by Cam Simpson
A domestic industry sprang up in Nepal to feed the boom, and existing businesses retooled to capture some of these benefits. By the early 2000s, the Nepalese government had licensed more than four hundred locally owned agencies to recruit workers and send them overseas. New recruitment agencies sprang up everywhere, in historic courtyards and on high floors of new office towers. Most were small storefront offices. They gave themselves names crafted in English to impress their counterparts in demand-side countries, and to woo the farmers they recruited from the hills, names such as “Bright Star Human Resources,” “Divine Insight Overseas,” and “Moon Light Consultant.” The English- and Nepali-language brochures published by the agencies were packed with superlatives and malapropisms. “We humbly welcome to those clients looking for a reliable, smootheness [sic] and punctuality, recruiting agents in Nepal,” read a Moon Light brochure covering forty-two glossy pages. “Our motto is ‘Right workers for the right job’ so that all of our clients are happy with us.”10 The licensed brokers, in turn, worked through unregistered subagents in towns and villages in almost every district across the country, creating a networked army of thousands of recruiters that reached into some of the world’s most remote corners, including the hills of Gorkha.11 The government left the trade almost completely in the hands of the agencies.
International airlines, such as Qatar Airways and Gulf Air, filled the skies above Kathmandu’s tiny Tribhuvan International Airport with jetliners ferrying farm boys to Qatar and Bahrain, or on to nearby Middle Eastern states after connections in the hubs of Doha and Manama.12 To squeeze more workers onto every flight, Gulf Air used a special fleet of wide-body, twin-engine Boeing 767s configured with economy-only seating.13 All 257 seats often were filled with young men who had barely ever ridden on paved roads much less in a sealed tube hurtling down a runway, and then up and above the mountains and out toward an unimaginable new existence. During takeoff, they heaved their bodies against their seatbelts, twisting and stretching from behind their restraints to try to peer out the windows.14
Nepalese travel agents, once reliant on hippies, backpackers, and tourists from wealthy countries coming to Nepal for trekking, started working between the manpower companies and the airlines for commissions on booking the thousands of seats filled with farmers each week. Newspapers that previously had consisted of just a few thin sheets chronicling government pronouncements and the royal family’s birthdays were suddenly brimming with advertising, as labor brokers were required by law to publish a public notice of overseas job listings.
If Nepal led the supply side of this new wave of globalization across the Eastern Hemisphere, Gorkha led the way within Nepal. Like Jeet’s father, the hardiest of Gorkha’s menfolk had, for two centuries, swapped its green valleys and tranquil way of life for a chance to make their names and fortunes overseas with the Gurkha Brigades. Now a much wider swath of Gorkha’s men made the same journey, only this time looking for construction or cleaning work rather than war and valor. Soon their numbers would reach into the millions.
Gorkha’s warrior past made the idea of crossing seas and borders strangely palatable among a people who were otherwise completely disconnected from the outside world, subsistence farmers living in homes without telephones, electricity, or even toilets. Not only were those who went abroad as Gurkhas respected, but people saw how the money they sent home could benefit the lives of their families in ways no one else could access, allowing them to buy extra farmland or invest in businesses or, in rare cases, even send their children to schools where there were ample supplies of paper and pencils. The two-century history of the Gurkha Brigades made it easier for the region to transition from an exporter of a small band of global warriors to one that exported a much bigger class of global workers.15
Ownership of farmland in places such as the horseshoe ridge also aided the flow. Overseas workers had to pay massive fees to labor brokers in order to buy their jobs, fees that often amounted to several multiples of the average annual earnings in Nepal. The country’s poorest couldn’t afford this, but farmers who owned land were able to borrow money against the acreage they used to feed their families and use the cash loans to pay the brokerage fees.16 The promise: after two or three years in an overseas job, a worker could earn enough to pay back the loans and all the interest, plus create a small cushion for his family’s future.
