Maoists, exploding tandoors, and vegetable carts

---

In Nepal things rarely happen as you expect or hope. This is what Heather and I discussed as we stood at the new bus park in Butwal, waiting to meet our friends for dinner. We were mostly thinking of the unexpected information we had uncovered in a series of interviews that morning. It started at the Radio Jagaran office, where I had managed to sit down with Dinesh (see my previous blog about him on my work blog site) and ask him some questions about his parents. His father is a Village Health Worker and his mother has uterine prolapse but they are from an extremely poor untouchable caste family, making them an example of a case where even those who have knowledge about UP still don’t have the resources to seek medical care.

During my discussions with Dinesh he began to tell stories of the caste discrimination his father used to face—the times he was beat as a five year old because the upper caste landlords didn’t think he should be going to school, the time he and his brother were shot by upper caste landlords and forced to live in a jungle for two or three years, the way that upper caste villagers refused to let his father administer injections to their children, despite the fact that he was the designated government health worker.

Heather sat by as our interview progressed in Hindi, and as I translated some of the stories for her she took interest in the relationship between Dinesh’s father’s story and Dinesh’s own experiences with caste and advocacy. As part of her work at the radio station Heather is producing radio profiles of journalists, so during the course of my interview with Dinesh she asked that I sit with her and Dinesh to translate an interview in which he could share these stories.

An hour later we went upstairs to the recording room, where the interview turned out to be even more dramatic than we had thought it would be. Dinesh described in further detail the scars that still mark his father’s back from the time he was attacked by upper caste men with a shovel. He told us about the time that Dinesh’s father sat Dinesh down at the age of 10 and explained to him the trials that he had faced as a Dalit boy who wanted to be educated. That year Dinesh studied as hard as he could and took first place in the district wide exams; he was denied the first place scholarship, however, by local upper caste landlords who didn’t think that a Dalit should hold such a prestigious title. This was the incident that spawned in Dinesh the desire to educate himself and work for the advancement of Dalit rights.

By this point in the interview Dinesh seemed to be opening up to us, and suddenly he began to tell us about the time that his father was kidnapped by Maoists to work as a soldier. What was even more shocking was that after describing in detail how his father was captured and made to shoot on behalf of the Maoists, Dinesh told us that he too had been taken by the Maoists. Only 16 years old at the time, Dinesh was kidnapped while he was sleeping, gagged, blindfolded, and forced to work as a child soldier. With an incredibly even tone and a direct (though watery) gaze, Dinesh told us about how he was made to plant landmines in the road, two of which caused fatal explosions. He witnessed both.

Dinesh’s interview was so powerful that we decided to postpone it for the next day, when we could arrange for a proper translator and an interview with Dinesh’s father present as well. After almost two months of working with Radio Jagaran and only a few days before she leaves Butwal for good, Heather was amazed to find in Dinesh—a wide eyed and highly giggly 19 year old boy with whom she had chatted almost every day—these layered stories of profound discrimination and suffering. Her whole time in Butwal Heather had been trying to uncover such narratives, and that morning we had managed to uncover one without even really trying. This is the kind of unexpected progression of life in Nepal that we discussed as we waited at the bus stand.

Our conversation was cut short when a bus pulled up to the bus bark and we saw Nandu’s head pop out of the door. We ran to hop in and joined Nandu, Deep and Uma—the girls from Radio Jagaran whom we were taking out for dinner as an expression of appreciation for their assistance and friendship during our respective stays in Butwal. The bus took us all the way to the end of the line at the edge of Butwal, where a fancy chain restaurant promised us a nice meal from a continental menu in a white table cloth setting. We ordered a small feast and sat waiting for our lemon sodas when suddenly the roof shook and a loud thud stopped all conversation. Outside waiters and chefs were running from the kitchen that connected to the dining room as all of us patrons sat frozen in our seats. Smoke started to bellow from the kitchen and as the staff ran around frantically, a waiter came sprinting down the hallway from the kitchen into the dining room, where he stuck his head in just long enough to tell us to get out.

