Chapter One: Raniban Ambush

“Power,”
Comrade Sunray had said that day, pointing at the beads of light in
the city below, “is now sensitive, now ready to strike without
proper judgment, ready to crumble down in self-pity the more it
misses its target.” They were in a patch of jungle which they could
not name, for it had been recently formed as the expanse of Raniban
had been cut through by a major supply route for the police, and so
this one part was a jungle all its own which nobody had bothered to
name. At a small police post just recently abandoned out of fear of
the Maoists coming, a police-radio had been found in the trashcan,
carelessly thrown there, and with a bit of a tinkering Comrade Sunray
and the other Maoists could hear the messages between the various
police patrols underway on this night. The policemen in their patrols
did not know that Raniban, their Raniban, at the heart of
Kathmandu, had been infiltrated, just as they had passed by with
torchlight shining into the thicket, the dark, which they dared not
tread, for the fear that had come when they found the Maoist
pamphlets to be convincing to them, its exclamations making a
commanding noise in their hearts. And with the jungle all more or
less Maoist-controlled now in the police's flawed worldviews, they
thought something would come from within it, like a large, gooey,
alien pair of hands, to take them in, into the fold of the world of
leaves and snakes and trees, and find themselves in the midst of a
tribal dance of “Tharu Maoists” around a raging fire, the
policemen all tied up and groggy, and the Tharu Maoists hooting and
howling around the fire, giving no indication of when desperately
needed food and water would arrive, or if rations indeed were as low
as the papers complained and they were
the food, or at least had to die, tied up and, just like that,
without a morsel to eat, simply a ceremonial object in a fire-side
dance. And even if one policeman were to escape from that horror, as
some policemen did, when they staggered naked and mad to some village
which had no idea that the insurgency was going on in the jungle
right next door, he would still most likely die, for the poisonous
substance he would have had to eat at their ritual and for the
ancient trapdoor he would step into in the delirium from ingesting
that poison, the trapdoor that opened to man-killing spikes. So once
he was in their jungle world, that was it, the end. And the only hope
he was sold on, well sold on, what made him quiver and shake with
fear less than he thought he would when staring into that dark hole,
on that dark night, was that the United Nations, with the more
powerful armies and fully in the know of the value of human life,
even a Nepali's life, gave the hope, the rather false hope, in
sincere meetings in the halls of power, and with various public
service announcements with the maudlin actors, that it was
excessively concerned, excessively, and so its forces would literally
jump into the jungles of Nepal to save the policemen from the
Maoists, literally leap wildly into the jungle with a soldier's
bravery, never fearing for their own lives on the line. But this was
excessive hope over a convincing advertisement's images, that was
all. At one point Comrade Sunray had worked for an NGO and had
learned a thousand ways to be harshly critical of the UN, and he and
Comrade Codebreaker Alpha had extensive debates about what exactly
was wrong with the UN, whenever they, in camouflage, sat in the
thicket by a remote dusty road and a huge white UN vehicle passed by,
as if the two of them were watching cars passing slowly by from a
cafe in Paris, so relaxed in these debates they would be. But the
first sign something was off was enough to transform them into the
most serious jungle fighters the world had seen.

Comrade
Codebreaker Alpha hushed the conversations among the other fighters,
concentrated on the police-radio's talk, to figure out exactly the
where and the when, using the coordinate geometry-- the slope, the
distance formula, the mid-points--he had always equated with his rage
when he had found himself doing the coordinate geometry textbook's
more advanced problems well into the night, wondering why he did
them, as beads of sweat broke on his brow and an important life
called. At first he had been unable to recognize it despite its
clues, this Maoist life. There had been intense concentration on his
face when he read the math problems in which some hypothetical
individual had tried to profit at someone else's expense, or when the
laborer had to carry sixty kilograms of a load on his back, say, and
sometimes he as the problem-solver had had to add more load upon that
to solve his little math problem, as if the laborer he was thinking
of only existed on the pages of a math textbook or copy, the real
laborers being denied the attention they needed by these hypothetical
textual ones. But he did the math problem, arrived at the unjust but
mathematically correct solution with gritted teeth, with rage now
formidable and well developed, the page filling with mad numbers
while he, in his heart, had already gone to the nondescript outskirts
beyond what mattered in math, beyond the squares around the
coordinate geometry graph where tried-and-tested solutions would have
been, beyond state power, to unnamed jungles far away, going so far
away due to a dedication to the laborer—the one who was heavily
burdened, the one who existed in mathbooks more or less without
families, fully laborer, that “atomized individual,” as
intellectuals called him dismissively in the parlance. And whenever
he looked into the eyes of the Maoist fighters on patrol, he wanted
to let them know that he saw beyond the numbers even as all they saw
was him tinkering with the radio and writing numbers down. He wanted
to share how he—and his friends-- had burned “Optional-Math”
textbooks after the SLC exams, and had felt a burden he had never
before known or named lift, a burden of oppression, of
knowledge that had always oppressed him. It was for the first time
then, as the fire threatened to burn his fingers, that he had decided
on taking a radical political path. But he had never told this story
to the fighters because they did not know the SLC, and so he kept
quiet instead, and also kept quiet like that about a lot of other
things, very very patiently waiting for the day when they would know
what the SLC was. And he would teach them then, as they understood
it, wide-eyed, just as they began ever so slightly to desire to take
that exam, to see what it would be like, at that precise moment he
would teach them how to problematize the exam and kill the desire
to take it. At this moment however, only Comrade Sunray and
Sunray's comrade lover Dawn knew his story. Intrigued by his capacity
to do complex math, they had asked him about his life, and both had
nodded their heads in admiration vigorously, and looked to him and
his math projects—the formulas that he invented—and thought how
the knowledge of this young man, this unassuming codebreaker, had
literally made their insurgency into the thousand-strong cause that
it was today. And they had dreaded the future, visionaries that they
were, the future distant but not inaccessible to them, but
which Comrade Codebreaker Alpha himself had not yet seen,
that future when the
insurgency would be done, and they would all come upon the proverbial
fork in the road, and one would go his way and the other would go his
own way, once united by the insurgency to be divided when new paths
opened in their respective lives. And they wondered if, on top of all
the mathematical divisions he had done in his head so far, would he
do that division in his life,
that last division, the one that mattered the most?