More than a year before Jeet and Kamala eloped, Jeet had tried to venture onto this path himself. On January 26, 2001, when he was nineteen, he got a passport from the district government office with the assistance of a local manpower agent connected to labor brokers in Kathmandu. Jeet went with a cousin from the village to the nearby agency in Gorkha city, the administrative capital of the district. The agent hung on to Jeet’s passport, as the manpower brokers almost always do, to facilitate registration with the government or the issuance of visas from foreign embassies. Yet more than three years passed without Jeet’s hearing anything, and it seemed such a remote possibility that he barely mentioned it to Kamala after they married. That changed suddenly in June 2004.
Jeet’s cousin informed him that their names had been put forward to a broker in Kathmandu, Moon Light Consultant, for jobs at a luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan. Although the broker had selected only Jeet, his cousin encouraged him to go alone, as such a chance seemed so rare. The brokerage fee would be about a thousand dollars, nearly four times the average annual income in Nepal, and the job would pay in the range of two hundred to five hundred dollars per month.17 Jeet estimated that he would be gone for only two or three years, and he informed Kamala of his plans. She and Kritika, now about sixteen months old, would be well cared for by his family, and the money he sent home could help them send their daughter to a school beyond the horseshoe ridge, and beyond the hills of Gorkha. He also told Kamala something she didn’t know: the family had an outstanding loan on some of its land, and an overseas job would allow them to pay it off quickly.
Kamala didn’t want him to go, and she started scratching out some calculations. If they lived frugally and their harvests were strong, the Gurkha pension would allow them to pay back the existing loan in a little more than a year and begin saving thereafter. But Jeet was adamant that he wanted to start earning his own money for his new family, a sentiment he related not just to Kamala, but also to other family members. He convinced Kamala of the soundness of his plan little by little, which was the same way he had softened her heart after their marriage. “Think of our daughter’s future,” he said to her, repeating this like a mantra in each discussion. It was the refrain Kamala could not answer. After waiting for more than three years, they could not let such an opportunity pass by.
On June 9, 2004, Nepal’s Department of Labour and Employment Promotion gave preliminary approval for Jeet and thirty-one other Nepalese men to go to work at Le Royal Hotel, a new thirty-one-story tower clad in white stone and rising above the Jordanian capital, completed in 2003 at a cost of $350 million.18 Reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, the hotel’s main tower rose higher into the Amman sky than virtually any other building. A Jordanian labor broker, Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply, facilitated the jobs on its end at the five-star hotel. On June 13, the Nepalese recruiting partner, Kathmandu-based Moon Light, published the required notice in Nepal’s Kantipur Daily, listing twenty-seven different positions. These included slots for a generator mechanic, kitchen helpers, a “salad man,” and “room boys.”19
One day in mid-June, Jeet rose to leave with the sunrise. Kamala had helped pack his rucksack, which contained two extra changes of clothing, including his button-down charcoal-gray shirt, an extra pair of sandals, a bar of soap, and his toothbrush. He embraced Kamala and his daughter inside the second-story bedroom where the couple had married by candlelight and where Kritika had been conceived and born. Crying when someone is embarking on a journey is considered bad luck in Nepal, so Kamala held back her tears, sinking just a little deeper into Jeet’s chest as they embraced, inhaling the
sweet jasmine. “Take care of our daughter and my mother. Take care of yourself. I’ll be back in a couple of years. There’s no need to worry,” he told her.
It seemed as if every villager had gathered outside the farmhouse to bid farewell to their favorite son. Jeet stood before his eldest brother and bowed as his brother slipped a garland of pink hibiscus flowers over Jeet’s neck and offered a simple Nepalese blessing. Like Kamala, no one at the gathering cried. They were stirred with the hope and sadness of a traveler’s good-bye.
