1
It was what locals would describe as a typical July evening in Kathmandu. The wind was chilly, and low-hanging dark clouds hovered in the foreground of a grey overcast sky. There was a light drizzle of rain, just enough to soak you wet in five minutes. Stray dogs barked as soon as there was a flash of lightning, and again at the sound of thunder. Bagmati, usually a serene dissector of the city, raged almost as high as the bridges over it, threatening to overflow the stone embankments. It looked like a thunderstorm was on her way.
The streets bustled with thousands of office-goers scrambling to get home before the clouds decided to let the cats and dogs loose. Unbuttoned raincoats flapped and whipped over motorbikes like a jockey’s crop, as if forcing the motorbikes to dart faster. Pedestrians walked to their homes as fast as they could, trying not to slip and fall on the stiff asphalt. School buses rummaged through the streets with all sorts of window art that were clumsily sketched over a canvas of warm breath.
Some schoolchildren splayed their palms beyond their umbrellas to feel the rain as they walked home with their moms and dads. Some of them abandoned their umbrellas altogether, much to the displeasure of their parents. Others even jumped into potholes to experiment how high the splash would reach. As the rain started to pour harder, the camaraderie between the rain and the kids only grew. But the adults, who had once jollied with the rain in their time, became more and more hostile.
One can never truly see the future, but it was certain that only a few of these kids would still be rejoicing in the rain once they got older.
The subtle drizzle of raindrops hit the roofs of hundreds of houses sprawled along the street. Most of the houses were tightly packed next to each other, sort of like blood brothers standing shoulder to shoulder in a photo. Blood brothers often swore to live and die together, and so would these houses. If a powerful earthquake hit Kathmandu, as it routinely did every couple of decades, each of these houses would take at least two or three others to the ground with them. Or if one of the houses was to catch fire, half of Kathmandu would turn to ashes.
In one of the many cramped houses, Bharat would lay on his bed pretty much every day, ruing his time at the hills of Baitadi. Just like the kids growing up to hate the rain, he now hated what he stood for all those years ago. But he could not just get rid of his regrets like rain-soaked adults drying themselves off. It was all he could ever think of, and it was consuming him.
2
The rebel camp at the hills of Baitadi housed more than 300 houses full of arms. It was an inventory so big that if the government had managed to seize just half of the houses, the Maoist rebels would’ve lost the war. One November evening in 2004, when the army ambushed them out of nowhere, it looked like the depleted rebels would throw in the towel. The war would’ve been over that day if it wasn’t for a determined commander.
“This is just a job to these mercenaries. Just another mission to get a payday. The feudal rascals at Kathmandu have made them exchange lives for money,” Bharat had said, trying to etch out every last ounce of courage from an otherwise dejected group of people. “But we? We’re fighting for the people. We’ve let them oppress us for long enough; we cannot let our children live through the same. After years and years of sacrifice, letting them win this easy would be like stabbing our martyrs in their backs.”
Next to no time, the invigorated rebels were back to blazing at the enemy. Taken aback by the counterattack, hundreds of them were floundering into landmines and accidentally blowing themselves up. Most of the army had started to retreat away from the hills.
A grenade had bobbled just a few feet away from Bharat in the midst of this resurgence. By the time he’d thought of fleeing, the explosion had already flung him far away.
A dark patch had engulfed most of his vision when the rebels waved their red flags in victory. All of the jubilated chants and commotion had blended into an incomprehensible murmur in his brain. He was on the edge of death, but even then, he had smiled as wide as his blood-smeared mouth was capable of. He had tried to raise his hand, but he had only been able to raise it as high as the tallest blade of grass. He had then tried to clench his fist, but his brittle fingers had given out. Even as his throat was choking up and his body was whimpering in pain, he hadn’t stopped trying to clench up and yell ‘laal salaam’ until all he had been seeing was dark.
After the battle, he was rushed to a small hospital in the Maoist stronghold of Kanchanpur. He had bled so much that a handful of villages had to be scoured to get enough blood. He was miraculously saved after several surgeries, but the same could not be said for two of his legs.
3
After a decade-long conflict, the government and the Maoist rebels negotiated a peace agreement in November ‘06. Maoists handed over their guns in exchange for the end of the Monarchy and a new constitution.
