And the men were away again. Off with their ten-paathi jute sack of supplies anchored across their forehead, small nut-filled cans rattling against their back, re-sharpened khukuri dangling by the waist, treading on muddy trails through unforgivingly humid Terai forests. The sal canopy teasingly let through hot streams of sunlight and the men were faithfully accompanied by swarms of pesky mosquitoes through much of their shaded march. They bivouacked only at night; that was when the cooks – all of them infuriatingly portly, invariably moustachioed, and largely unburdened with any load during the day-long marches – put together barely edible kodo gruel. (The men had been promised one maana of ration every day, but a soldier who traded in Chainpur swore that they received only three-fourths of that.) The platoon commander, a young, oddly proportioned Thapa from Palpa, gave the troops one break at midday, when he alone was served a large bowl of hot gruel, sprinkled with his private supply of lamb sukuti.
‘Make way! Oye, make way!’ bellowed the rotund head cook as he deliberately bumped into and pushed through the troops, carrying the copper bowl as if he were delivering the Sanjeewani herb. ‘Raja needs his feast!’
Bir Bahadur and his fellow soldiers gave way, glancing hungrily at the bowl. While ‘Raja’ Sher Thapa feasted and then slowly chewed on supari, the troops made do throughout the day with their own supply of nuts and whatever fruits and berries they could forage. They were a day away from Kailali, cutting through the Chure hills, and some of the men were tasting chiuri fruits for the first time.
Bir Bahadur set aside his heavy sack on the stump of a tree and carefully placed his khukuri and the longer, heavier kora on the ground. Hanging the load from the strap on his forehead had left a dull heaviness extending beyond his temples that seemed to gently pull his weight backwards. The drone of the men’s chatter and the clatter of cans, pots, and weapons being set down drowned out a quiet brook rippling away through the forest. Bir Bahadur was drenched in sweat, his slight and nimble body crouched into a squat, as he hunched over and gazed endlessly at the pebbles, some smooth, some jagged, some broken, all shaped by the unrelenting little brook. It took a while for Bir Bahadur to register his own distorted reflection: a sunburnt flowing blot of a man, sprawling nose unmistakable even on a brook, lost in thought. As he absentmindedly plucked and crushed the leaves from a drooping branch, a couple of cooks came by the resting men, imploring them to burst into song to entertain the young platoon commander. None of the men bothered to look up at the fat cooks.
There were no songs on this trip. Like their khukuri, the men’s excitement had dulled with each blow that these military expeditions had delivered upon their bodies and spirits. On Bir Bahadur’s first Gorkhali expedition in Bikram Sambat 1842 – some 15 years ago now – to the village of Banakatti along the Rapti, when he had helped quell a small band of Awadh soldiers who had taken back control of a cluster of villages, he had been full of song. There had been a lightness to each step. There were no complaints about the gruel. The heat was bearable. Getting out somewhere, anywhere, away from Naangi, his village, his beautiful wasteland, had lit a fire in his belly. They had been outnumbered – two indifferent warriors from Awadh to one singularly motivated Parbate – but they had swept aside the enemy with an overwhelming force of will, screaming and slashing, slashing and screaming. They had cleared the villages and set up new sentries. They had taken charge.
And camped right in the middle of the village they had protected and then ransacked, they had sung their usual songs about the promiscuous girl from Tharey Bhir who mothered twenty children from eighteen men, about the eternal love between a mountain and a lake, about the industrious women and men of some hillock in Baglung who tended to golden harvests all day and made merry swilling alcohol enriched with the goodness of kodo all night.
The boys spoke of a new tomorrow then – the fires in their bellies raging – where they would all have vast, fertile lands and subjects to till them. Bir Bahadur hated to think that he had once dared to dream along with the boys.
