It is strange, I thought, how a point of commonality could be forged so
quickly between this 80-year-old woman in Burma and myself, based on our shared heritage.
Many of the people that I met during my travels in the country had a unique openness towards the world; while distrust tends to wrap many modern societies like shrink-wrap, in Myanmar many still exude an immediate intimacy. This openness worried me—I feared I might inadvertently do or say something that could put the people I met in harm’s way. But I need not have worried. The Gorkhali community has nothing to hide in Burma. “We have excellent relationships with both the state and the Kachin rebels,” I was told several times with great conviction.
In the bamboo hut of the old woman, we moved to the issue of religion, always a contentious one in Burma's Gorkhali community, as they refer to themselves. The old lady was a Buddhist, unlike her son and daughter-in-law, who followed the Bhakti movement through the Hare Krishna path. She had a Buddhist shrine midway up her wall, like her Burman neighbours. “We have no quarrels here,” she said. “I follow Buddha, and they follow Krishna.” Unlike in the larger community, this
family seemed to have made peace with religious freedom and the different choices of family members.
Immediately afterwards, we went to the gompa. Dorje Lama, the chairman, welcomed me warmly. An election to choose members of the committee was in full swing. Most of the people were Tamang. We sat down at a bench at the back, and I admired for a few moments the civil
ways in which the event was taking place. Ostensibly it was an election, but it was clear the candidates had been pre-selected and nominated. The men sat on one side, the women on the other. They all watched as the man on the dais read out the names of the elected male candidates.
“We were planning to have a celebration, but it wasn’t appropriate with the Kachin rebels resuming the fighting,” a man named Nima Lama told me.
About 80 or 90 Gorkhalis had been recruited by the Burmese government forces to fight the Kachins, he noted. I had already come to hear about this forcible recruitment by the military, but Mr Lama seemed to think that this was an issue of patriotic duty. “The Gorkhalis should fight the
rebels, too,” he said passionately. “It’s their duty. I hate the Maoists and what they did to Nepal.”
All the Gorkhalis I meet talk about the bagi, or Tigers, their nickname for the rebels in Myanmar,
with the same neutral tone that many urban Kathmandu people have used to talk about the Maoists. There appeared, at least on the surface, to be no approval or point of commonality with the rebels.
Mr Lama told me he had been back to Nepal a number of times. “What did you think?” I asked him, curious. He said it was a waste of time. “Hartal [civil disobedience], chakka [jackfruit] jams and strikes. I was stuck in a house all day and didn’t get to see anything,” he said.
This was a familiar story. The Gorkhalis in Burma who had gone to visit their relatives in Nepal uniformly seemed to have experienced it as a series of unbroken strikes that left them stranded in concrete suburban homes. It was time and money wasted, they said. Mr Lama went on about the Maoists for a while. Then he asked me what I thought about all of that.
“Yes,” I said. “But now in Nepal the war is over and now we are left with all these orphans. Later you look back after killing all your people and you think: What was that all for? Why did we kill our own people? Who will take care of these children now?”
This made him sombre. “Besides,” I added quickly, “one of Buddha’s edicts is not to kill.”
Later this week, I will learn that the Kachin too are seizing Gorkhalis to fight in their army. A Gorkhali woman told me that her 17-year-old nephew, travelling to the Chinese border to trade
motorcycle parts, was seized by the Kachin rebels. “They’ve taken him to be part of the Kachin Independence Army. His mother went up and begged them to release him, but they won’t let him go,” she said, before adding, “‘I’ve heard the Kachins have their own Gurkha battalion.”
I wonder at this strange game, in which both the state and the rebels seize the Gorkhalis who end up fighting their own people on opposite sides of other people’s wars. Indeed, being tagged as “brave”
has long been one of the Gorkhalis' biggest curses—and perhaps also a significant blessing. Both sides, it appears, want Gorkhalis as allies, and none see them as enemies. That is why the villages are empty, as the young men and women flee the conflict.
Another man sitting in the hall recounted a historical tit-bit. A relative of his from Burma was one of the police officers who went back to Nepal to lead the coup against the Rana regime that established King Tribhuvan on the throne. I turned on my video camera and begged him to repeat this story.