Comrades
Dawn and Sunray had met at a UN-organized seminar of NGOs and quickly
fallen in love because they had both been going through a difficult
time and each had needed an outsider's view on how to solve life's
issues. They had been in a resort and had looked from the wide-open
terrace one morning at the jungle in view, and in the beginning they
had hesitatingly articulated their problems as if they were personal,
but found slowly that their problems were political as well. And then
Sunray, ever the good speaker, had summed up their problems, when the
sun had set below the huge hills in a magnificent scene: “We are,”
he had said, “at this moment, in the decline of Nepal: poverty has
never been worse, police power never so corrupt, women as oppressed
as they were a hundred years ago...the decline of Nepal is all around
us now, and I see no place for hope, for survival.” And then two
years later, on a pleasant rainy night in Teaching Hospital in
Kathmandu, Sunray and Dawn's child, a daughter, was born. A beautiful
daughter she was, but blind and deafmute, with no chance of surviving
without the care of her mother, never hearing nor seeing even the
pleasant rainy night when she had been born, the night which leaned
towards her, demonstrating an intensity of anxiety about her
well-being which would only lessen as night after night elapsed. A
year into her life she died, leaving a scar in Dawn, a rage in
Sunray, and in the steps of their departure to the jungle there was a
hurried fleeing from society too, a fearful fleeing from the
ruthlessness of life as they saw it—the life, the air, the
hospital, the home, and then the UN, the state, the police, the
political establishment, capable all of these of taking away
daughters from parents, as they saw it. It was in Rolpa, much later
in 1999, when a police barracks
had been taken over by them, the Maoists, and it rained so much so
that it rained the roads away, with the police thus stuck many many
hills away at night, so that the barracks, for the time being, were
theirs, it was then that the fighters had slept in the barracks to
avoid the rain, and had, in bunk beds, shared their stories and
secret pictures, and Comrades Dawn and Sunray, looking out at the
rain, had from a deep purse which no one had known about shared a
small picture of their late daughter, and had wept openly in front of
the others for their loss. It was on that night that the two of them
felt the first signs of intimacy and love from the fighters, who had
come around and consoled them, handed them blankets and tea and such,
and they, in gratitude, had written a kind of “Constitution” or
“Code of Conduct for Guerrilla Warfare,” where they had listed as
the first item the rule “Aim for the heart, never shoot at the eyes
or the head, for he or she must have in the next life the ability to
know and learn.” And it followed on from that, it flowed and
flowed, this “Constitution,” till the sun rose again and still
nobody had slept in that barrack-world: the victory over the police
of the previous night was significant, sure, but even more so was the
intimacy between the Maoists, the togetherness, the community that
they felt, and the rain, and Rolpa cut off from the bad
world...everything had played its big part. Before they left for the
jungle again they stuck a Chairman Mao poster on the barrack's wall,
so that, if any one policeman almost convinced to come over to their
side wanted to, he could put a “human face” to all this
overwhelming war and bloodshed, and hence connect with the
insurgency, if at first through nothing more than the desire to know
this man whose face was on the wall, this one they called Chairman
Mao, whose face had become on the order of a very important sign, a
larger than life sign, only to the poor and the fighters, of
course, and not to the privileged folks who also sometimes stumbled
into the barracks camera in hand, who had seen it many times in dorm
rooms and saw him as no different from any other celebrity.

A
glinting blue police-van grew visible just after Comrade Codebreaker
Alpha had told the rest to be ready. A slow-moving police-van, quite
obviously not in-the-know about the Maoist infiltration, shining a
powerful torch—a gift from the US police-force—into the thicket.
Wolves recoiled when the powerful light hit their eyes—growled and
seemed to want to restart the first wars with men such as these--oh
how long ago--wars which had driven the wolves out for good--or so
the men thought—till they came back to Raniban under cover of
night, having devised a strategy to win while running along a path to
the jungle no one else knew. The police torch also shone on the
drug-users, the tapes,
who wilted when the light hit them, collapsed unto themselves,
groaned, moaned, “go away...go away...” wanting their drug highs
to be resumed, pale hand over their eyes, cursing the police, making
it obvious that they had some fragments of the revolution in the
shallow drawers of their bedroom cupboards, next to the old broken
cigarettes and cool blue lighters. Comrade Dawn, nimblest and
quietest of the Maoists, took her place at the back of the fighters,
and was ready to do what she had done in all the ambushes so far: use
the megaphone to guide them, encourage them, all
of them, including her husband Comrade Sunray. Or sometimes make
chant-like sounds to disorient the enemy. She was very good at that,
at playing “the witch” the young policemen had stoned to death in
their villages as ruthless teens trying to demonstrate their budding
bravery, as if she were that same witch coming back to haunt them
again. She climbed an old tree and had a proper view, and saw Comrade
Codebreaker Alpha was ready to throw a flare into the path to ready
everyone for the ambush. Then the fighters looked at one another.
They were always allowed this ritual, no matter how critical
the situation, this chance to say wordless their last goodbyes, not
to their families in their hearts, nor their village friends
drifting before their mind's eye, nor to memories of playing on that
tall village swing at Dashain
time during a childhood now long gone, when dear Father had been
alive, but to say goodbye to the other fighters, the other comrades,
the soldiers next to them now and here, in the muck and mess
with them, to affirm this
life, in this moment, now with a past they had all
absolutely left behind, gone the long walks through jungles singing
songs of the coming utopia, and learning to get accustomed—among
shy giggles—to the heavy guns that they had been given out in that
small ceremony they remembered as if it had been yesterday, in that
fantastically beautiful clearing somehow just there, just meant for
them, as if the jungles, too, were—naturally--on their side, till
it was time tonight to say goodbye. They then moved a little down the
hill and trooped towards the patrol route, under the cover of
darkness—or so they thought. For they did not know—they who only
knew the maobadi batti—that today there had arrived to the
police force, in the cover of the night, just a few hours ago, a
hundred or so night-vision goggles, one of which was being used by a
sharp young policeman in that police-van. So that if the police-van
reached a proper set of coordinates, and the fighters did too, the
policeman with the night-vision goggles would see perfectly the
Maoist insurgency coming to ambush them.