That was many conquests ago, many lifetimes ago. His once-beautiful leather khukuri sheath was now tattered, broken buffalo skin barely holding together. Much of his dark brown cotton daura and white patuka now had indelible blots of blood spatter. (He was issued the uniform when he enlisted, but a new set cost two mohurs, one-tenth his pay. So his poor wife would grate her palms off at the village spring every time he came back from the battlefield.) He had become sinewy, his ribs pronounced, and his sunburnt skin looked much like his buffalo leather sheath. His full-moon face, as his sweet mother used to lovingly call it, had sunken into angular dimensions. But for all the depressions on his body, his nose remained defiantly bulbous, a shapeless monstrosity. He could shrivel into just skin and bones or bulge out like one of the cooks, but his nose would still stick out proudly like an appendage with a personality of its own. And understandably, he earned a series of nose-related monikers, ironically from other soldiers with invariably flat, stubby, and wide noses. (Bir Bahadur particularly hated being called dhonde or nepte, and the jokes about which fanciful objects – a python, a radish, the entire enemy platoon – would fit right through his nostrils.)
With his nepte nose, Bir Bahadur could manipulate air flows into his canal-like nostrils so masterfully that he could produce a honey-like voice that stood out among the hoarse, off-key gaggle of soldiers singing in unison.
Both the song and fire in him had extinguished slowly.
For years now he had felt a phantom tiredness seeping deep into his bones, becoming oppressively heavier even as his frame grew smaller. With each passing day in service as a porter-soldier, he found himself eternally tired, lost in a trance, isolated from everyone and everything, capable of nothing other than the orders barked at him. Although he hated the long marches, the sorry food, the violent stench of blood, disease, and death, the heat and cold, the abusive commanders, each more vicious and bigoted than the last – he could not even bring himself to hate it all with a fury.
With each trip, something slowly chipped away in Bir Bahadur. It was a while before he realised that this was a shared affliction: The others too had stopped singing on their marches.
Around the small forest clearing split by the winding brook, Bir Bahadur took off his round, dark topi and wiped the sweat from his forehead as the mid-day sun glowered down upon him. As he looked up at the men resting against the gigantic sal trees – Sher Thapa peacefully napping sideways on a thin straw mat, his gut hanging over a khukuri that had never tasted blood, an aide fanning him with a bundle of official-looking lokta documents – only a handful of faces seemed familiar from that first operation to those scattered villages alongside the Rapti (where they had frolicked and cooled off after a dazzling display of screaming-and-slashing violence). Some companions from that campaign had been transferred to different regiments following the great reshuffle of 1851, after the regent Bahadur Shah faced his final exile. But most men and boys from that first tour had met violent ends in the expeditions that followed.
Bir Bahadur’s fellow villager Netra Gurung had died somewhere in the east in Kirat country, a hatchet right between the eyes (to which some village elders had first tsk-tsked, then thanked goddess Barahi that at least his eyes had been spared). Another soldier from that original platoon had deserted north of Kuti but had apparently been picked up by a band of Qing Empire soldiers and slowly tortured to death for intelligence that was never forthcoming. Many others had succumbed to wounds or malaria during the summer marches. A few had been maimed and amputated beyond use – and swiftly removed from sight so as to not douse that newly lit fire in fresh recruits. All were broken.
‘The jungle weeds out the weaklings, you know,’ platoon commander Thapa, on his first military expedition, sagely preached as he dusted himself off after his nap and mounted his mud-brown horse with great difficulty, helped on by his swarm of underlings who murmured in agreement. As he adjusted the feather on his headdress, he spat out his supari with more proclamations: ‘Gather those weak in-bred Limbus and Gurungs! Put them at the head of the column! Or they’ll desert. Let the rest follow me.’
As his horse worked up a trot, Thapa croaked, ‘They’re not made for this. It’s not in their blood.’
Sher Thapa’s blood traced back to a long line of treasurers to the Sen Rajas of Palpa, a particularly belligerent and scheming petty kingdom among the Chaubise Rajya that had lost Gorkha’s favour by delaying reinforcements during the conquest of some of the Baise Rajya in the mid-1840s. The talk among the men was that Sher’s father had torn the kneecaps off his suruwal begging his Sen lord to ask the royal Shah court in Kathmandu to spare his sons from service. The Sen Raja, downtrodden but egregiously proud, never took the appeal any further than Palpa.
