Tough, Hardy And Indomitable

It’s not just dried mud I was sleeping on last night. As I made my way to the makeshift toilet, my torch picked out evidence that a menagerie of beasts had been easing themselves on our campsite for quite some time. When it also picked out a trail of bones and an abandoned flip-flop I decided to switch it off.

Up at six. Nawang Dorjee, who I think may be the nicest person in the world, brings me tea and a little while later a small bowl of hot water for washing. Check the view. Yes, everything’s still there. The Himalayas, the rocky slopes, the wooded spurs, the village without roads or streets. Poinsettia, oleander, frangipani and dry-stone walls. Farmhouses, simple and solid, as beautiful as any Italian hill village. When you look more closely, though, you can see that none of them has glass in the windows, only wooden shutters to keep out the winter cold, and the living space, though picturesque, is squeezed on one level, with space below reserved for stores of grain, firewood, animal feed and the animals themselves. A number of the houses have water buffaloes in the basement, big and black, like old vintage cars.

As I clean my teeth I look up the hill. A buffalo, being milked by an old woman, her head resting against its wide grey flanks, gazes impassively back. Prayer flags move lazily on their poles (there must be a Tibetan influence here), smoke drifts from the rooftops below and a pair of young women, with long dark hair, coming slowly up the hill, stop for a moment to adjust the headbands that carry the full weight of their baskets and to give us a good looking over.

At breakfast Adrian tells me about Long Noses and Flat Noses, something I’ve heard our Sherpas talking about. Nepal, he says, has a fundamental ethnic division between the Indo-Aryan with origins in the south and the Mongolian who originates from the north. Sherpas think of themselves as Flat Noses and superior to the Long Noses, who in turn think of themselves as more urban and intellectual than the Flat Noses.

‘Traditionally, but not exclusively, it’s been the Mongolian hill men who we’ve recruited,’ Adrian explains.

‘The hill farmer lives a very hard existence, and he comes from a hierarchical society and if you superimpose military discipline and military training you’ve got the makings of a very good soldier.’

He reckons there will be 100, maybe 150 potential recruits today, many of whom will have walked as much as eight or ten hours to get here. There seem to be many more than that already, clustered in groups lower down the hillside, around the old volleyball pitch, which has been adapted for the recruiting, with gallows-like structures put up for the exercises and schoolroom desks brought out for the officials.

The whole event is organized by the local recruiting officer, the galla-wallah. He is a local man who will have been given instructions as to how many recruits are needed and scoured the villages to find likely candidates. The most that can be selected today will be 44. The galla is paid a small basic salary and a bounty for every successful recruit.

The Gurkha regiment has to walk a delicate tightrope between offending the Nepali army and provoking the Maoists, so the galla deliberately keeps the procedure informal and unmilitary. There are no weapons or uniforms in evidence. Sporting a baseball cap and a blue and red striped rugby shirt he gives an introductory talk, which, despite general squeaks, laughs and shouts from the local children, meanders on for some 25 minutes. He’s followed by the village headman and then Adrian.

Adrian’s much shorter speech, in fluent Nepali, is greeted with loud applause. He’s garlanded by the local women and then cuts a red ribbon to mark the start of proceedings.

After the young men are registered and their height measured, they have to perform a series of physical tests. The first are heaves up onto a bar (the British Army requirement is six, the Gurkhas demand 12), after which they have to show that they can expand their chests by two inches. According to Adrian, this is a rule of thumb way of anticipating possible tuberculosis problems later on. The disease is prevalent here.

The boys puff their chests out to bursting point, and those who fail the first time are allowed to take strenuous exercise and try again. One of them completes a frenetic routine of 40 or 50 push-ups before leaping up, panting like a racehorse, and rejoining the queue.

He scrapes through the two-inch test next time, but his chances of being among the final 44 are still slim and, even if he gets through, this is only the first phase of the process. Successful applicants here go for a gruelling Hill Selection later in the year and only the best of those will go through to Central Selection in Pokhara after that. Some five months from now, the 24,000 original applicants will be reduced to a lucky 230, who will then leave Nepal for induction training in Singapore or at Catterick in North Yorkshire.

