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.