Once news had broken that Sher would be leading a platoon of thirty Gorkhali soldiers beyond the Mahakali to fortify villages in Kumaon, Sher’s father had arranged for an extravagant send-off, replete with garlanded son-on-horse, a band of criminally underpaid and legally untouchable local musicians, a Bahun and his apprentice handsomely gifted with garments and rations, and a sacrificial goat strung along to complete the show (but no mutton feast for the village spectators). Sher’s father, smeared in turmeric and vermillion, told anyone who would listen that King Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah – grandson of the great unifier himself – had earmarked young Sher for this noble expedition. Some of the more learned among the men were quick to point out how fitting it was that a four-year-old king would have anointed Sher Thapa.
Bir Bahadur did not care for such chatter. He wrung out the sweat from his topi, picked up his sack and weapons, and got in line behind Sher’s horse, as instructed. He had never been a big talker. His earliest memories of home were of being all alone in the emerald highland meadows an hour’s walk up from his house, above the tree line, finding sticks to corral his family’s sheep, head wrapped in rags, body barely shielded by his big sister’s oversized vest from the biting cold, snot hardened into two small streams gushing from his already cavernous nostrils – but not a single soul to talk to. He was barely taller than the ungulates he was shepherding, but as the little man of the house, he had to make the solitary walk up the mountain which people called Sisne Danda to take the sheep out to graze.
As Bir Bahadur marched ahead with his platoon towards Kumaon, he realised that perhaps the tiredness etched into his bones had been present even when he was a kid. In those lofty meadows of Sisne Danda, with what he now knew was Dhaulagiri peeking from behind the clouds, resplendent with an orange-red glaze, the six-year-old shepherd boy Bir Bahadur used to feel an incomprehensible weight holding him down, and he used to dream of many things that helped him feel lighter. He dreamed of playing from dawn to dusk with the boys in Naangi village, throwing rocks at each other and running up and down the terraced fields. He dreamed of drinking skimmed milk every day from that village elder’s generous cow and devouring fatty mutton soup every night with his two sisters, cooked by his mother as if they had just finished praying to the god of land during Bhume Puja. Most of all, as he would leave warmer climes every summer towards the cold embrace of Sisne Danda, he dreamed of not having to take care of sheep.
*
I am well here. The nights are hot and the days hotter.
Tomorrow we leave for the hills, so it will be cooler. From there we will have the advantage. But our scribe will stay back at our outpost in Almora. So I do not know when I can write to you again.
No one here is ready, but we all have Ishwar’s blessings. Do not worry about me. I count the days until I will see my village again.
An unfamiliar gust came, swept away the little vest from Oni Sara’s hand. The winds were not as strong here towards the ridge of Kaphal Danda as they were in the valley of Naangi, where they had to tie clothes to the line when hanging them out to dry.
Still, the chill of the wind loosened her grip and blew the vest out into her small garden, a riot of green fenced in by a low hedge. As Oni Sara got off her porch to pick up the vest, she noticed that a bundle of hay weighed down by timber was dangerously close to flying off and leaving the roof of her mud house with a gaping hole right above her kitchen-bedroom. She dusted off the vest, still a little damp, before placing it atop a small, neat pile of clothes on her porch.
The roof would have to wait. Phooli was expecting her to help bring in the barley. Oni Sara went to the small shed jutting from her house and picked out an axe and a sickle from the tangle of hoes, sickles, and mattocks. She approached the pile of branches her children had gathered from the nearby grove and swung the axe halfway into a large log so that it would stand in view, resolute – a reminder for the roof work. She carried in the pile of clothes from the porch and left a bowl of kodo gruel warm upon an ember for her children.
The sun had risen above the highest ridge when Oni Sara set off towards Phooli’s house in Naangi valley, a good descent from the top of Kaphal Danda. Barefoot, sickle and a handful of bayberries firmly wrapped to her waist by a patuka, and a spare patuka around her head to contend with the sweat she was sure to work up, she walked briskly, breaking into a patter when going down sloped paths, and humming with the chorus of cicadas and songbirds. She broke off stalks, swooped down and hopped up to pluck white orchids, and weaved them together expertly without slowing down her descent.
