by Cam Simpson
Amid the rusted-out cars, motorcycle rickshaws (called tuk tuks), and trucks belching black fumes across Kathmandu, a tiny two-seater no bigger than a clown car in an American parade rolled silently across a dirt road not far from the diplomatic quarter in Kathmandu and into its parking spot behind an iron gate in front of a three-story redbrick house. The car, imported from India, might have been Nepal’s first all-electric vehicle, if for no other reason than that electricity service in Kathmandu sometimes functioned only a few hours a day. The driver, Ganesh Gurung, a U.S.-educated sociologist raised in the mountain air near Gorkha, put up with the disruptions to make a small and silent stand against the increasingly dangerous pollution choking his city. The three-story brick house on the dirt road served as the headquarters of the Nepal Institute of Development Studies, a small Nepalese think tank he had established in 1998 to conduct research into the economic development policies and needs of his country.
Gurung had devoted himself to the study of foreign labor migration since long before Nepal’s government saw how critical it had become to the nation’s economy and how easily Nepalis were trapped and abused inside the unregulated global trade. He knew more about the system than anyone else, and had written a paper on it ahead of a 2003 conference of the United Nations’ International Labour Organization focused on human rights abuses against migrants from Asia. We had spoken extensively by phone previously, and he had agreed to help me figure out what had happened to the twelve should I ever come to Nepal. Over a cup of tea and a handshake across his desk, he allowed me to hire a fixer and a young sociologist from his staff, and helped me find a driver. He also warned me how difficult it would be to retrace the journeys of the twelve men, given the obvious hurdles.
For starters, the government report showed that except for the three men whose paperwork had been lost, and who were from the same village in Nepal’s low-lying plains, the victims of the massacre had come from towns and villages scattered across the country, all separately drawn into the same nationwide recruitment pool through different channels. It was natural to assume that they were somehow all connected by more than their fates, yet all but three had been strangers to one another before they went to Jordan, and perhaps right up until they were kidnapped and killed together in the ditch across the border in Iraq.
Logistically speaking, this meant that even with “home addresses” for their families, it would likely take weeks to reach them all. They were scattered across a nation with few phones and fewer roads, a nation spanning more than fifty-six thousand square miles and rising across some of the most inhospitable, albeit breathtaking, terrain in the world, a nation in the throes of civil war. It could take hours or even days of walking before reaching villages in places such as Gorkha. And after the murders of their sons, husbands, and brothers, some of the families had moved, which meant that even the most basic information about them in the report could be useless.
Gurung knew of a charity that had raised a small amount of money for the families, and its leaders might know how to reach the survivors. And one of the nation’s richest businessmen, who ran a conglomerate that owned the famous Gorkha Brewery, had offered surviving family members jobs in his offices and factories. His company also might help us reach the families. After a few phone calls, we had a rough idea about how to locate some who were now living in and around Kathmandu, which was the best place to start.
Thousands of Nepalis packed the narrow alleyways and streets in the ancient city of Patan, dancing in a procession both leading and trailing a towering effigy of the Buddhist god of rain. Men pulled long ropes to raise the effigy on a pole hewn from the trunk of an old-growth tree felled in the surrounding mountain forests. It tottered as the men wheeled it on a chariot through the streets. Thousands of tiny flames, held in brass candles burning clarified butter, danced in the breeze at outdoor temples and altars around every corner, with Patan’s red chariot festival in full swing. Amid the chaos of the festival, we found the single-room ground-floor apartment that Bishnu Maya Thapa shared with her last living son.
Her firstborn son, Bishnu Hari, had left for Jordan less than a year earlier, age eighteen. He stood barely five feet tall, and his face sported fuzz that wouldn’t trouble the dullest razor. He always wore blue jeans and sandals, and if we judge by the blurred images of a young man in long sleeves and jeans captured in the four-minute video, the terrorists executed him fifth.
