The Sichuan Broadcasts

We have left the village rather late. We had time to wash and shave. Comrade T. shaves almost every day.

  There is always something elegant about him. It is not his attire, which he manages somehow to keep always neat: he dresses in simple western style clothes, like all the intellectuals in the hills. He was a teacher before the uprising. A teacher-farmer, like all his colleagues, as he has made it clear to me. He used to spend all his time off working on the family farm. It is more something in his bearing that is elegant. He is tall and spare, very dark skinned. His little moustache is always perfectly trimmed. He sports a topi, the traditional Nepali man hat, tilted to the side with studied casualness. We stand on the top of the hill. The slope is so steep that it looks like a cliff. Below, we see one of the tributary of the Karnali river, not larger than a ribbon. He shows me the bazaar where we are going to take the bus, tiny squares along the red thread of the laterite road, on the other side of the river. Opposite us, across the deep valley, we see the hills of Rukum district, which stand as high as the ones we are leaving. He says it won't take us more than three hours to get to the bazaar, but I shall be careful, the path down to the river is steep and very dangerous. We have spent the last two days in his house. He hadn't seen his family for more than two months. His eight years old son was overwhelmed by joy when he discovered that his father was home. He made his homework with him in the evening, by candel light, eyes wide with admiration and love. There is a teenage girl too. She is crazy. She sits most of the time, speaking alone. They don't understand, they seem to suffer a lot from it. Sometimes she gets angry for no apparent reason and starts to beat people around. Only her father knows how to talk her back into quietness. Men came, and there was a long discussion. Some of the village family heads are very involved in Party work. Like him, they don't have much time left for their farms. They have syndicated their holdings and set up a kind of cooperative. They have appointed a manager from among themselves, who organizes production, distributes work and hires daily workers when needed. They try to meet as often as possible. We have repaired the cattle shed. There wasn't enough rice ready. We went with his son and his mother down to the beam hammer pounder shared by a few families to hull paddy. (...) The first evening, he went to the fields with friends. Since there is a cease-fire, it was possible to unearth dangerous material and bring it to the house. They came back with two blue plastic barrels, the kind used here to keep and transport pickled food. He opened them and with plain emotion started to empty their content: the Hindi translation of the works of Marx. He hold each book with loving care. His face became somber when he noticed that moisture had attacked the paper. He told me, with a voice tainted with nostalgia, that since the beginning of the Revolution, he hasn't much time left to study. When we arrive at the bazaar, he takes me first to see what used to be the police station: the burnt down ruins of a square cement building. There was a small battle there a year ago, before the great raid on Salyan town, when they captured almost forty trucks of weapons and ammunition from the army. Back to the place where travellers wait for the bus, two women are looking for him. He doesn't know them. They talk. He seems to hesitate. They talk more, other people from the bazaar join the huddle. We follow the women to a rather large house further up along the dirt road. We are welcomed by an effusive elderly man, who jabbers some kind of English, who takes an immediate fancy to me, and who is completely drunk. He drags me to the corner of the common room that is his realm. After a lot of griping and squawking, he loftily allows me not to drink whisky, and has his daughter bring me lassi instead. He was a soldier in one of the Gurkha regiments of the Indian army, and has lived for twenty years in Bombay. Politely, I pretend to pay attention to his ramblings. Comrade T. is sitting on the floor at the other end of the room, the rest of the family in a half-circle around him. A grown-up son is writing some kind of letter. Comrade T. takes it and reads it with great attention, nodding approvingly. He folds the paper carefully and puts it with other documents. He takes out from his bag two very small fabric wraped parcels, and gives them to the mother. She opens them with hastiness, the whole family eyes wide open around her. Gold!? It is gold: finger, ear and nose rings, thin bracelets and a necklace. I am rescued from my talkative and stumbling host by the horn of the bus. We have to leave in a hurry. "What kind of business was that? - Cumbersome. Last year, we have expropriated the bank here. Some local families kept their jewels in its coffer. So they had to send us descriptions, we have to check everything, find the time to get back to them and restitute them their gold, have a receipt made... All this takes a long time, and it's not a priority."