‘It’s a big culture shock,’ Adrian admits, before adding, a trifle ruefully, ‘But the army’s a culture shock anyway.’

The rewards are substantial. As a serving soldier, the Gurkha gets the same pay as a British soldier, around £1000 a month. By comparison, a captain in the Royal Nepal Army is paid around £100 a month. On retirement many Gurkhas come back to Nepal and make a good living in the tourist business, buying hotels and guesthouses.

Adrian brushes off any suggestion that there might be local resentment at having these elite fighters poached by a foreign power. Adding up pensions, welfare schemes, direct expenditure, as well as the return of money earned abroad, he reckons the Gurkhas are worth £68 million a year to the Nepali economy.

Because the turnout out has been much higher than expected, with 251 applicants registered, they are only halfway through the programme by the end of the day. The galla seems pleased as he brings the results up to date. Twenty-three failed in the heaves, 40 in the sit-ups (in which one boy managed 98 in less than 2 minutes), 13 failed the eye-test and 7 were deemed too short. This leaves 168 still in the running for 44 places.

It’s been a long hot day for everyone, so we discreetly open a bottle of whisky to celebrate with Adrian and the organizers up in our dining tent.

After a while the galla comes in to join us. He looks decidedly uncomfortable and mopping his brow with a handkerchief, he talks rapidly to the others in Nepali. I can see expressions change.

Adrian translates for us. Some ‘visitors from the forest’ have approached the galla. They now want to talk to the rest of us. He nods, anticipating my question. They’re Maoists.

A delegation, including our director J-P, follows two young men who look like students, one with a colourful embroidered shoulder bag, the other carrying documents of some sort in plastic folders. They look quite harmless, as if they might be on their way to a tutorial, but the submissiveness of everyone concerned suggests they have something more than moral authority.

They lead our people out of earshot, off behind a small temple, beside which a gnarled old bo tree grows. After half an hour they’re back. J-P reports they met with four of them, all young, the same sort of age as the recruits, two of whom were polite and reasonable and two ‘a bit nasty’.

They have asked the galla, Adrian and two other Gurkha officers, to go with them to meet what they call their high command, two hours’ walk away into the forest. While we are taking all this in, three of the Maoists appear at the door of our tent. One, in a white shirt, is short and chunky and wears glasses reminiscent of Piggy in Lord of the Flies. He has a row of pens clipped in his top pocket. Another holds a radio. We mask the whisky bottle as they peer round the tent. Once they’ve gone another boy appears. He wears a baseball cap and speaks to the Sherpa Nawang, expecting him to translate. Nawang’s eyes simply grow wide and he seems transfixed, speechless with anxiety. The boy’s tone seems apologetic. Cradling a silver torch, he puts his hands together in the traditional greeting.

‘Namaste.’

At that moment the stocky accomplice appears once again. He is less charming and, having scrutinized us all one last time, he makes a remark and goes.

Nawang eventually recovers enough to translate.

‘He said he has the tape measure.’

The galla, together with all his records and the tape he used to measure the chests has gone, along with Adrian and his two fellow-officers. Though there appeared to be no physical threat, there seemed no question of their not going, nor of who they were going with. I walk outside. The sun has set and the distant peaks of the Himalaya, a moment ago blood-red and magnificent, are now cold, grey and remote. I find myself scanning the faces of the villagers. Everything seems very different from this morning. Perhaps they all hate us, stirred to anger by the Maoists, who’ve portrayed us as friends of a corrupt and oppressive government?

I realize, rather pathetically, how easily I project my own feelings onto others. If I’m happy, they must be happy. Now I’m suspicious, they must be too. Their expressions give nothing back. They get on with their work and I get on with my insecurities.

To complete a rotten end to the day, our cooks serve us goat in batter with tuna sauce.