Kamala watched Jeet walk past the family’s store of firewood, then past the single red bird-of-paradise planted at the edge of their property, down to the vegetable patch just below their house, and onto the trail descending into the horseshoe valley. She cried silently that night so as not to frighten Kritika, who slept with her on the platform bed in their room. But Kamala could barely sleep, and when she could, did so fitfully. In a dream, she stood before the bird-of-paradise at the head of the footpath. She looked below and saw Jeet rising back up the mountainside, smiling warmly with his eyes, returning to her.
3
August 2004
Gorkha District, Nepal
Rumpled and exhausted, Kamala fell onto the platform bed and wrapped herself around her eighteen-month-old daughter. Sowing rice consumed everyone’s days. The monsoons were nearing their peak, so the terraces were soaked and boggy, the mud grabbing at Kamala’s every step and leaving her limbs heavier than usual by the time nightfall came. Jeet may have been gone, but the burden of his work remained, along with Kamala’s own responsibilities—at home, in the fields, and in motherhood.
Word reached the village that Jeet had flown to Jordan on July 3, but no one heard anything else, as the family had expected. Forty-eight days had passed since he landed in Amman to work at the five-star hotel, and months more might pass before a letter made its way from overseas to the village on the ledge, if one came at all. Phone calls were no easier. Just reaching a telephone required a two-hour walk out of the horseshoe and over the near hills to the edge of the village Taksar. There the Kunwar family ran a sort of one-room convenience store on the ground floor of their home by the side of a narrow road choked with buses spinning up dust en route to Kathmandu. The phone sat atop a waist-high display case stocked with Chinese flip-flops and Indian sweets. The Kunwars charged a few rupees per minute to make or receive a call. Phone messages could find their way to the horseshoe if and when someone stopped by the shop on their way to the ridge.
In the two and a half years since her marriage to Jeet, Kamala had come to work seamlessly with her mother-in-law in the daily running of the farmhouse. Kamala rose at about five thirty to light and stoke the kitchen fire. She fetched water from the large community well at the bottom of the hill, and then swept and, by hand, sponged every floor in the house before doing the same on the porch. She worked at her mother-in-law’s side to prepare meals and clean up when they were done. The two women grew closer as they split responsibility for managing crops and lives in Jeet’s absence.
Warm and affectionate with Kritika, the old woman also gave both her granddaughter and her daughter-in-law things Kamala had never had: a pair of slippers, children’s clothes, a sari, and even red bangles for Kamala’s wrists, which only Nepalese wives were supposed to wear. The level of security Kamala felt in the farmhouse exceeded anything she had conjured when Sati pitched Jeet’s family’s virtues under the cover of grazing cattle.
On the morning of August 21, 2004, nearly ten weeks after Jeet had left home, Kamala finished her chores and went down to the large terrace just below the farmhouse, where the red earth stood wet and empty. The time had almost passed to plot the family’s last vegetable garden of the year, where spinach, pumpkins, and tomatoes would take root and rise before the mists of winter climbed up around the ledge. Kamala brought the Chinese-made radio with her and set it on the garden’s edge. Jeet’s songs had long ago replaced those of Kamala’s sisters in the fields, but now Radio Nepal offered a comforting surrogate voice in his absence.
A bulletin cut into the afternoon music: a terrorist group in Iraq had claimed credit for kidnapping twelve Nepalese men, the announcer said, before reading the full name of each victim and listing his home village. The third name was “Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar,” from “Bakrang Number Five, Gorkha.”1
Kamala stood silent—not shocked, not panicked, but curious, questioning her ears and disbelieving. Names in Nepal include each person’s ethnic group, so virtually no one’s name can be considered unique, especially in an ethnic group as big as theirs. It would be a bit like all Americans having names such as “Peter Joseph Catholic Irish.” The name read over the radio could have belonged to anyone.*
“Kidnapped . . . Jeet . . . Magar . . . Bakrang Number Five . . . Gorkha . . .”
Was that his name?
That sounded like my Jeet’s name.
That’s our village. It can’t be. Is it a mistake?
It must be another man with the same name. Is there another man with the same name in the village?
They must be wrong about the village. Did someone steal Jeet’s passport?