The narrow, muddy trail opened up into a sweeping view of the valley: rectangular patches of yellow mustard fields, rippling golden-ripe crops, and muddy plots, with scattered thatched-roof houses growing denser towards the depths. Phooli’s small farm was also brimming with golden crops, and Oni Sara was greeted with a cup of skimmed milk.
The two friends squatted in the field to slowly work their sickles through the barley. Oni Sara beamed as she handed Phooli the bayberries and the white orchid crown she had concocted on her way down. Phooli let out a beautiful laugh and carefully placed the floral crown on her head.
‘No, you wear it,’ said Phooli suddenly, removing the garland. ‘Your face looks bare. Nothing around your wrists either. They say it’s bad luck.’
‘Who?’ Oni Sara asked sharply. ‘Who says that? Who? I don’t listen to them. And you shouldn’t either. You know they’re not looking out for you, Phooli.’
Phooli smiled knowingly.
Oni Sara continued, ‘Did your mother ever tell you these things? Or your grandmother?’
‘But didn’t your husband leave you any jewellery?’
‘I feel better this way. I feel lighter,’ Oni Sara tried hard to remain composed, but her dough-like nose – unadorned by any precious metal – rose. Her neck, ears, wrists, and fingers – all cooked into shades of a dull brown by the sun – were bare too.
A summer ago, when Oni Sara had taken her children and sheep out to higher pastures, her house had been broken into and her stash of jewellery looted. She had decided not to share this news with her friends Phooli and Kaali, or any of the village elders. She had not written about this to her husband either. She saw no point in it. She suspected the conniving Thakali and the idling Chhetri who lived in the pits of the valley – an unlikely pair of young slackers who had evaded recruitment when King Prithvi Narayan Shah had begun tightening his siege around Bhadgaon a few years ago. One of them supposedly had a clubfoot or curved spine or both, and the other was spared because his uncle worked in the tax collection office in Baglung – Oni Sara could not say which excuse matched which wastrel.
She could, of course, start pointing fingers. Appeal to the village elders. But that was an endless hill to climb, even for Oni Sara. There hadn’t been much in her little wooden box anyway. Just a ring and an amulet her husband had brought home from his exploits towards the valley of Nepal. Last winter, when her youngest boy, Bir Bahadur, had fallen ill when a wave of smallpox made its way up to Kaphal Danda, she had not been able to barter the gold for money or food. Only Phooli had made the trip up with her boy’s favourite: mutton. The village elders had sent their blessings.
Oni Sara and the elders did not have time for each other. She would not deck herself up like a married woman. She would not stop with her strange language and strange rituals. She would not volunteer herself for work on birta lands. Why should she, for some Bahun who one day magically owned a quarter of the valley’s most fertile rice fields (including those tilled by Kaali’s in-laws), just because some king somewhere was convinced of the priest’s purifying powers? In return, the village elders would unerringly send the tax men to her far-flung house every year.
And the tax men would utter fantastical official words for what they would take away. Saunefagu, if they wanted the little ghee in Oni Sara’s pantry. Chumawan, if they wanted four anna to celebrate the prince draping himself with some sacred thread. And they commanded free rein on the crop of the season to the value of two anna – always weighed according the tax man’s mood on tax-day – in the name of jaagir for some Pande kapardar. After the taxes, Oni Sara’s family had barely enough to scrape by.
‘This will go into your husband’s belly, witch!’ the smug tax collector had sneered the last time his men whisked away half her kodo harvest.
Oni Sara was always sharp with her tongue: ‘Then why’s your paunch getting bigger every time you huff and puff to my house, you bloated ox?’
The taxes used to be subsidised by her husband-tribute, as she put it to a scandalised village elder one day, to the military expansion in the west. But now, as the battles grew interminable, the tax collector would prise away more of her crops each passing season in the name of King Prithvi Narayan Shah from Gorkha. Oni Sara had heard from Kaali, who had heard from a trader from Nuwakot, that the great king was now trundling towards his deathbed. But the conquest raged on.
Every time her husband headed out, he would only grunt to let her know if he was heading out west or east. Or a little to the east. Or west of the west. Sometimes he would head out at dawn. No goodbyes.