His mother had soft light-brown eyes and waist-length hair that she wrapped in a bun when she went out in public. As she spoke, she held her face between her two hands, which were thick, like those of a retired boxer. She looked well beyond her four and a half decades, especially around her eyes. She’d earned much of her living smashing stones with a hammer at a roadside quarry in their hometown northwest of Kathmandu. Stone breaking was an old and steady way to survive in Nepal, if not a lucrative one.
In the early years of her marriage, a common saying throughout Nepal and India formed the basis for a kind of mantra in her prayers: “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.”2 Sons are equated with prosperity. Daughters marry and move in with the families of their husbands, so it is believed that only a son can bring security by bringing a wife and children home to help raise food and shoulder some of life’s burdens, or even to earn a salary should he leave home.
Before Bishnu Hari, his mother had given birth to three daughters. So grateful was she that her prayers for a son had been answered that she lavished love and attention on him. By the time he had graduated from the equivalent of high school, he wanted to do whatever he could to keep her from spending more of her days breaking stones into gravel.
Many from their small town, in a district ravaged by Nepal’s civil war and about a five-hour bus ride northwest of Kathmandu, had moved to the capital city to find work overseas. Bishnu Hari followed their path, aided by a former neighbor who had started earning commissions by connecting young men from his town with brokers in the capital. He worked as a dalal, a Hindi-derived word that had once been used to identify a pimp and that had, in the new age of global labor, become synonymous with “middleman” or “agent.” Dalals are vital to the overseas labor system in Nepal. They’re paid in cash, sometimes by labor brokers (who slice off a piece of the dalals’ commissions from the workers) and sometimes by the prospective overseas workers themselves. They’re not licensed by the government the way the main brokerages are.
Bishnu Hari’s dalal was named Kumar Thapa. He sported a faux-leather baseball cap and a pencil-thin mustache, and claimed that he had helped Bishnu Hari get a job working at a restaurant called the New Bamboo Cottage, a tiki hut tourist restaurant in Kathmandu where the smell of clarified butter, scorched cumin, and sweat hung heavy in the brown thatch used for the walls. In exchange for his labors, Bishnu Hari got to eat for free and sleep at night on linoleum tables that he shoved together side by side and end to end to form a sort of platform bed. When he wasn’t working, he combed newspaper ads and visited some of the city’s hundreds of labor brokers.
In June 2004, Nepal’s leading daily newspaper published a public notice–style advertisement for jobs at Le Royal Hotel in Amman. It promised more than one hundred open positions for Nepalese men, each fetching two hundred to five hundred dollars per month. A logo appeared near the bottom of the ad, a crescent moon and six stars slung low over two mountain peaks. Arching over the stars and the mountains like a rainbow were the words “Moon Light Consultant Pvt. Ltd.,” the Kathmandu broker. Its government registration number was there, too, lending an air of credibility. The Moon Light ad mentioned that a “demand letter” for the hotel jobs in Amman from its Jordanian counterpart (called Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply) was on file with the government, as required by Nepalese law. No one reading the advertisement could have known that Eyad Mansour had done nothing more than simply type some words on his letterhead and fax the paper to Nepal. The ad said that job interviews would take place at Moon Light’s office the next day
. The dalal said he had arranged for Bishnu Hari to get in, although he accompanied the nervous young man only to the Moon Light office and through the process of what passed for an interview.
Bishnu Hari would have been a standout that day. He had more schooling than most young Nepalese men, and rudimentary training in welding and wiring had given him an extra edge. Perhaps his strongest qualification: he could afford to pay for the job.
The agency called the New Bamboo Cottage about two weeks later and said that Bishnu Hari should come back with some two thousand dollars, or about eight times the average annual income in Nepal. He got word to his mother. The family borrowed all but four hundred dollars of the cash from local lenders, who charged an interest rate of 36 percent a month. He took the bus back to collect the money from his mother, and bade her good-bye the next day, telling her not to worry. “I will earn and send money home. We’ll buy land and build a small house to live in.”
