“Aamaa!”
Mishri Maya Rana quickly peeps from her backyard kitchen window to see who’s calling her. It’s business.
“Wait! I just made the fire, just wait a second,” she says and sprints from the kitchen and out on her porch to a small all-in-one retail store, one of the two shops in the Maoist stronghold of Theuwatar village in Gorkha, which is home to some 80 families.
It’s not just her granddaughters who call her Aamaa; it seems or maybe it’s how elderly women are greeted here in this small village which has recently been connected to the main highway by a suspension bridge. Before that, 41-year-old Rana says, “Villagers had to literally suspend oneself on the ghirling (or tuin, a cable car operated via a manual ropeway) to get to the other side…scary! People fell prey to the river. A child drowned a few years ago.”
Just two hours’ drive from Nepal’s capital to the west, the installation of the suspension bridge three years ago and electricity (last year) has surely helped Rana and her villagers. But it’s not enough. Life is still hard, and villagers have been scraping every bit to make ends meet. Adding to the stress, the recent ban to farm on the nearby hills by the community forest development has left the villagers numb. They had been promised a lot of things. Snatching their livelihood right from their mouths wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t know what to do. Before, we had rice, corn and millet, and now we have nothing. There, in our backyard, crops are already destroyed. There’s not going to be any harvest this year. I don’t know what to do,” says the grandma who raises five of her eight children (three daughters, five sons). Her youngest daughter Sushma recently got married.
Back in the capital, only the late monsoon is to blame for the drought, and there’s been little research on the ugly virus that’s been destroying corn plants worldwide, and a recent Parliament hearing debated whether Nepal’s community forest should strike a deal for carbon trading in the upcoming conference in Denmark. Halfway in the hearing, a few of the policy drafters requested to be explained as to, “What exactly does LDC mean?” Earlier this year, a newswire reported that South Asia could face the ugly threat that could wipe out corn plantations.
Back in Theuwatar, ecological challenges are already unfolding. “There’s no fish in the river these days. Only a handful of small ones, and that too only when we’re lucky,” Rana says, “And there hasn’t been sufficient rain either for the little harvest that we do. Thank God, they (community forest) didn’t prohibit us from collecting firewood and cattle fodder, or else we’d be doomed.”
The cloudy Saturday morning builds up as Rana’s youngest daughter Sushma, who’s visiting her for the weekend, attends to the cattle in the stable.
“Sprinkle some salt on the curry and make sure you don’t mess it by adding too much water. Quick! And did you attend to the poultry?”
“Long time ago,” replies the newly-wed. She just turned 16.
“Make sure you don’t mess the curry, and give water to the buffaloes too. Your father can be home anytime soon. I hope he catches some fish. He must be hungry.”
Rana, who started smoking at the age of 16, then lights up a hard cigarette and blows a long puff. Things aren’t going good for her. It’s never been smooth actually, right since her childhood. At a very early age, she lost her mother and then her father who served in the British Indian Gurkha Regiment who was never home, and she has vague memories of her own past.
“My father was a double pensioner. He lived for 109 years. I barely knew him though,” she says. Her life changed after she met her would-be husband Dhan Bahadur Rana exactly 28 years ago in a ropain jatra in the village. Rana was 13 then, and her husband 22.
“He was immensely good in chudkas (a dance and song combination akin to the Magars) and we fell for each other,” Rana says with a light blush in her cheeks. They married nine days later, and soon left for India where they settled in Samaypur in New Delhi. “He would work and I would take care of the household. Come to think about it, those days were better and more fun. No loans, and we maintained a healthy lifestyle, but now things have changed.”
The Rana couple settled down in India for 12 years after which they decided to come back to their village with their five children (three daughters and two sons) who were born during their stay in New Delhi. Back home, things hadn’t changed much, and Rana had already tasted an upmarket life in the south. “There were so many people, the temples and the zoo,” she recalls, and back here in Theuwatar, the village was home to just 25 families then.
But the Rana family settled down for good. The decision might’ve been influenced by the renewed hope and aspirations of the country post-Jana Andolan. But elsewhere, the multi-party democracy had shed off its adrenaline, and ideologies were swinging from one camp to the other. In Theuwatar’s neighborhood, however, private investments were creating short-tem job opportunities as the highway opened up to tourism. Rana’s husband decided to join the gold rush. He dared his life each single day on the ghirling to get across the river. Nearby, rumors of a cable project had become the talk of the town.
The grass is greener on the other side!
*****
The year is 2059 BS. Traffic on the highway isn’t busy as expected, and the nearby market areas have succumbed. Land has been cleared to accommodate more people and growing investments. Meanwhile in Theuwatar, Rana has given birth to three more children. All are sons, and the younger one is just one year younger than her first granddaughter from Shobha, her elder daughter who now lives with her husband in Khaireni.
In Theuwatar, the Ranas have also built a sizable house, own a stable and a small field in the backyard. Outside, a portion of the porch has become a small retail store where they sell almost everything that villagers would want to spend money on. What remains of the porch acts as a pit stop for men who want their smoke, and for village women their meeting while they fetch drinking water from nearby, and for children, their small playground and an opportunity to nag their parents for a little this or that.
Things look pretty well off for this grandmother or Aamaa, as everyone calls her. But beneath the blue eyes, a storm is brewing. Her elder son Prabhu Rana is just back from Dubai after a 22-month hiatus, but Aamaa isn’t happy at all. It’s not in the sense of a mother-son relationship though but the ripple effects of global recession which has hit this village of nowhere. Prabhu recently lost his job as businesses started downsizing their employees. He hasn’t found any job yet, and the Rana family has lost their only source of steady income as their little store hardly fetches them salt and oil. So says Aamaa who has Rs 300,000 as debts on her head, and the interests keep adding. Rs. 3 for every Rs. 100 a month.
“I don’t have a bank account. I never had one,” Rana says who already owes Rs. 63,000 as interest in the past seven months. For how long she has owed interests and the loan, she won’t tell but the loans probably came along when her elder son Prabhu left for Dubai.
“I’m totally stressed. My head aches like anything and I don’t know what to do. My son has just come back and he doesn’t have a job yet. My man has no work either, and our family is too big. And now we can’t even farm, so I just don’t know what to do. Living in a society, one has obligations to fulfill, and more importantly, we have to live; and to live, we have to eat and to eat…along comes a loan,” she adds as she tries to brave the worries within her. Her eyes lose the glimmer she had just some moments ago.
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Aamaa says as she pats her pet dog which starts to wail all of a sudden. The wails, they echo with the flowing sound of the Trishuli River. The water levels have increased overnight.
(This story was produced during a writers’ and photographers’ retreat organized by photo.circle.)
arpan@myrepublica.com
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