On the back of their historic win, they swept away the next election, and the former commander-in-chief of the rebels became the prime minister. Most of the top dogs in the war got themselves a seat in the parliament, with some unctuous ones even going as far as being ministers. People like Bharat, who were important in winning the war but were not interested in joining politics, were given ceremonial roles in the party just so they could enjoy some perks of being on the winning side.
Bharat was also anointed as one of the faces of the party. Whenever they messed up, he’d make an appearance on the telly, where the interviewer would make him come out of it as a sad, broken man. They loved to use him to remind people that the party members had sacrificed a lot and that they were actually the good guys.
He had done enough at the hills to warrant himself a cult status. The public, unfortunately, never saw the heroic side of him because of the TV portrayal. Instead, he was pitied. People would get teary-eyed when they met him, and he’d frequently hear sympathetic tongue clucks. He was thought of as anything but a fierce soldier, bypassed through every security check— even at the prime minister’s office— without even a pat-down. He was never a sucker for machismo, but he couldn’t take this image of a weak, miserable man with a grain of salt.
The challenge of navigating life with disability coupled with a constant stream of patronizing sympathy definitely bothered him. Still, he knew that he would eventually make peace with it. The barrage of failed promises was what drove him crazy.
He had placed all of his faith in the hands of the comrades in charge, for they had promised incarcerating feudality and rewriting the country from scratch would unite the people and bring peace, or why else would he give up his contented life of a well-paid civil servant to join them in a war that they had a very slim chance of winning? Why else would he rather stay in the hills and not be mourning by his mother when his father had passed away? Why else would he risk his own life and hundreds of other lives by taking a depleted group of rebels back to the battlefield? But when the dust settled, he could only see more of the same happen. The government was as corrupt as ever, inheriting the usual tomfoolery for power from before the war. And although they had proclaimed a gazillion times that a new constitution was imminent as soon as they got into the government, they hadn’t still gotten around to drafting one even after four years of office.
The paupers had couped their way into the throne and chosen not to dismantle it. Tens of thousands had died for a handful of conmen to be the new royal family. And he was among those who let that happen.
After the war, he could barely even look into a mirror without being overwhelmed with a tremendous amount of guilt. He couldn’t forgive himself for leaving his mother to grieve the death of her husband of thirty-nine years all by herself. By the time he’d got to be with her, she was a sickly woman, torn apart by the weight of sadness she had to bear alone.
“I’m sorry, aamaa,” was the first thing Bharat had said, drenched in tears, hugging her with whatever of him was left. “I’m sorry you had to go through everything alone.”
“I missed you. I—I miss buwa so much,” she had replied, her voice broken with sobs. “It wasn’t easy, but I—I consoled myself hoping that somewhere in the hills, my son…my extraordinary son was doing what he felt was the right thing to do. It is all worth it now because you—you’ve made your dreams come true.”
That same year, Bharat had found her unconscious on her bed one morning. Doctors had said it was a heart attack, but Bharat knew very well that it was the years she had lost with her son that had actually killed her.
It is all worth it now because you’ve made your dreams come true, always rang in his ears to remind him that, in the end, none of it had turned out to be worth it. He had championed a war that he felt had no consequence except thousands of pointless deaths.
When he wasn’t lamenting all of this in his head, he was wailing uncontrollably, biting his bedsheet to muffle his scream, and throwing as big of a fit as his frail body was capable of.
And it wasn’t just him. The skepticism surrounding the ones in charge had also started to spread all over the country. Having seen a massive cash cow in anti-Maoist stories, the media had started to capitalize. There would be sensationalized news reports every week about something terrible they had allegedly done. Some weeks, they would be accused of being Chinese agents. In other weeks, there would be stories about all the blasphemous black magic rituals they had allegedly performed to shift the war in their favor. This week, some news channels accused the Maoists of not handing over all of their weapons to the army. To deny this controversy, the chairman-cum-PM had called for a press conference. And as usual, Bharat was summoned to help them collect some sympathy points.
As the last crop of school children passed by his house, a beardy Bharat with a head full of white hair stared out the window from his wheelchair, waiting for his one-bodyguard convoy to arrive, as drops of rain pattered into his windowpane.
4
His room was not more than six cubits in length, but it was a football field for someone without half a body. The building was a damp old structure with no pillars, and the walls that bore all the weight had as many cracks as an old farmer’s foot. It was an impending death sentence for those who lived inside it. But to Bharat, this execution day couldn’t come sooner.