Bishnu Hari flew to Amman on July 3, and his younger brother moved to Kathmandu and took Bishnu Hari’s place at the New Bamboo Cottage, encouraged by his brother’s success and eager to find his own overseas job. He was at the restaurant several weeks later when his brother called long-distance, the first time anyone had heard from him since he left.
“How are you?” Bishnu Hari asked his younger brother, but the line cut immediately, and he didn’t phone back.
In August, Bishnu Hari called again. The restaurant’s owner, a woman named Gana Magar, answered and recognized Bishnu Hari’s voice right away. “Where are you?” she asked him.
“In Jordan,” Bishnu Hari said. Then he added, “I am done for.”
Before he could explain, before his brother could come to the phone, the line went dead, Gana Magar told me. It is the last known time anyone in Nepal heard from Bishnu Hari until his anguished visage, taken from captivity in Iraq, flashed on television screens days later.
Interviews—with Bishnu Hari’s mother, with his younger brother, with the dalal with the pencil-thin mustache who had accompanied him to the labor broker, and with the restaurant owner who had employed him and who received his ominous call from Jordan—plus the advertisement in the newspaper and the paperwork gathered by the government commission all showed that the eighteen-year-old had been the victim of the kind of bait-and-switch common to the “supply side” of this newly booming slice of globalization, but far more sinister than usual in both its specifics and its consequences. More than the terms of the work had been changed—the advertisement and the paperwork filed with the government were as clear as they were fraudulent. Everyone who had dealt with Bishnu Hari throughout the entire process said the brokers spoke only of Jordan, not Iraq, and that included the dalal accompanying him throughout the interview. Bait-and-switch techniques common to the new global trade could cost people two or three years of their lives under conditions akin to peonage and coerced labor, and then years of crippling debt for their families who purchased the jobs, but these techniques were on another scale entirely. It appeared they had cost eighteen-year-old Bishnu Hari his life.
“My child is dead, my son who I brought up in the midst of hardship and difficulties, crushing rocks, carrying gravel,” his mother recounted. “I want to die myself.” She pulled out one of the only clear pictures of him she still had, a passport-size head shot barely bigger than a postage stamp. She held it gently in both her hands and raised it to her lips, then closed her eyes and kissed it. If she had known what awaited her son, she said, “I would have kept him by my side, even if I had to do backbreaking work.”
She had remained in Kathmandu to make sure that her last living son stayed in school and did not try to pursue his own dream of working overseas. “I’ve tried to persuade her,” the young man told me, “but she says no.” At this his mother, squatting on the floor beside him, reached for her son’s leg and wrapped her arms around it, trying to hold him in place as much as embrace him, and began to cry.
Across the Kathmandu Valley and beyond, the stories and paperwork were turning out to be as similar as the heartbreak. Each man appeared to have succumbed to the bait-and-switch. Without exception, each family had to borrow money to pay small fortunes in order to buy the jobs on offer in Jordan. Even so, the sums they had paid varied, sometimes widely. Dalals were involved in every case, but some, such as the young man from Bishnu Hari’s village, acted like ushers for the Moon Light agency in Kathmandu and collected only small fees. Others inserted themselves much more aggressively into the middle, and this allowed them to control the process. These dalals set the price for the jobs exorbitantly higher, keeping bigger cuts for themselves. The farther from Kathmandu, the easier it was for dalals to be more controlling and to charge higher fees, as “locals” far from the city had no idea how the business worked, and little chance of discovering this on their own.
In the lowland plains of southeastern Nepal, the families of the three young men from the same town paid more to their local dalal than any of the other families: roughly $3,500 apiece. The jobs in Jordan, the dalal told them, would pay $700 per month. The three young men, ages twenty-one to twenty-four, were the closest of friends. The oldest worked in the local cinema as a ticket taker, and he marveled that just one month’s salary in Jordan would be more than four times what he earned all year at the movie house. His two friends, a farmer and a student, were equally dazzled.