Dawn
and Sunray, right before starting the Maoist movement, had been in a
white NGO jeep stuck in a part of Krishna
Bhir because of a landslide in the works, witnessing the sheer
power of angry nature as it tortured the human world stuck below, the
huge boulders up there which could roll down at any time, the stuffed
and overstuffed jeeps and cars and buses which could quite easily be
crushed like bugs. The plan, when
they knew no more than to pronounce the word “freedom” clearly in
Nepali, when it wasn't even clear to them what they exactly
meant by that word, except that they felt its insistence on their
politically conscious lips, had begun a year or so ago, when Sunray
had begun his reckoning of the moment in which they lived and had
worked through labyrinthine analyses of obscure newspapers. And one
night he had begun to think of uniforms, and then of the soldiers to
wear them, and then onto other historical manifestations—in Latin
America and elsewhere—of armed struggles by the poor and oppressed.
He dived into books of jungles so thick and dense that he quickly got
lost in them, but it was so exciting that he lost his breath, and
went therein in the silent night deeper and deeper, in the thickest
of a jungle which had not yet known a machine, where he saw the ghost
of Che, or dreamed it, and it was always beyond the stifling leaves,
always camouflaged Che's clothes, with perfect visibility not really
possible, not in a convincing way. By the blue moonlight streaming
in, he wrote to himself something which touched his soul: “To be
such that one, while in reality, is a figure in a dream, not properly
seen for the light is always rather dim, and not properly known, at
least not by the onlooker within the dimness.” And it was not an
aimless foray into the jungle after a while, but he began to connect
with it—he felt like he had a map of it somewhere in his
head—because it led, when he finally knew where and when to stop,
to dawn, to that young bright light piercing through the canopy, to
colorful birds so cheerful at that and to a fawn stretching to reach
the first dewy leaf to be had for the day, and he felt a thrill like
that which little children enjoying nature for the very first time
feel, before he woke up and was alert to a world robbed of such
incredible jungles and pathless ways of life as he had seen, and
robbed of the potential, which was evident while driving in the NGO
jeep through jungle after jungle, to be less visible, to fight for
that right, that right to be less visible, to drop out,
to not live under oppression and an oppressive light, but to live a
life under that light which is more playful, as Dawn was in the
jungle, and this came to his mind like a painting, a painting with
Dawn in it, but only as if she was a part of the jungle, as he took
her in his mind from that NGO jeep they were in and placed her in the
jungle out there, and followed her in there. Their great secret was
that theirs was a life of the jungle, that the jungle for
them, their daughter lost, was not a means to an end but an end in
itself. It was where they would live forever, they thought, to guide
others who came to it, the poor and the oppressed, the needy
wandering in in desperation—that indeed was the end of it, to live
close by the hidden path, to be that man and woman who guided those
who sought that hidden path. And then Sunray said to Dawn at Krishna
Bhir, pointing to a massive boulder about to tumble down, “Either
we move on as the movement to the jungle, or we wait and we get
crushed here and now.” For Sunray, this life of rebellion was all
he would do henceforth: his new life on the whole had begun, and he
was its leader.