If you’d asked him about the times he had thought of ending it all, he didn’t have enough fingers to count it for you. But each of those times, something hadn’t felt right. He’d felt as if his will to leave this world was manacled. How could he nonchalantly walk over the pile of corpses that he had helped create and just disappear into thin air?
Walking the hills of those promising but secretly crony doctrines had taken him to slippery slopes he precariously fumbled upon. Those who weren’t so lucky had fallen to their death. At long last, he had grown to realize that the hills weren’t real. He was made to constantly climb and descend incredibly pliable sand dunes disguised as hills, which deformed at the slightest gust of wind. Who better to chop down the prop-trees, rip up the grass carpet, and expose the snakes of the dunes for what they really were?
A black Range Rover pulled up in front of the house. Bharat gazed at it with his focus elsewhere, seemingly contemplating something else, as a man in a grey suit and black aviators got out of the car and entered his building. Only when the footsteps approached nearer did Bharat wake up from his daydream. He stretched to move the mattress in his bed a little and picked up a key. Footsteps led to a stop right in front of his door, and he heard a couple of knocks.
“Sir, I suppose you’re ready?”
“Give me a minute,” Bharat replied. He wheeled to his rusty tin cupboard and opened the safe inside with the keys. There was a rugged, dusty range bag lying there. Bharat grabbed hold of it and took something out. He then coughed over the sound of clinks and cocks that followed and put the thing in the pouch at the side of his wheelchair, unbeknownst to the guard outside.
Over the last year, the media had regularly exploited people’s dismay towards the ruling party by reporting some of the most outlandish claims about them. Even the most staunch Maoist critic would say that most of these reports were bonkers. But the country would soon find out that one of these rumors was true— they had not returned all of their weapons.
5
Excerpt from The Himalayan Times, 17 July 2012:
MASS SHOOTING AT THE PRESS: 8 DEAD, 15 INJURED. PRIME MINISTER SURVIVES.
Kathmandu, July 16– Bharat Raj Bantawa, a former rebel and a senior advisor of the Maoist party, open-fired at party officials during a press conference on Friday evening. The prime minister and the home minister were among those in attendance. Security was quick to shield the PM and take him out of the scene through the back door. The home minister, however, caught a bullet in his chest, and passed away on his way to the hospital.
One armed police force personnel managed to shoot the perpetrator in the head after about two minutes of shooting, and he was pronounced dead shortly after. Eight party members— including Bantawa himself— died, and a further fifteen suffered major injuries. The survivors are undergoing treatment at the Army Hospital.
Security experts are perplexed about how someone could sneak in a compact assault rifle within just a few meters of the prime minister. Mahesh Jung Thapa, security head of the prime minister, says that the PM himself had made Bharat exempt from security checks. “The prime minister believed that he, being differently abled and everything, posed no risk. He also considered Bharat a loyal friend from what he saw of him during the war. So, he asked us to always let him through without checks out of respect,” he said. “A few others also have that pass, but the whole list is going to be scrapped today.”
This event has undoubtedly pushed the already prevalent but largely closeted anti-Maoist rhetoric to mainstream discourse. Protests in Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Bharatpur demanded an explanation of the event and questioned the whereabouts of the weapon used in the killing. Ironically, the press conference was called to dismiss the allegation that the rebels had not handed over all of their weapons in the first place.
The public is awaiting a formal statement regarding the matter from the prime minister himself, who is set to give a televised speech to the nation on Sunday. An emergency committee chaired by Mahesh Thapa has been formed to enforce drastic security measures and…
6
The Kathmandu Post, 13 September 2012:
PRIME MINISTER RESIGNS AMID NATIONWIDE BACKLASH Kathmandu | Sept. 12– Nepal’s prime minister has resigned after investigative reports by Nepal Army suggested that the firearm used in the infamous press conference shooting in July may have been from the war. Thousands have been rallying nationwide to condemn the ruling party for violating treaty terms since the news broke out two days ago.
“I do not trust them anymore,” one protester said. “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. God knows how many more lies they’ve told us.”
The party has denied the report’s authenticity, labeling it as a ‘propaganda orchestrated by feudalists,’ and vowed to take the matter to court. However, the public seems to be convinced of their alleged treaty breach, and this has put the party in a critical situation for the first time since they took charge of the government…
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