Even though the paperwork filed by Moon Light with the Nepalese government had said the men were bound for hotel jobs in Jordan, the local dalal had told the young men and their families that they would be serving food to American soldiers at a U.S. military camp in Jordan. The families had no idea what brokers had typed onto permit applications filed with the government to get their sons and brothers out of the country. They did express concern to the dalal about the safety of the trio, given that the job involved the U.S. military. The dalal’s response was: “Don’t worry—you are working for American soldiers. The plane will take you to the camp, and in the camp, there is no danger.”
Together, the three families agreed to borrow money to pay the broker, believing that $3,500 apiece was, in the end, a good investment for the future, given the salaries. The young men boarded a night bus together in late June 2004. It rolled down a road where oxen pulled carts filled with dung and straw before passing under a canopy of mango trees and reaching Nepal’s only east–west highway en route to Kathmandu for their flight to Jordan.
Not long before they were taken from Amman and into Iraq, the three called the only phone in their village, a local pay phone maintained by a shopkeeper, and their families were summoned. The young men on the other end of the international line were panicked. The Jordanian brokers had dramatically changed the terms of the jobs the families had already paid for, and now they would have to surrender two months’ pay to Jordanian brokers as an additional fee for their jobs. They also would have to accept less than half the monthly salaries promised in Nepal. The bait-and-switch terms meant it would take at least a year for their families to pay back just the principal on each man’s loan, assuming they could put 100 percent of their salaries toward their loans and nothing else, and that didn’t include the interest. Effectively, they would have to work two years for free just to break even with the debts they had incurred to buy their jobs. In addition, the young men said, they were being taken to “an American camp” across the border in Iraq. They wanted to come home, they said.
The families responded that they needed to weigh their options. They asked the young men to phone back the next day. That night, the families decided collectively that the debts they had incurred to buy the jobs were so great that they had no choice but to ask the young men to proceed, lest they all face certain ruin. Even if they couldn’t pay back all the money borrowed to buy the jobs, they needed to pay back as much as they possibly could. Even if they had decided to reject the new terms, it wasn’t clear how they would get the men home without incurring more debt. They had no choice.
They spo
ke again the next day at the preordained time, relayed their decision, and said their good-byes. The families never heard from their sons and brothers again.
I asked the families if they knew from where in Amman the young men had telephoned them, and whether the young men had provided any way to get in touch. The brother of one of the three pulled a billfold from his back pocket and carefully plucked out a small folded piece of paper that had been stashed there for nine months. It contained three handwritten phone numbers, which he had taken down the day the young men phoned home. He had asked his brother for the numbers, in case the line went dead, as frequently happened during calls to Nepal, but he had never had cause to use them. Each number began with a Jordanian country code and an Amman exchange. Two were clearly for the same business, as they were just one digit off from each other. We made a copy of the piece of paper and then handed it back.
Five days after burning an effigy of Prakash Adhikari, his family received a letter. A computerized stamp on the envelope’s face read August 1, 2004. The letter had taken forty-four days to reach their village along the eastern edge of Nepal, not far from the border with Darjeeling, India. The same stamp indicated that it passed through a postal facility called “Amman City Center.” And the envelope’s handwritten characters were all from the English alphabet, drawn in block letters. Many had been written over or crossed out and written again by the sender’s unsure hand. Across the left side were the words from prakash adhikari, jordan.
In the letter, Prakash asked after everyone in the family and sent them his best wishes. His father suffered from diabetes, and he urged the family not to work too hard during the sowing season. In his absence, they should hire a farmhand to help make sure their father didn’t suffer, he suggested. Prakash then assured them that he was well. But, in hindsight, something clearly had been amiss. He mentioned that he had attempted to call the local dalal in the village from whom the family had bought the job, but said that the agent had not responded. Prakash did not explain his need to reach the dalal, but he did write, in a matter-of-fact way, that soon he would head into Iraq after being “in Jordan for a month without work.” He also wrote, “I have realized that life is like a flowing stream. Until yesterday, I was in Nepal. Now I am in a foreign land. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s the times, or the situation, or maybe I had no choice.”