Dawn
had felt overwhelmed when Sunray had asked her to go with him into
the jungle. And as the anger at the world grew inside her too, she
felt more creative, as if a part of her was also asking in her heart
what exactly it was she would do in the jungle. So she felt more
creative, and that creativity seemed to hint to her her path, her
purpose, and so she accepted it and began to paint. She painted the
uniform they would wear, the colors' exact shade she chose, and she
put muse-soldiers in wide, fantastically colorful paintings of
utopia, painted out as rainbows in the blue horizon and bright yellow
shapes which looked shapeless, friendly and warm, the place of full
equality, of no oppression, the place of freedom. She was passionate,
her thoughts infused with a feeling
of utopia, a feeling which, despite her years in
boarding school in Kathmandu and her troubles with her family, was
still with her. She had a feeling of utopia, which had somehow
crept through and bloomed, a fact which, if you told any other NGO
worker, would be laughed away because he would never believe that in
the life and world of Nepal a utopia could be imagined, because he
would consult only the reports and graphs which gave a bleak
portrait, but she had really felt
it—it seeped through her and dripped from her into every single
painting she made, in every one it was there. Then when she
saw on a college dormitory wall a poster of Chairman Mao, she began
to add more people into her paintings, people working in the fields,
with the machines that the people had mastered and which were on the
whole created by the people themselves, and such paintings she made
could, if they had to be labeled, be called “socialist-realist.”
And when it all began and gathered in a whirlwind, in a force, a
rage, when they entered the jungle wearing the uniforms they
themselves had stitched, and guns half-handmade and
half-manufactured, she took with her only her painting supplies, and
when Comrade Codebreaker Alpha made maps of utopia for the fighters'
benefit, she gave them her paint supplies to paint out their feelings
as they heard and saw what Comrade Codebreaker Alpha had to say, to
paint what the utopia that was mapped felt like to them. They liked
to use bright colors, and they had sheer will to paint more and more
and more, due to which they even made paint from the juices of the
flowers they found, and whenever a new rare flower they uncovered
within a fold of leaves they made paint from it and worked on each
new painting for months at a time. And those were, in sum, the days
before the fighting began, the “formative” days were those, and
on the whole, great days were those. She had stood before those
paintings, and, during painting sessions all of the Maoist-painters,
too, would stand and stare at their work with her, see the utopias
that had been within them, the dreams that had been there, these
expressions, these reminders of freedom. And it was all good to hope
that power did not reach into them, into everywhere and everything,
and that one day, one fine day in the depths of a quiet jungle, as
they patrolled like any other day, a faint cheer would be heard, from
far far away, that said that someplace in Nepal, or in all of it, the
utopia which they had sought and fought for had finally arrived...

And
the one policeman was not convinced by the whole thing, the one who
thought of Tharu Maoists gone wild in the jungle, not convinced by
the armed struggle which arose, its philosophies and foundations, the
news articles that criticized it or the ones that hailed it, the
documentarians that went to Rolpa and “objectively” filmed it,
the police heads decapitated but still frozen with looks of fear, the
politicians in more fear, the ferocious modernly dressed young woman
from the village adamant about taking a stand about it all, the
international actors who commented in the tersest of terms about it,
but who, he secretly felt, did not fully understand it, the one he
called his wife, who wanted him to quit the police-force, and knew
not that they wouldn't be able to go back to the village where the
fighters had more or less taken over, the ones he called his kids,
who were fascinated by the maobadi batti he had had to bring
home on account of the extremely long power cuts, because they, the
ones he called his kids, needed to study, grow up, and pass the SLC
and do still more beyond what he had done in his life, and settle
quietly into the sides and factions and regiments of the ones whom he
doubted, with his Nepali post-SLC doubt that had developed beyond,
but only just beyond, the iron gate to the graveyard. And he, that
one doubting policeman, was
the one shot dead by the rebel ambush at Raniban that night. It was
he who was killed right on the spot the moment the night-vision
goggles had registered a thousand-strong army of Maoists rolling down
the hill in waves, after which
the police-van, knowing it would have been downright impossible to
fight that force, fled the scene. As the police-van sped away from
the ambush with one of theirs suddenly dead, the policeman wearing
the night-vision goggles looked in the rearview mirror like a
cop-hero, and his look was greeted by the ambush coming onto the
road, running after the speeding van. And in its rage to catch up he
heard a voice articulating the decades and centuries of oppression
that he himself knew well in his heart, an oppression right down to
the first seed of the withering family tree, the tree which, huge and
ripe from eager procreation, takes a thousand years to die but is
surely dying from the very beginning, rotting from within even as it
maintains a facade of order when it sways gently and calmly in the
village breeze, losing nothing and gaining nothing, shedding nothing
and taking nothing, the branches adance and bendy, fresh and young at
the tips, fooling the wise old village man
whom those tips swooped down to greet, who knew nothing about
the tree but saw in it a positive picture of life and vitality, of
the hope of life, the beauty
of life such that even a tree that had lived for a thousand years
still wanted to live, to grow, bear as and when possible,
until it bore that fatal seed for which it had been alive all along.
And that fatal seed, that one doubting policeman lying
in between the force field radiating lukewarm old-man wisdom and the
cold underground, was now dead
in that police-van, now spirit, soul, between the system of belief
known as life, and the system of belief known as death.