The terrorists, who called themselves the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, had first posted a statement on an extremist website the day before, saying that their “heroic fighters” had seized a dozen young Nepali men—the statement called them “infidels”—because they had come to Iraq to help “U.S. Crusader forces” who were “fighting Islam.” The twelve Nepalis were on their way to the American-occupied Al Asad Air Base in the restive Anbar Province about one hundred miles west of Baghdad. The posting included the name and village of each man, taken from his passport as a sort of proof of life. It promised to deliver pictures soon, “so that they will serve as a lesson to others.” The statement also included the name of a Jordanian company for which the men worked, something called “Bisharat.”2
As Kamala stood on the barren terrace, music again poured from the radio, but she didn’t hear it. After some time, she gathered herself, picked up the radio, and hastened up the slope toward the farmhouse. Others heard the same news, which spread quickly across the village, albeit in confused and panicked fragments. Neighbors and family converged on the porch of Kamala’s home and inside the main room, just beyond the farmhouse’s threshold, and as more arrived, the rising sound of worried voices spilled out into the three valleys. Someone made a fire in the kitchen. No one knew anything, but everyone was afraid.
After a while, Radio Nepal news broke in with another bulletin that silenced the room. “Jeet Bahadur Thapa Magar,” the announcer said, followed by the government’s formal name for the horseshoe ridge that was his home. Someone screamed, and Jeet’s mother threw herself onto the hardened earth floor. Kamala froze in place. The assemblage of neighbors and family members melted into panic and grief.
Before the United States launched the Iraq War in 2003, Nepal’s government had declined an invitation to join what the administration of President George W. Bush had dubbed the “Coalition of the Willing.” Some British Gurkhas were posted in Iraq through their service in the United Kingdom’s armed forces, but even in the Nepalese capital, where electricity and television and printing presses had at least some presence among the elite, news of the American war did not play a significant role in daily life. Less than one-half of 1 percent of all Nepalis even used the Internet in 2004.3 For eighteen-year-old farm wives on the horseshoe ridge, the war was almost completely unknown if not unknowable, but Kamala did understand that Jordan and Iraq were two different countries.
Jeet’s eldest brother, Ganga, could not comprehend how Jeet had ended up in an American war zone, let alone in the hands of a terrorist group blaming him for serving the American occupation. Nor could he conceive what benefit anyone might obtain by kidnapping Jeet and eleven others hailing from one of the poorest and most powerless nations on earth. Surely, Jeet and the others would be freed, everyone told Kamala as they tried to comfort her. Kamala herself clung to the hope
it was all a case of mistaken identity.
Within a day, a newspaper made its way from the city by bus, then after hours by foot across the hills to the village. The cover displayed a photograph the kidnappers had posted on the Internet of the twelve Nepali men, aged eighteen to twenty-seven, assembled before a large black banner emblazoned with white Arabic characters as if gathered for some kind of macabre class photo. One hostage sat on the floor at the center of the picture, an American flag draped under his chin like a bib. He did not look into the camera, but instead stared down into the field of red-and-white stripes, the others assembled around him. Jeet stood on the far right, wearing the charcoal-gray shirt Kamala had helped him pack, his sleeves rolled up above the elbow, the darkness of the shirt accentuating his wan face and the weight of worry and sleep deprivation in his eyes. Inside their farmhouse, Kamala saw him in the photo and sank into despair.
The day after the radio bulletin, Jeet’s brother Ganga trekked down from the ridge before sunrise and caught a microbus for the city of Gorkha, the district’s administrative capital, desperate to find someone who could tell him something, anything. Along the way, he entertained fevered fantasies of borrowing money and bribing a Nepalese government official to send a message to the kidnappers on the family’s behalf. Many Nepalis understood they could get something done in their country only through the grease of a bribe. Ganga planned to speak with everyone he could find, even local journalists, hoping to discover that plans were afoot to negotiate for the men’s release, or that he could rouse someone to action.