Oni Sara was used to fending for herself. She had her children. Her two girls, Hastamaali and Sun Maya, would help her with her crops in her small, triangular field. The little girls guided the plough together, fetched water from the spring, cooked and wash when the spring water was not freezing cold. Her youngest, Bir Bahadur, was turning into a capable shepherd in the high-altitude cradle of Sisne Danda. The four highlanders quietly went about their way like four dough-nosed ants carrying loads many times their weight.
And they worked their hardest to punctuate their work with some time together. They would weave little wicker toys, much like the ones Oni Sara’s grandmother used to make for some reason, some ritual, some god Oni Sara no longer remembered. The girls had taught their mother to find and weave together those rare white orchids. And they would together give their house some colour with earth pigments from Kashi that Oni Sara had bartered for sheep wool in Beni’s markets. The mother and children drew colossal white mountains, dark blue meandering rivers, emerald trees that were all pines, yellow-streaked white orchids, all of the six sheep the family owned, the sun in a brilliant yellow, clouds, and the moon. One day, the little boy started to draw a man, so they had to complete the set and draw the rest of the family as well, working a plough together.
On some nights, the four of them would sing together, each child singing more beautifully than the other, a wistfulness beyond their years in their lilt, warming their hands on the fire. Oni Sara loved them so much that her heart would ache, but she also seemed to spend much of the day yelling out orders at them. How she longed to just be present with her little children, singing and making toys together all the time. Oni Sara had heard from traders about the beautiful carvings that people from Palpa could etch onto wood. Perhaps her children could grow up to create wondrous things instead of running themselves into the ground and growing bitter in the cold, thought Oni Sara. Her only knowledge of the world beyond the valley of Naangi was through her husband’s letters, which were quite bare, scribbled hastily by a scribe as other unlettered soldiers waited their turn. On rare occasions, his letters betrayed care for the family. Oni Sara always searched for that grain of care.
Whenever he came back, he drank Oni Sara’s homemade kodo raksi, not too much, because he could not hold his liquor. He ate less with each meal. He spoke in grunts. His eyes sparkled when they tracked his children, but he could never bring himself to string together a careful sentence for them. The children would look at him as if he had once been someone familiar.
‘Is that father?’ Bir Bahadur had once asked when Oni Sara’s husband had ambled back on one of many occasions with his small jute sack. The next day, the little boy added a patchy moustache and beard to the man in his wall-painting.
The Gorkhali soldier awaiting his next assignment would sit slumped over on their small mud-plastered porch, gazing not at the horizon but lost somewhere in the mid-distance. He stank. The stench of blood, sweat, rain, mud, urine, shit, and ungodly concoctions of bodily and elemental fluids that accompanied him on his marches did not leave him.
The expedition before last, when he had headed ‘a little west’ to conquer one or another of the Chaubise Rajya, he had returned with a bad knee and deep wounds on his left hand that had left half of his fingers dead. He never offered an explanation.
Oni Sara did not know what he could offer out there. But then she did not know what he would do here either. She only knew that he would keep going until they turned him away.
Oni Sara too would keep on keeping on.
Her spare patuka on her head drenched with sweat, Oni Sara sat with Phooli on a mound and munched on bayberries from Kaphal Danda, their day’s labour neatly stacked besides them, quietly watching the solemn colourless glow as the last of the sun dipped below Tharey Bhir.
*
I heard from Kaali Gauchan that you are all in Gorkha. I hope the cold isn’t bothering your knee.
This year’s harvest was poor. But we are making do.
Hastamaali has become very beautiful. She has learnt how to make alcohol too. You may like hers better than mine. Sun Maya and Birey keep asking when you will return. But they are still very young.
Bir Bahadur was squatting atop a small mound. His patuka and kora were nowhere to be seen. His topi must have fallen off when they were hurtling down that hill, slashing at branches, screaming their lungs out. His khukuri, unsheathed, was lying next to him, viscous scarlet drops slowly dripping from the sharp edge. He was idly scratching shapes of sheep onto the dirt with a stick.
Behind him lay death and despair.