Chapter Two: The Fall of Dawn

On a
monsoon day in 1998, a day off from training and education, a group
of twenty to thirty Maoist fighters from Rolpa had, in civilian plain
clothes and with Comrade Sunray, Comrade Dawn and Comrade Codebreaker
Alpha with them, descended down from the hills around Mugling to have
some fried fish and just to walk around. When they got to Mugling,
they found motorbikes with stickers of Che, and young bus conductors
wearing t-shirts with Che, and posters of Che on the teashop walls
and wristbands of Che on the younger teens, and so it had appeared to
the fighters, quite convincingly, that they were in some kind of
utopia, given that there were so many faces of Che in that place, and
so they had proceeded to scream, to scream: “We are in
Utopia! Utopia!” and dance around in the rainy streets, and behind
them the dark green towering hills were just about to join in the
rain, with gaudy bright red flowers, and little smiling red-cheeked
Mugling children who had seen cars and buses and trucks pass by their
whole entire lives, and when younger ran after these lives of
mobility fascinated by them, motivated by the question they posed to
drunk missing fathers when restless legs asserted themselves in bed,
“What is beyond those tall dark green hills, truck-driving dad?”
But as they got older they had stopped chasing trucks with dads, for
the life beyond had stopped being appealing, because labor had
been recognized in driving these long long bendy roads, and labor—if
nothing else—the Mugling children fiercely disliked. So instead
they sat and stared, as they had done today when the fighters had
leaped and danced in the rain shouting, “Utopia! Utopia!” And if
they, the Mugling children, had so much as made a single peep about
that, so much as narrowed their eyes at that strange sight, the
police would have found out about the Maoist fighters in civilian
clothes and shot all of them down right there on the road, and it
would have been a significant victory for the police. But the Mugling
children just watched, as they always did they watched anything that
traveled this road, eyes glazed over and staring from under the
rickety tables of their mothers' tea shops which lined the road, they
just watched the road, and, through the silence and resignation of
the Mugling children, the Maoist fighters survived what would have
been a massacre. And Comrades
Sunray and Dawn and Codebreaker Alpha too survived, as they were just
coming down from the hills to hush the fighters quickly and
vigorously when they heard screaming and dancing. “The Mugling
Incident,” as this almost-fiasco was called, was debated day and
night after the Maoists went back up the hills and back on patrol,
and the main comrades tried to make it clear to the other fighters
that despite the pictures of Che Mugling was not utopia, and
then a whole new education was imagined for the fighters, one which
relied less on dangerous concepts like utopia and more on an
accounting-for of the events that had happened around them during
their training and usual forays into the world of normal people by
making use of words that they understood well. Comrade Dawn was held
most accountable for the Mugling incident, and a rift grew between
her and some of the others: her educational approach, her heavy focus
on artistic expression, made her problematic. And one day not very
much afterwards, when they had been patrolling a very thick part of
the jungle, Comrade Dawn, who was fond of walking while daydreaming
towards the back of the patrol line, broke away from the line without
the others knowing, and walked a separate way through the jungle, and
she felt she was gone for good, that fateful day of the aimless
drift, until she heard a rustling in the leaves, the unmistakable
sound of footsteps breaking twigs, and, with gun drawn, she had
waited for something to emerge, and when it did she found it to be a
small group of Maoist fighters, who, when she had broken off had
broken off with her, to show that they were on her side. Wide-eyed,
staring at her silently stood they for whom her visions of utopia had
mattered more than anything else. Then one of them whispered, “Come
back, Comrade Dawn...come back...we believe in utopia....we will keep
alive the dream of utopia...” And she suddenly remembered her own
late daughter, looking at these young fighters and trying to
calculate how old her own daughter would have been then, perhaps
barely a teenager like these fighters were, perhaps a bit older...
They stood silently before her with their excessively passionate and
naïve expectation of utopia, and she felt ready to do anything
for them to keep their belief alive, seeing clearly for the first
time just how young they were, without parents at that age when they
needed help with tempering their daydreaming, and just for their sake
she turned back to join Comrades Sunray and Codebreaker Alpha once
again.

In a
sense it was to appease the very vital Comrade Codebreaker Alpha, who
had been angered by the Mugling incident, that Comrade Sunray drew up
a rudimentary sketch of the Raniban ambush and handed it over to him,
giving him a year or so to bring that project into fruition. Comrade
Codebreaker Alpha busied himself with the project—he was totally
immersed in it—and drew “meta-maps” on the jungle's muddy
ground, meta-maps which he said were maps of other strategic maps.
And as he consumed himself, totally occupied in the world of
map-making, he began to note changes on the surfaces on which he was
drawing: the muddy ground of the jungle in the hills was now giving
way to a different kind of ground: a harder ground, cracked in
places, with holes for rodents and snakes, no visible footprints,
dust rising from all places, surfaces that had not held seeds for
many many generations, the fields of the unfortunate, with the poor
Tharus confined to these barren places, with eternal famines the
government did not care about, or maybe could not do anything
about—and such drawing surfaces began to now contain slender
footprints of anxious folks that he did not want to disturb, which
led to the Tharus themselves in their hot huts. And as Comrade Sunray
was speaking to them, he said a few words on their cosmological
animal, the Cosmic Tiger, and they shuddered with fear, as if the
Cosmic Tiger had passed by right outside. He spoke of the Cosmic
Tiger's paw print, asked if they had seen it and they said they had,
and he asked if they could point one out to him but they said they
could not, for they saw it in their dreams, they saw it in their
visions. And then Comrade Sunray raised his voice in that hot hut, in
that village where was approaching the time to flee because a UN
vehicle was about to drive on by, he raised his voice to say,
“Because the Cosmic Tiger's paw is gone...but we are still stuck in
its paw print—we inhere almost wholly in its paw print, and from it
we are unable to rise...but now we need to rise...” Then a
long silence ensued as the frightening words showed them the way out,
the way free, but which they knew could not be taken with ease.
Comrade Codebreaker Alpha went outside the hot hut, took from the
field a cow-herding stick, and drew in the dust a map, a very
detailed and meticulous map, and Rolpa fighters stood around it so
that the wind would not blow it away, and it remained intact thus.
“Those who follow this map,” he said, “will become Tharu
Maoists—more than just Tharus.” And at night the Maoists
waited by the X-mark on their map, and hordes of Tharus from the
village came to join them, with
the word “freedom” freshly pronounced by their parched lips,
they came, they came dedicated and angry, and they shared shy smiles
and waited for instructions, and dreams came, and new visions of
utopia were painted out as art that looked like their own, and they
watched wide-eyed and paused before the canvas and then painted more,
and a poetic one among them stood up in the middle of it all and
looked at all the diversity of the Maoist faces with colorful paint
smudged and half-wiped on them and called all of them “the People's
Army.” And sometimes a tiger rustled by in this part of Nepal, its
blazing orange hide seen passing amid the bushes by moonlight by
half-open eyes half adream, but they had no fear of what they saw,
not even of a tiger, at least not then.

