In 1956, Sunar Gurung was returning to his hometown of Ngawal in Manang after completing a year-long trading spree that spanned over Nepal, India, Burma and Thailand, among other countries. Although a citizen of Nepal, the government of Nepal hadn't yet allowed its citizens to travel abroad unless they were members of the royal family or of the British Gurkha regiment or were highly influential individuals with travel exemptions granted by the King. In the case of Gurung, he wasn’t any of the above. So the only way a Nepali like him could travel to distant countries was via an Indian passport.In the case of the people of Manang (Manange), there were many inhabitants who had settled in Shillong and parts of Assam in India. This allowed every Manange who visited India to get an Indian passport using the address and information of the other Mananges who were already living in India. Gurung was no different and now wielding an Indian passport, he traveled all over South Asia, which a common Nepali citizen in the 1940s could only dream about.
With his total earnings of approximately INRs 2,500 in pocket (equivalent to US $625 then), a princely sum in those days, Gurung finally headed back to Ngawal, Manang after being away from home for over a year. While crossing Assam on his journey home, he was confronted by a group of traders from another large village of Manang who beat him black and blue and robbed him of everything. After weeks of negotiations and involvement of other parties (read: friends and family members of the perpetuators) the robber-traders agreed to return a paltry Rs 700!
Unable to come to terms with returning home with an amount that would not be nearly enough to pay off his debts nor to feed his family of six young children, Gurung made the decision to turn around and try his luck again: He would use that Rs 700 to get to Calcutta.
In Calcutta, Gurung would buy local products and seek arbitrage in selling them on the streets across other South-East Asian countries. This involved (and this was true of other traders from Manang as well) selling herbal products amassed in the hilly regions of Nepal and India. With the earnings, he went to Burma to purchase cheap rubies, jade and other precious stones. He then took those stones across the border into Thailand where he would sell some and make the leftovers into jewelry. The finished products were taken to Hong Kong, Singapore and Brunei and sold at a premium.
As with every Manange of his time, Gurung's childhood was spent in abject poverty: No formal schooling, one meal a day, one food-bowl, a dirty pair of shoes and ragged clothes on his back. With an infertile and rocky soil base where only potatoes and buck-wheat grew and with an inhospitable freezing climate, the Mananges could care less about education or schooling and focused mainly on taking care of their basic needs.
To provide for their families and secure a bright future for them, the Mananges had to indulge in risks larger than any other Nepali of that era could imagine! Based off that need for survival, the male members of the generation prior to Gurung's left Manang and headed to Kathmandu to seek trading and arbitrage opportunities. There they found a huge demand for products easily available in Manang: Tibetan mastiffs, the scent of musk deer and Himalayan herbs. Armed with these items the next time around, they flooded into Kathmandu and sold the goods for a handsome profit.
As time went by, they brainstormed further and realized a greater potential lay in doing the same in a large city like Calcutta. Later, they would spread over to Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei and Malaysia, where they sold their Himalayan products, purchased the local products found in each country, and then sold them in another. Incredibly, all this was happening in the 1940s when Nepal was officially a "closed" economy that didn't permit its masses to be educated nor allowed its citizens to travel abroad!
Gurung, still distraught over being robbed of his life savings in Assam, ended up in Brunei six months later. One warm evening in 1957, after hawking around his products all day, he and his other trader friends from Manang went to a local park where they partook in physical exercises. That very night, while sleeping on the street as every other Manange trader did in order to save money, Gurung suffered a massive heart attack due to health complications arising from his hard life. He passed away at the tender age of 39 in Bander Seri Begawan, Brunei.
His body was left abandoned by his petrified friends and relatives who were conducting their business illegally without proper paperwork or visa. Worse, for his family back in Manang, it meant no goodbyes, no tears, and no blood money from the government. Only questions lingered on and so did the sad lives of his six children left to spiral deeper into the web of poverty.
Gurung was my grandfather.
BY KARMA TENZING
Comments