for quite some time. When it also picked out a trail of bones and an abandoned flip-flop I decided to switch it off.
Up at six. Nawang Dorjee, who I think may be the nicest person in the world, brings me tea and a little while later a small bowl of hot water for washing. Check the view. Yes, everything’s still there. The Himalayas, the rocky slopes, the wooded spurs, the village without roads or streets. Poinsettia, oleander, frangipani and dry-stone walls. Farmhouses, simple and solid, as beautiful as any Italian hill village. When you look more closely, though, you can see that none of them has glass in the windows, only wooden shutters to keep out the winter cold, and the living space, though picturesque, is squeezed on one level, with space below reserved for stores of grain, firewood, animal feed and the animals themselves. A number of the houses have water buffaloes in the basement, big and black, like old vintage cars.
As I clean my teeth I look up the hill. A buffalo, being milked by an old woman, her head resting against its wide grey flanks, gazes impassively back. Prayer flags move lazily on their poles (there must be a Tibetan influence here), smoke drifts from the rooftops below and a pair of young women, with long dark hair, coming slowly up the hill, stop for a moment to adjust the headbands that carry the full weight of their baskets and to give us a good looking over.
At breakfast Adrian tells me about Long Noses and Flat Noses, something I’ve heard our Sherpas talking about. Nepal, he says, has a fundamental ethnic division between the Indo-Aryan with origins in the south and the Mongolian who originates from the north. Sherpas think of themselves as Flat Noses and superior to the Long Noses, who in turn think of themselves as more urban and intellectual than the Flat Noses.
‘Traditionally, but not exclusively, it’s been the Mongolian hill men who we’ve recruited,’ Adrian explains.
‘The hill farmer lives a very hard existence, and he comes from a hierarchical society and if you superimpose military discipline and military training you’ve got the makings of a very good soldier.’
He reckons there will be 100, maybe 150 potential recruits today, many of whom will have walked as much as eight or ten hours to get here. There seem to be many more than that already, clustered in groups lower down the hillside, around the old volleyball pitch, which has been adapted for the recruiting, with gallows-like structures put up for the exercises and schoolroom desks brought out for the officials.
The whole event is organized by the local recruiting officer, the galla-wallah. He is a local man who will have been given instructions as to how many recruits are needed and scoured the villages to find likely candidates. The most that can be selected today will be 44. The galla is paid a small basic salary and a bounty for every successful recruit.
The Gurkha regiment has to walk a delicate tightrope between offending the Nepali army and provoking the Maoists, so the galla deliberately keeps the procedure informal and unmilitary. There are no weapons or uniforms in evidence. Sporting a baseball cap and a blue and red striped rugby shirt he gives an introductory talk, which, despite general squeaks, laughs and shouts from the local children, meanders on for some 25 minutes. He’s followed by the village headman and then Adrian.
Adrian’s much shorter speech, in fluent Nepali, is greeted with loud applause. He’s garlanded by the local women and then cuts a red ribbon to mark the start of proceedings.
After the young men are registered and their height measured, they have to perform a series of physical tests. The first are heaves up onto a bar (the British Army requirement is six, the Gurkhas demand 12), after which they have to show that they can expand their chests by two inches. According to Adrian, this is a rule of thumb way of anticipating possible tuberculosis problems later on. The disease is prevalent here.
The boys puff their chests out to bursting point, and those who fail the first time are allowed to take strenuous exercise and try again. One of them completes a frenetic routine of 40 or 50 push-ups before leaping up, panting like a racehorse, and rejoining the queue.
He scrapes through the two-inch test next time, but his chances of being among the final 44 are still slim and, even if he gets through, this is only the first phase of the process. Successful applicants here go for a gruelling Hill Selection later in the year and only the best of those will go through to Central Selection in Pokhara after that. Some five months from now, the 24,000 original applicants will be reduced to a lucky 230, who will then leave Nepal for induction training in Singapore or at Catterick in North Yorkshire.
‘It’s a big culture shock,’ Adrian admits, before adding, a trifle ruefully, ‘But the army’s a culture shock anyway.’
The rewards are substantial. As a serving soldier, the Gurkha gets the same pay as a British soldier, around PS1000 a month. By comparison, a captain in the Royal Nepal Army is paid around PS100 a month. On retirement many Gurkhas come back to Nepal and make a good living in the tourist business, buying hotels and guest-houses.
Adrian brushes off any suggestion that there might be local resentment at having these elite fighters poached by a foreign power. Adding up pensio
ns, welfare schemes, direct expenditure, as well as the return of money earned abroad, he reckons the Gurkhas are worth PS68 million a year to the Nepali economy.
Because the turnout out has been much higher than expected, with 251 applicants registered, they are only halfway through the programme by the end of the day. The galla seems pleased as he brings the results up to date. Twenty-three failed in the heaves, 40 in the sit-ups (in which one boy managed 98 in less than 2 minutes), 13 failed the eye-test and 7 were deemed too short. This leaves 168 still in the running for 44 places.
It’s been a long hot day for everyone, so we discreetly open a bottle of whisky to celebrate with Adrian and the organizers up in our dining tent.
After a while the galla comes in to join us. He looks decidedly uncomfortable and, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, he talks rapidly to the others in Nepali. I can see expressions change.
Adrian translates for us. Some ‘visitors from the forest’ have approached the galla. They now want to talk to the rest of us. He nods, anticipating my question. They’re Maoists.
A delegation, including our director J-P, follows two young men who look like students, one with a colourful embroidered shoulder bag, the other carrying documents of some sort in plastic folders. They look quite harmless, as if they might be on their way to a tutorial, but the submissiveness of everyone concerned suggests they have something more than moral authority.
They lead our people out of earshot, off behind a small temple, beside which a gnarled old bo tree grows. After half an hour they’re back. J-P reports they met with four of them, all young, the same sort of age as the recruits, two of whom were polite and reasonable and two ‘a bit nasty’.
They have asked the galla, Adrian and two other Gurkha officers, to go with them to meet what they call their high command, two hours’ walk away into the forest. While we are taking all this in, three of the Maoists appear at the door of our tent. One, in a white shirt, is short and chunky and wears glasses reminiscent of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. He has a row of pens clipped in his top pocket. Another holds a radio. We mask the whisky bottle as they peer round the tent. Once they’ve gone another boy appears. He wears a baseball cap and speaks to the Sherpa Nawang, expecting him to translate. Nawang’s eyes simply grow wide and he seems transfixed, speechless with anxiety. The boy’s tone seems apologetic. Cradling a silver torch, he puts his hands together in the traditional greeting.
Himalaya (2004) Page 13