At
the end of the training of the Tharu Maoists, when Cosmic Tiger
nightmares had been swept away from their minds, their cosmology was
now more or less erased, after the head comrades through much
deliberation and study had tried to comprehend all of it. They were
then stood before a painting which Comrade Dawn had made which was
the final painting of sorts to guide them, and it was for the first
time in their training a painting which was not “impressionistic,”
so to speak, with style and brushstrokes exuding from the canvas, but
a “realistic” work depicting none other than Chairman Mao
himself, and not the one that Comrade Dawn had seen in the college
dorm rooms of many a privileged student, but one in which Chairman
Mao was humbly working with the people, crouching down and helping
them out with something, on a farm which looked to be bustling with
activity, and it was the people which were key there, people
with stern looks and concentrated faces, they whose minds had
developed the will to work for the cause of the poorest of the poor,
they who wrote by the bright and great maobadi batti their
ideas and tactics without fatigue, never once pausing to reflect on
the raindrops falling from the canopy despite their appreciation of
beauty, for from then on it was people who mattered to them
more than nature did. And because they pored over that painting, the
face of Chairman Mao never left the minds of the Tharu Maoists; it
became a face they saw in their dreams, it became a face they would
always recognize. But the point was at first to get familiar with
it, especially for the fact that the face's features were
different from their own, looked foreign to them, different from all
the faces they had seen thus far. This foreignness did not matter; as
Comrade Dawn always insisted, they were united by something beyond
their faces and bodies. She called it a wheel of Revolution, not a
face, not even a body, a wheel of Revolution: that was the
main thing to keep in
mind, she said. An ever turning wheel of
Revolution which took life
to the firing line for years and years, which caused the supreme
vigilance of the best of them to get better and better day by day. A
wheel also turned by the anger-filled intensification of their
articulations, turned by shouting angrily before Comrade Sunray when
he dared to play “devil's advocate” with them sometimes, just to
fathom their thinking, their major points of debate. And he narrowed
his eyes during these great debates when the wheel of Revolution's
turning was winding down; he was looking to see if something like a
capitalist's core had rotted inside them, as it should have done.
Then one day it happened, in the dampness something rotten fell out
onto the jungle floor and he heard its thump and confirmed what it
was, and so the training was well and truly concluded. Before burning
her notes on the newly-trained Tharu Maoists, Comrade Dawn pieced
together everything they had said about the Cosmic Tiger and their
cosmology: she found out that they believed the Cosmic Tiger was
placed before a cave to guard a flame; it was all metaphorical, but
this much seemed to her like the concrete seed of the whole
cosmology. She took jungle shortcuts, feeling like a kid again
running along grassy shortcuts she knew well, down to the cave they
whispered of. It was glowing at the hole, there really was the Cosmic
Tiger's paw print outside it, and a growl or a rumble issued from
deep inside it when she snapped a twig, as if lightning that night
had led to thunder far far away. She readied her gun and wanted to go
in the cave and kill it but was too fearful to do so, too fearful to
disturb a people's once-beloved cosmology. So she turned back to the
cause instead and tried to forget that it was there.

The
Maoists sat by fires, their souls camouflaged in the night's
darkness, stared at fires, planning and otherwise, but never at that
moment did questions arise, doubts about the cause, for they had
nothing to look back on except empty huts and village kerosene
lanterns going dry and farmer-parents out on barren fields never to
come home and be fathers and mothers to them, but always carrying a
disturbing totem, a disturbing heavy sign hung around their necks and
eyes helplessly leaking fear, with their little joys exercising
control interspersed with bad jokes, with their thinking about
marriage for souls that did not want or need it, as dreamy friends
yearned to go abroad, squinting at a far far away safe place. And in
that moment, that rainy night in Rolpa, one simply did not know when
the Maoists would come and kill, or at least intend to, because one
was not yet on their side and so one was to be considered the enemy.
And the supreme chance, when the bullet narrowly missed the head,
went into the mud wall of the cowshed, the chance to escape, and then
to join their forces, if for nothing else than for the need to
survive those bullets speeding in here and now, and, taking guns from
their wild hands, allowing oneself to be “recruited” in the midst
of battle, in that wildness and desperation, in the line of deadly
fire, when, with a thundering voice saying “STOP!” to the old
life, a new life was discovered, and all the ones that had oppressed
and discriminated suddenly became “class enemies,” with a
distance coming in between, a No-Man's-Land coming in between never
to be inhabited. And “fire!” they said, “FIRE! FIRE!” at
the souls they had always seen and been with, but always with a
No-Man's-Land in between, and that showed the appeal of these Maoists
of Nepal, that they had seen and felt the No-Man's-Land in between
lives, whether in urban places or rural, whether between fathers and
mothers or daughters and sons, between all of them, everywhere, the
No-Man's-Land between people the Maoists of Nepal had seen. Then
something unmanly grew upon that No-Man's-Land, like when at the womb
when the late daughter grew, comfortably deafmute and blind with no
relatives to judge her, then, when daughter was being built by mother
and mother was being built drop by drop of breastmilk by daughter,
and there had then been only peaceful coexistence in their world
before the ancient parental totems had stood large in swirling desert
sands in dreams, real talk had been there about the sheer
poverty which was to surely come, about the thoughts of suicide
camouflaged but no less there behind it and beneath it all. And after
the battle was fought, that night in Rolpa barracks with rain, there
had been shared as many unspoken stories as spoken ones—about who
had madly killed his or her own family, who had spared the witches in
their village huts, who had done what, where-when-and-why—these
unspoken stories had passed between eyes, how unspoken, life had
changed since the daytime when the People's Army had come, and the
high felt at the split-second decision to join that army still flowed
through in the veins, like the high experienced during drunken
card-games in the Rolpa village life left behind, that village of
class enemies now dead or gone...And it had been that card-game high
that so intensely came to the fore in the depths of these
battles—because the war had all been, indeed it still was, full of
youth, so full of youth that got high in the gamble.

