The List finally arrived in my inbox on Jan 29. Two lists, actually: one from two years ago, and one from last year. The title of the List, which Laxu picked up from the Foreign Employment Office, is Assistance Decision Made From (Date) to (Date). It’s a record of insurance payments managed by the government that’s as close as I’ve been able to get to a list of migrant laborers who’ve died abroad.
The first question I needed to answer was How Many. It seems as if everyone knows there is a flow of bodies arriving home to Nepal from overseas, but nobody is quite sure what the scale of the tide is. I’ve noticed that people I’ve interviewed usually shrug off the question How Many a few times, and then give me a sudden, precise answer that measures their own anxiety over the problem.
From April 2012 to April 2013, there are 727 names on the List. The following year, ending in April 2014, lists 24 women and 856 men—and average of nearly three laborers per day.
In reality, How Many is a more complicated number than three per day. A certain number of laborers go abroad off the books, or over the border seasonally to India. Study abroad has also become hugely popular, and waves of luckier young people to exodus to foreign countries (although I would guess that most of the boys in Kaskikot, given the choice, would still opt for labor over study). While about 300,000 laborers per year leave Nepal through manpower companies, the total migration rate is a lot higher – closer to 800,000 annually.
All of which is to say, the airlines officer and security guard may not have been all that far off when they estimated the number of bodies or insurance claims they receive daily. Some estimates put the body count around five per day. But I’m mainly concerned with young men, and occasionally women, who sign up with labor companies.
When I opened the List for the first time, I felt like an intruder. To see a list of names in a place of reverence is one thing. But the black and white letters under Assistance Decision Made from (Date) to (Date) are simply data: eight hundred and eighty statistics.
Besides, each name was listed with only a spouse name, village and ward number (there are no house addresses in rural Nepal), and a date of death. It’s 42 pages long. I had no idea how I would locate or speak with any of these families.
I closed the List and it was a few weeks before I opened it again. Then, yesterday, I was in Kaskikot, filling up our tin jugs at the water tap, when Madu walked by.
“Hey Madu,” I said. “Remember the project I told you about?” I said I was looking for the family of a young man who’d died abroad. After all that work, I was back where I’d started, having talked to Madu three months ago when I first arrived. Honestly, I hoped Madu could help me circumvent the List.
As we were talking, Sher dai, another neighbor, walked by and joined our conversation. He offered to do some inquiry on my behalf in Kaskikot, but then I mentioned that I had a List already at my house. He followed me back home, where I set down the basket and took out the water jug. I pulled up a low stool in the yard and took at my laptop.
We reopened the list. I searched “Kaski.” Sher dai and I started copying and pasting a short list of names in to fresh document. Many were from Pokhara or surrounding Kaski villages that I know well: Leknath, Syangia, Hemja. And then we came upon Dirgharaj Adhikari, Kaskikot-08.
“Sher dai, this boy is from Kaskikot. Where is ward number 8?”
Sher dai said said he would look into our short list and get back to me. To my surprise, he came back not two hours later.
Dirgharaj Adhikari’s house is just half an hour up the road. It’s likely that, at some point in the past, I ran in to him in a bus or shop or at Kalika School, where he studied. He died last spring in Qatar. He was 22 years old.
“Shall we go?” Sher dai asked.
It was only 11 am. Just a few hours earlier it had been a month since I’d faced the matter at all. I’d assumed before I even began this project that I wouldn’t have to look far to find the bereaved family of a young male laborer. But it was still unnerving to be so flatly correct.
I pulled my microphone and camera out of the back of the dresser and put them in my bag. I got on the back of Sher dai’s motorcycle and we left for Dirgharaj’s house. Within minutes, we turned off the main dirt road on to a small motor path that lead to a lone house, perched high up on the hillside. As we approached, I could see the yard was full of people. A leather-thin man with clear green eyes emerged from the yard to greet us a respectful distance from the entry way. He was Dirgharaj’s father.
We had arrived exactly on the day of sarad, the annual puja that marks the anniversary of a death. The entire family was there to honor Dirgharaj. He died exactly one year ago today.
“Hello sir…may we come in?” I asked. “We’d like to hear about your son.”
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All The Pieces 