Now just 25, the head constable from Rolpa´s Gajur village has spent more than six years of his life as a paraplegic, wandering through cold, echoing hospital corridors on a wheel-chair, inhaling air reeking of disinfectants. [break]
It took Thapa as many years to accept that the lower half of his body would remain paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Thapa´s active stint as a cop was brief, and he remains a rustic youth from Rolpa with a vocabulary and accent that some could find funny. He joined the police force in 2002, a year after getting married to Urmila and consequently needing a job.
“There were few opportunities back in the village. Joining the police was one of them,” Thapa said at the Nepal Police Hospital in Maharajgunj, which has become his second home, the other being a rented room close to the hospital. In the room that doubles as a kitchen live Urmila and the couple´s six-year-old son Bishal.
Thapa no longer considers Gajur his home. Given his paralysis, he has given up on any prospect of breathing the familiar air back in the village.
“I could take a bus up to Libang. But I would need to be carried from that point to my village,” he said.
Thapa was among 13 policemen who were attacked by the then rebel Maoists in Surkhet on November 10, 2003. The 13 were walking from the District Police Office to Birendranagar Multiple Campus to secure the campus premises during pre-SLC tests. That was when bullets rained on them.
Head Constable Nara Bahadur Budha and a constable died in the attack. Thapa, then a constable himself, received two gunshots that went through his spinal cord, instantly severing control over the lower half of the body. One bullet is still lodged precariously inside his body.
There are no miracles
Since the attack that knocked him unconscious for 30 minutes, Thapa has received treatment at Bheri Zonal Hospital in Nepalgunj and at Bir Hospital and Nepal Police Hospital in Kathmandu.
Having been unable to make it beyond fifth grade due to poverty, he wrongly believed until recently that medicine and physiotherapy would cure the paralysis. By now, it has dawned on him that he was expecting a miracle.
“I now understand that I will remain a paraplegic for the rest of my life,” he said. “But I am not alone. There are six other policemen in this hospital in comparable physical condition and they give me company.”
Thapa was promoted to head constable after the attack. The promotion and the employment of his wife by Nepal Police as a constable have been the only rewards he got for exchanging a life of sound health for one confined to a wheel-chair.
Many of his batch-mates who survived the war unscathed have now become sub-inspectors, and some have served as United Nations peacekeepers abroad.
Undemanding
Thapa is among many cops who were left handicapped by the conflict, but are yet to receive any kind of compensation from the state. But he demands little.
“I only want credible assurance that my son´s education will be taken care of,” he said, disclosing a deep-rooted fear that the bullet lodged in his body might kill him before Bishal grows up.
Bishal is a second grader at the Police School at Samakhushi. His education costs his father Rs 1,100 every month and the rented room at Maharajgunj costs the couple Rs 2,200 per month.
Families of police personnel who were killed during the conflict were given Rs 750,000 each in compensation. But those injured are entitled to a maximum of Rs 200,000, depending on the severity of injury. But, like Thapa, many injured cops remain deprived of any compensation.
With even compensation yet to come his way, Thapa fears that the Nepal Police may also not feed him, treat him and pay his salary indefinitely. “It has been nearly seven years. I can no longer function as a cop,” he said. “How long can they possibly keep me?”
His fear isn´t entirely unfounded. The Police Department has already gotten used to addressing him by a number rather than by his name.
Barring his wife and son who visit him at the hospital every day, there are few who come enquiring about the youth who loved to play volleyball in Gajur village, Rolpa until a decade ago and is now identified at Nepal Police Hospital as the patient in bed No. 10 in the Orthopedic Ward.
bikash@myrepublica.com
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