Even
the gun battles with the police over control of the village were
completely youthful and had been taken up by the Maoists as a game in
comparison with the larger formulations at stake. These larger
formulations were presented such that the fighters could be as very
much involved in them as the head comrades were. They were heard loud
and clear, after silence fell in the post-battle ghost-villages, also
because the fighters had found a way of talking properly, inspired by
snippets in the newspapers they had tried to read prior to the
insurgency, and also by playing around with the “sign clusters”
that constituted the bulk of the content of every map and meta-map
they had used: the temple, the police-station, the patrolling route
of the police, the river, the village, the trees—the supposedly
“lowly” fighters could make elaborate village-stories out of
these signs, and they even shared such village-stories with Comrade
Codebreaker Alpha excitedly. Sometimes there surfaced in the jungle
UN reports on villages in Nepal, somehow these reports were brought
into the jungle-world, and the fighters all knew to engage with the
reports quite tactically, by evaluating in which
places the UN had not gone far enough in its
description-writing and data-collecting, and hence had failed to
bring development and its language everywhere in Nepal, and
so deducing that these places could be more receptive to the Maoist
insurgency. And so, even as early as the Mugling incident, a
“movement” was developing which emphasized use of the head more
than use of the gun. It was widely believed that powerful people
would listen if the right words were used. Given this newfound
faith in the power of words, in the deepest and thickest of jungles,
where it was impossible for even the most determined of police to
follow on account of their rifles getting tangled in the thicket,
journalists were invited, journalists with slender pens carried in
back pockets, not only to witness Maoist training but to talk to the
fighters, to use interesting words which the fighters could then pick
up and use themselves. And some of these journalists brought along
their laptop computers and Comrades Codebreaker Alpha and Sunray
stared at them till their batteries died, with the other fighters
crowding around these two, who then spoke of the raging rivers of
Nepal that the fighters knew so well, while being
critical of the mean feat of government injustice due to which
the rivers became supplies of electricity to urban areas where people
used such fancy things as laptops, while villages remained without a
single electric bulb to brighten their homes. The fighters, in the
past as idle villagers, had often gone to the raging rivers flowing
by, realizing the promise of electricity all too well--until it got
dark and they had to walk back to unlighted homes, without having
figured out how to make electricity as those big nondescript
hydropower buildings did, when they were humming with activity, those
big hydropower buildings around which the middle-aged village men
were known to linger to the point of madness, sometimes even carrying
their crying infant children there to show the only light bulb alight
for miles and miles. The two head comrades hoped the fighters would
see these urban computer-users as enemies, and, indeed, they did
succeed in establishing an image of urban life, but it was never
clear whether, in the fighters' minds, this was a good image or a bad
image. But no matter what the head comrades said, the fighters might
really have thought that Kathmandu was full of well-lit wide roads
and glittering skyscrapers, and that longing look towards a city
became an enduring problem for the insurgency, whenever the twinkling
dots of city lights were passed by on a patrol close to a city, and
the fighters looked out to them longingly, longing for at least a
taste of what it was like over there, in a big city life that
beckoned...

With
the regular journalists came a reporter-without-borders who wanted to
cover not so much the training and the education sessions but the
People's Army “in action, in combat” as he put it. And the casual
way in which Comrades
Sunray and Codebreaker Alpha agreed to this request made Comrade Dawn
rage: “We have become too comfortable that combat between us and
the police is inevitable. Too complacent about lives being lost! As
committed as I am to this movement, I never think that we should be
so casual about Nepali people getting injured or killed!” Even
though Comrades Sunray and
Codebreaker Alpha tried to explain to her that they would use the
material of the reporter-without-borders “strategically” and “in
the long-run,” Comrade Dawn was thoroughly disapproving and came
close to insinuating that they would one day reduce themselves to
staging fake battles for the sake of journalists. Though
reporters-without-borders was, in a sense, the kind of “organization”
that would be an integral component of the utopia that she imagined,
she did not want the movement to go down this road in which the
fallen would be totally ignored. Thus, on her insistence, a
handwritten note was sent to the reporter-without-borders claiming
that the Maoist leadership just did not know whether
or not a gun battle would actually occur: “The Maoist
movement is highly sensitive to the day-to-day developments in the
People's War and cannot say for certain that there will be a future
situation where a gun-battle will be fought by the People's Army
against any outside forces.” Despite this disappointing turn of
events, the reporter-without-borders came, dressed in khaki and a
safari hat, this foreigner who, that very afternoon, had half-eaten a
good lunch at a good Thamel hotel, came with the still-preserved
childhood habit of walking into a forest in the wilderness of remote
Nepal as he would walk into a grove in a small Western town, without
regard for paths or proper navigation, and still never get lost or
ever feel uncomfortable or indeed look out of place. Then a Tharu
Maoist could not help but feel rising in her the deeply engrained
Nepali hospitality towards all foreigners, who, with Visit Nepal '98
stickers on their laptops, sat down to witness that Tharu Maoist
perform a traditional dance, to their utter delight and firm belief
that they were witness to a “beyond borders” event, given the
almost universal love and almost spiritual oneness projected in that
moment. It was beautiful, and it was something the UN worker in his
small cubicle would never get to see, never see precisely because of
his workplace alienation that the Maoists wanted to address, but
which the UN strongly defended as necessary. And that Tharu Maoist
dancer danced well into the night and nobody wanted to sleep, that
gaggle of borderless foreigners much too excited by this visit to
these violent parts of Nepal. A goat was carried in and dramatically
beheaded right in front of them, a goat to be cooked for a borderless
feast, with hot goat-blood squirting all over the place, painting the
ground and the leaves in a red color that glistened with the light of
the fire that was busily burning away. And there and then, Comrade
Dawn took all of this in: the twitching dead goat, the blood-red
hands of the fighters tending to its insides, the blushing
foreigners, that authentic Tharu dance...and it was so overwhelming
to her, that gap between what she used to see and what she saw now,
all these things that today consumed her world, her mind, her
work-day, the Great Red Project underway, the gun-battles in the
minds of these foreigners looking for a thrill—she closed her eyes
because things were approaching an end-point for her: the project and
the pain were ending. And she saw these things now, she simply saw
these things: a shred of a policeman's uniform stuck on a bramble, a
map of her life, and a far more generalized meta-map of where she was
right now, and what she was doing right here, and she opened her
eyes...and it was gone...she didn't see anymore, she thought...she
was...she was lost...

