ARTICLES
G
THE CHIEF OF ARMY STAFF’S COWS
eneral Sushil Shamsher Rana, the Chief of Army Staff and the most senior military officer in Nepal, lived in Jhamsikel behind high brick walls guarded by a company of elite soldiers from his Ranger Battalion. A white helmeted military policeman always stood on duty outside the main gate, flanked by a pair of gigantic copper vases filled with fresh flowers. At intervals along the wall, machine gun posts poked out of watch towers above the green and white buses ferrying children to and from the Gyanodaya School. The Chief of Army Staff was the most powerful man in Nepal but, as the Nepalese saying goes, eagles have many enemies. Whilst his compound was a haven of green amongst the urban chaos of Kathmandu, it was a heavily guarded idyll and the new razor wire along the top of the wall illustrated the stark realities of his power. Military tradition dictated that the Chief of Army Staff was the only army officer in Nepal allowed to maintain a herd of cows inside the ample grounds of his compound. A detachment of soldiers was responsible for looking after the ten chocolate and tan coloured bovines and making sure that churns of fresh milk were delivered to his kitchen every morning. In the monsoon the cows grew fat on the rich green grass inside the compound. In the winter the grass turned brown and the cows were let out of the compound, escorted by two soldiers lazily shouldering their M-16s, to forage for themselves along the grass verges outside the Engineering College. The disruption they caused to the city traffic as they crisscrossed the Pulchowk Road – a major traffic artery – was enormous and a continual source of irritation to the city traffic department. One day in Bikram Sampat 2063, not long after the second Jano Andolan, Narayan Pradhan, a poor Newari farmer, was squatting smoking a Bijuli cigarette beside the small Durga temple outside the Chief of Army Staff’s compound. His kharpan was carefully placed beside him with that morning’s produce of radishes and spring onions neatly arranged
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in bamboo baskets. Like any other morning, a purple bougainvillea flower had been placed behind his ear by his wife and there was a fresh red tika mark on his forehead. He had been selling mullah in this neighbourhood for years, retracing the same paths to sell his produce to the housewives of Jhamsikel, Sanepa, and Kupondole. When Narayan had started selling vegetables many years before, the area had been a loose network of Newari villages connected by muddy paths through the green rice fields and bamboo groves. Nothing remained of those old neighbourhoods except a few decaying, red-bricked Newari houses swallowed up by a grey urban sprawl of monstrously ugly development. As he finished his cigarette, Narayan looked up abstractly at a peeling proclamation on the other side of the road. He read slowly: “Unattended cattle will be impounded and removed. By order of the Municipal Council of Lalitpur.” The old farmer reflected how much the world had changed from his youth when cow slaughter was
