BY SHRUTI MANIAN
Ira Regmi and her father had just ordered tea at a bhatti and taken their seats when sudden screams rang through the bustling market. “They’re coming, they’re coming,” shouted people in the street outside. Shoppers and passers-by crowded into the tiny stalls to take refuge from the commotion in the street.
Ira found herself shoved into the largest bhatti — a local shop ubiquitous all over Nepal serving tea, traditional food and beer- with her father and twenty other people. As she looked out, she saw a man being dragged to the middle of the market courtyard by three other men who were attacking the man for teaching Sanskrit- the ancient Hindu language, primarily associated with religious scripture- at a local school.
Ira was 9 years old and had accompanied her father on a business trip to Surkhet in Western Nepal. This was in March 2001 and the Nepali civil war was at its most brutal. A national emergency was declared In November that year. Maoist rebels had taken over the entire country except for the Kathmandu valley which was protected by the surrounding mountains. For the Maoists, Sanskrit and those who taught it had come to symbolise all the reasons the monarchy had to be overthrown.
As a child, Ira was unable to differentiate between the army and the Maoists because they both wore camouflage uniforms. “As I grew up I noticed that the army is more prim and proper and the Maoists looked like they were wearing hand me down army clothes,” said Ira.
In the confines of the bhatti, Ira’s father whispered to her that the men attacking the teacher were Maoists. The Maoist insurgency was predicated on both caste and class. The higher caste Brahmins and other Hindu groups formed 35 percent of the population but dominated the rest of the country socially, politically and economically. Sanskrit was viewed as one of the many outdated and casteist means of upholding Brahmin supremacy in Nepal. It was a symbol of an oppressive system that the Maoists believed had to be obliterated.
As they hauled the teacher to the middle of the courtyard, the Maoists taunted him, asking if he would ever dare to teach Sanskrit again. Even though they all carried guns, the Maoists took out khukhuris- a traditional Nepali knife and began to slash the Sanskrit teacher’s arms. The teacher begged for his life, crying that he would never teach Sanskrit again. But the Maoists continued stabbing him. The violence meted out to him was a warning to all those who watched hidden behind the shutters.
When the slashing grew even more gruesome as the men began to slash the teacher’s face, Ira’s father pushed her behind him and covered her eyes. Even though she could no longer see what was going on, Ira could still hear everything, including the round of bullets the Maoists fired — but only after they had killed the teacher. “The bullets were fired for show because it was always intended as a complete spectacle,” said Ira.
Surkhet had become a Maoist stronghold and the rebels did not even bother to cover their faces with masks as they committed murder in a public market in broad daylight. Ira kept asking her father why no one called the police. The police were impotent in Surkhet, he explained. Even the army did not have the resources to fight the Maoists outside the Kathmandu valley.
After the attack, Ira’s father went to the dead school teacher’s house to offer his family condolences and any assistance that was within his power. Ira believes that her father was deeply affected by the lynching because he worried about how it would affect his young and sheltered daughter.
But Ira says now that it was an experience that forced her to confront how cosseted her relatively privileged life in the Kathmandu valley was — a realisation that everyone in the valley came to within the year. In the months after that lynching, such murders occurred with increasing frequency. “The deaths became so commonplace. We used to count numbers. Today this many. Tomorrow this many. Army and rebels. Army and rebels. That was all our news,” said Ira.
Even though the same degree of violence had not quite permeated Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur- the three cities in the valley, the Maoists wielded unbridled power in most of Nepal. At the bhatti, Ira remembers seeing sacks of grain stacked against the wall. The woman running the bhatti told Ira’s father that they belonged to the Maoists who stored grains, weapons and money with locals who were too afraid to protest.
Even as these were morbid thoughts for a 9 year old, Ira grew accustomed to the violence like most Nepalis. “We turn events like this into a matter of a timeline. During the Maoist period, after the Maoist period. Before the curfew, after the curfew.” said Ira.
And sure enough, when Ira and her father went back to the same bhatti the next day, after the murder, life had gone back to exactly how it was before the murder. “I felt no visible difference,” said Ira.
The teacher’s body had been cleared away and all the blood on the street had been scrubbed. Ira was young enough that some of her memories of the incident do not make complete sense even to her. She no longer knows if the wet patch she saw on the ground later was a figment of her imagination or a remnant of the violence that the scrubbing could not erase.
“I always wondered how do you clean a place after someone has been killed there?” Ira said. “Maybe blood leaves some kind of patch you can’t completely get rid of.”