Sher Thapa was strutting on his horse across the fields of ripe maize as tall as him – pride inflating both his heavy chest and long, sharp nose – shouting inane commands: ‘Count their dead! Then go search those
rooftops for enemies! I heard these greedy pigs grow crops on their roofs. And tell these Kumaoni villagers that Sher Thapa from Palpa has freed them!’
Each directive was met with adulation from his underlings, who began a lively discussion about their Raja’s guaranteed ascent in the royal court in Kathmandu, all within Sher’s earshot.
‘Raja will become a khardar when we get back.’
‘Khardar? You dimwit! Raja will make bhardar, with Gorakhnath’s blessings!’
‘And Raja will receive rice fields in Makwanpur! Larger than this village!’
‘Those Indian singers in court will sing about Raja’s exploits! The way he prepared the men. Our boys were too strong. Our boys fought like Bhairab. They were –’
‘They’re only sheep,’ snapped Sher. ‘It takes a tiger to win conquests.’
The cooks and aides immediately murmured their agreement.
Bir Bahadur could not help but shuffle around, still squatting, to take a look at the large-hipped tiger. The khukuri, untainted by action, hung beneath the commander’s paunch. The headdress rested easy on his big head. No stubble on the jowls. His daura-suruwal was spotless.
Bir Bahadur stared at his commander long and hard – and felt nothing. The soldier’s sprawling nose remained resolute, neither waxing in anger or waning in deference.
Bir Bahadur looked down at the sleeves of his own daura. They were in tatters. Fresh blood splatter was superimposed over the faint blood stains from past conquests for past Sher Thapas. This time, Bir Bahadur resolved to pay the two mohurs for a new uniform so that his wife would not need to grate her palms off in the cold spring of Kaphal Danda.
*
We lost many men. I am fine. I will be home next month. I want to eat meat stew. Try to buy a sheep from the valley. That is all for today.
Little Bir Bahadur stirred even as Oni Sara placed the clay pot on the earthen floor with the deftness of a butterfly landing upon a leaf.
‘Will we have to eat gruel again tomorrow?’ he whispered, ensconced between his sleeping sisters, eyes barely open.
‘Sleep, Birey.’
‘Why did you have to give away the old sheep? What are we going to have during Bhume Puja?’
‘We will make do again,’ said Oni Sara softly, squatting by the hearth, her attention lost among the embers.
Drifting back into his slumber, Bir Bahadur mumbled, ‘I’ll go join father. Then they won’t take away my sheep.’
A pang went through Oni Sara’s heart at that thought.
She felt the walls of her hut collapsing into her, a nauseating heaviness draining the air out of her lungs, forbidding life to reenter her body. Growing waves of dread enveloped her. By now, Oni Sara knew that these waters would slowly recede. But it did not make the drowning any easier. After a lengthy struggle, reprieve came from the narrow slit in the roof, which blew a sliver of cold wind down her neck – and lungs.
Oni Sara hurriedly pulled the allo blanket closer to her sleeping children’s chins. Her gaze lingered on their dough-shaped noses, already growing too large for their round faces.
At that moment, Oni Sara hoped with a passion that, in her children’s dreams, they were warmer and eating till their hearts and bellies were full.
She had her own dreams for her children. She still hoped, twenty years since her husband first began heading out for battle, that he would someday be granted more land, where their crops would be plentiful, where their children could play and sing and dance every day. She hoped that Hastamaali, who had already worked harder in her young life than most grown men and women in the valley, would no longer have to toil so hard, the poor child. Oni Sara hoped Sun Maya would marry a rich landlord somewhere in the Terai with an estate so vast that she would need a horse to inspect every corner. She could see her grandchildren climbing trees and plucking ripe mangoes. And her youngest boy – her full-moon–faced Bir Bahadur, her sweet, sweet boy with that beautiful voice and already mighty nose – would become a carpenter, or a trader, or a singer in some court. He would not need to tend to sheep up in Sisne Danda. He would have his favourite mutton soup every day. He would be happy.
Still breathing heavily, Oni Sara wrenched herself out of her reverie. She covered the pot of gruel. She had to sleep soon. When dawn broke, she needed to pick up that axe and fix that roof.
* * *
This story is dedicated to my newborn son, Hiyud (हिउँद), who I’m happy to report is also a nepte.