Immediately we ran to the door but it didn’t take long for us all to realize that we had nowhere to go. If we turned left we would have to run past the kitchen, most of which was now on fire and promised to erupt with a second explosion any second. If we turned right we hit a dead end in a hallway with no escape. So we turned right. At the end of the hallway we opened the bathroom doors and searched unsuccessfully for any kind of window that we could climb out of. With no apparent escape route, we just clung to each other, not knowing what else to do.

A minute passed and though waiters and cooks were still shouting and darting around the restaurant (while maintaining a huge radius around the kitchen), the immediate danger seemed to have decreased. We took a chance and ran down the hall and toward the kitchen, as busboys sprayed the flames with fire extinguishers. Unwilling to continue straight ahead and risk a straight path past the potentially explosive kitchen we hung a left and ran to the back of the restaurant grounds, where we found ourselves again trapped without an escape (so much for fire safety in Nepal). After Heather determined that we could not, in fact, scale the fence, we settled into the farthest corner from the kitchen, half expecting that the gas explosion that had caused the blast in the first place would trigger a second one and send pieces of the restaurant flying in our direction.

Although the girls made fun of Heather and I for how quickly we had run from the building (apparently our self-preservation mechanisms are more advanced), they were also visibly shaken. As the five of us stood in the corner fanning ourselves and trying to slow our heart beats, Uma laughed and explained how her first thought had been that we had been hit by a bomb. During the height of the conflict in Nepal (2001-2003), Uma had regularly heard such explosions in her village and had even seen blasts in front of her house as police and Maoists battled for control of the country. Deepa and Nandu quickly agreed that they too had instantly assumed that we had been caught in the middle of a conflict. I realized how different our lives have been when I recalled that my first thought was that something or someone had fallen on the roof.

After a few minutes of hiding in the back corner, we decided to take another chance and run past the kitchen again for the front door. Tentatively we made our way and discovered that no less than five fire extinguishers had managed to put out most of the flames, so we took our chances and ran past the growing crowd, which fearlessly stood huddled around the remains of the exploded tandoori oven.

Our dinner plans foiled and our interest in ever eating in that restaurant again ruined forever, we set off back down the road toward Butwal. We boarded an empty bus returning to its resting place at the center of town and rode a short distance on the main road to what we decided would be our Plan B restaurant. As we were getting off the bus a sudden commotion caught our attention and we looked toward the source just in time to get out of the way of a quickly approaching mass of shouting men. My immediate thought—caused, no doubt, by my recent brush with chaos—was that we were about to be overtaken by a violent riot. Strikes are not uncommon in Nepal and they regularly spiral out of control; I was convinced that this was one such case and that I was about to have to protect myself from some crazed group of Nepali men. The group yelled at us to get out of the way and I obligingly ran around to the front of the bus and sheepishly hid until I saw the group pass. They were not, as I had expected, crazed rioters. Instead they were just a dozen men trotting alongside a two-wheeled wooden vegetable cart, upon which a young man was curled in fetal position and writhing in pain. Their crude transport was headed for the hospital.

Eventually we made it to dinner. Thankfully Nepali menus are limited (even at fancy restaurants), so we managed to recreate our exact orders from the first restaurant, and eventually sat down to a meal of momos and pizza. But it was a strange dinner and conversation encompassed all the events from the day, starting with the explosion in the restaurant and circling back to Dinesh’s experience with the Maoists. We also learned that two other employees of the radio station had been kidnapped by Maoists, deepening further our growing understanding of how many histories of suffering are just under the surface in Nepal.

Heather and I are incredibly lucky that we escaped from the explosion unharmed, but more so that we do not have a history of kidnappings and bombings against which we can frame the incident. From the stories of Dinesh’s father to the man being carried to the hospital on a vegetable cart, we can take not only an understanding of the often profound difficulty of life for Nepalis, but the incredible privilege that we have in being able to come here and uncover these unexpected stories.

---

Comments

[m.c.]

damn
jesus libby! i can't believe dinesh's story and your explosion. seriously, what a crazy day you had. i'm sorry i didn't know about this the last time we talked on the phone or i surely would have asked about the follow up interview. you should really consider submitting this to the bee or some collage of all your entries.