A
shred of a policeman's uniform stuck on a bramble, and everybody saw
it, grew alert that the police were close by, and guns were raised
and aimed at the bushes, beyond which a rustling could be heard, the
sounds of someone attempting to negotiate wild terrain, to come to
terms with terrain which had been trained for, with lessons crowding
the mind, strings of theories that attempted to explain these chaotic
twigs and leaves going over their heads, and the policeman zoned out
with far-off-looking gaze despite the presence of powerful members of
the force, zoned out to a village home far far away where were
waiting a wife and kids, waiting by the maobadi batti he had
brought home on one occasion, as outside spread the opaque blackness
of night, the moment ripe for political hostility, the rage of the
fighters in the stifling humidity of the night very hard to contain.
And ignoring their fearful prayers a loud gunshot ripped through the
night, and the policeman was brought back to attention, to the
classroom where lessons in guerrilla warfare had been taught, to the
powerful policemen staring at him, at how zoned out he was, how far
gone. Or perhaps it was something else in its entirety, as his limbs
weakened and blood seemed to flow endlessly from a wound, and he
stumbled to the ground, more shots ringing out all around them, then
to be even less alert and more zoned out than ever before, lying face
down in the jungle mud when his heart, in truth, was far off in the
distant village where they were waiting for him to return. But he
couldn't even stand up now; his blood had all poured out from his
wound. “STOP,” had screamed the teacher-police, “STOP zoning
out, STOP daydreaming,” but that was how village days, not
even that long ago, had been spent, so that it was difficult for him
to stop these things, even as a pain was coming on now, a pain which
he had never felt before, an all-too-intense pain which finally did
pull him away from zoning out and daydreaming. But he was helpless;
what he had loved was torn, a shred dangling from a bramble, and
everybody else had fled. The sheer size of the People's Army had
overwhelmed everyone else; he alone couldn't move from the floor, nor
move in the classroom where he sat frozen most of the time, when came
another “STOP” shout, another shot, and it was done now, he was
gone, and never had he thought more of his family and village before
that moment at Raniban, before his eyes closed—merely two hours ago
he had been sleeping and dreaming of them in the barracks, and now he
was gone...

And
in the immediate aftermath of the Raniban ambush, Comrade Dawn began
to inquire about ways of leaving the Maoist insurgency. At first she
was hopeless, for she realized there was no way out of the jungle:
“How can I go back to Kathmandu when all I have is this Maoist
uniform I wear?” The insurgency had begun to seem to her, trapping
as it did its subjects in the jungle, authoritarian in nature, not
yet in the sense of actually having an authoritarian leader
insisting that she stay in the jungle, but definitely having opened
up the space for such a leader to emerge, given the way of life they
had chosen, their inability to escape from it. So she took a walk in
thought, in deep thought, about these things, about structures and
systems and agents, and her walk became long and non-linear, yet it
was so very fruitful for her to think and problematize the general
operation of systems, specifically ones which were more territorially
confined than chaotic and randomly expressive in vast and accessible
empty space. And so she walked, and it was never clear whether she
had actually arrived at the flatlands of Thimi in Kathmandu Valley or
whether she had envisioned her arrival in her madness, in her brain
now with a rusty “Disturbed” sign hanging at its entrance gate,
its borders lined by intensely bright Deepawali
decorations hanging from unpruned synapses that had begun to encroach
a vacant ventricle, with loudly buzzing bush insects wildly flying in
circles, multicolored but about to burn out to black, also causing a
vague but persistent ringing in her ears that she hadn't heard until
after the deafening sounds of bullets and bombs faded away. She
arrived fully dressed in Maoist uniform, and yet, perhaps it was good
fortune and nothing else, or simply a vision, nobody
made a scene, nobody went looking for the police, and she in her now
free, non-linear mind and life looked around, at a street-dog going
through a garbage bin, a political taxicab going by, blaring its
messages about a strike or some such event the next day, a
well-dressed newlywed smoking a cigarette, and then lightning far in
the flatlands, raindrop rounder than coin, white-noise still
scattered in the distance, clothes heavy on the clothesline, plans
heavy in the pipeline as heavy women waited under the closest roofs
to dry, looking at the sky...

The author hasn't added any updates, yet.