The Sichuan Broadcasts

I began to restate my request to him, but I was soon interrupted by the arrival of another young man.

   They all greated each other, both the editor and Prakash seemed to know him well. He was very uneasy, haggard and almost frightened. They both gave him some money, enough to buy food for a couple of days. He left as stealthily as he had come. Prakash watched him go with a very sorry look on his face. "This friend, he is in bad shape", he said to me, "he used to be with us, but he has left the Party because of political disagreements. He has put himself in a very bad situation. The police doesn't get into this kind of distinctions, and he is being chased like any other maoist, but he is alone. Everybody tries to help him, but we have very little for ourselves as it is."
  I was to leave with Prakash. When we parted, the editor told me with a large smile: "I have done what I could to help you. I am unable to help you in any other way. Let's assume we've never met." We shook hands and he bade me good luck.
  I would see Prakash every two or three days for the next month. He introduced me to the rest of the Janadesh team. They seemed a bit dizzy from their newly regained liberty, and were very busy looking for a new office and struggling to get their confiscated equipment back. They were orphans trying to get along by themselves: their chief editor, who by the way they spoke of him must have been a very charismatic leader, had been murdered in custody by the security forces during the last emergency. They thought themselves to have been lucky. Except for the boy who was in charge of distribution, a round faced youth with almond-shaped eyes from the hills, they had all been arrested by the police. He had been arrested by the army, and held in one of the clandestine jails of the military where he had been severely tortured. They considered him a true hero, and treated him as such. Arrested by the police, they had been kept in a regular prison, with some semblance of judiciary control. There were hundreds of political prisoners in there, they didn't feel lonely, and some of the guards were secret supporters who transmitted mail back and forth and did their best to make things easy for them.
  Prakash was in charge of covering the human rights movement: the struggle to find out the whereabouts of political prisoners and to make the light on extra-judiciary executions. During that first month of cease-fire, there were many meetings held on that subject by a number of NGOs and associations. He took me along to some of them. Most of the time, while waiting for my request to reach the Center up in the hills and for the answer to come down back to us, I spent in my hotel room reading the only literature available in second-hand bookshops around Asia, worn out volumes of Penguin and Wordsworth classics.
  The great day came at last. Prakash picked me up early and took me to the bus station. I was introduced to my trekking companions. One was a young fellow, not more than twenty, short and very fat. I would be amazed at how a good climber he would prove to be. He told me to call him Sangha. He spoke a rather ungrammatical Anglo-Indian volubly, which I would often have a hard time to understand, and would be my interpreter. The other guy was older, around thirty. He would be our guide, and spoke only Nepali. He did dress like some of the guides I had met in Thamel: utility waistcoat, baseball cap screwed on the head, sneakers and sunglasses. He was tall and lean, wore a little moustache, and seemed to be very discreet, almost shy. I would be astonished at his complete metamorphosis after the last army checkpoint. He would become very talkative and exuberantly joyous. It would be only long after that last checkpoint, and once he would have fully convinced himself that I really was an internationalist, that Sangha would confide to me, with the delighted face of a child about to reveal a great secret, who he truly was: Kathmandu valley clandestine military commander. He was actually going to report back to the Center and get fresh instructions. Since he was heading the same way as we had to, we had been entrusted to him for the first leg of the journey. We were still in enemy territory now, and didn't talk more than was necessary. I was instructed to act as if I didn't know them when we would get to checkpoints, and advised to make up a plausible story to explain my travel to Salyan, a project to visit on behalf of some NGO or the like. I would almost certainly pass without being questioned, said Sangha, because the running dogs in the Kathmandu Palace get all their money from the imperialist powers and their soldiers don't dare to bother whites, but it was better to have something ready, just in case. I was quite elated by these instructions: I was becoming clandestine! an undercover agent, and without running any serious risk...