The river protects them, says an elder: drowning only happens to other ethnic groups, and so far, even their children have been spared.At the foot of the Himalayas, Nepal is changing before your eyes. Since the fall of the king, Kathmandu has been swelling on dollars, concrete and bricks, and a whole valley smokes to feed it. At the other end of the country, in the Terai, on the border with India, the Radjis, an ancient nomadic people of the forest, still follow the river and the bees. Two reports for Faut pas rêver, two ways of building a life: brick by brick, or at the tops of the trees.
Every day, the sun rises behind the chimneys; life, though, goes on behind the walls.“Twenty years ago, there was only a quarter of what you see here.” For the urban planner Vishnu Parasad Bhattarai, building goes on in every direction, heedless of earthquakes, and bricks are made from the finest farmland in the world. On the edge of the city, fields of bricks stretch as far as the eye can see: a hundred and twenty brickworks produce a billion a year. They mould, they carry, they stack. Fetching the earth is hard, moulding too, stacking even more so; “if we were educated, we wouldn’t have to suffer like this”. They miss the time when people believed in God, before the Maoists came through. Bibek, thirty-two, carries quite another message: ten rupees per hundred bricks, a hundred to a hundred and sixty trips a day, friends from the village to joke with, “so no, I don’t complain”. The boss, LP, a mere accountant a few years ago, is the first in the valley to have signed his bricks with his initials, and says that what matters most is the workers. In the evening, at Bibek’s, they play cards. He came to try his luck: to wait for the fruit to fall from heaven is to die gazing at it.
You learn early to give your dreams the shape of a brick, to be left to dry in the full sun.
Six hundred people are constantly at work at each brickworks.
Each trip earns a token, to be exchanged later for rupees: the boss may grumble, but he pays well.
The kiln is heated to a thousand degrees and fed with coal every twenty minutes; the bricks fire in it for two days.Once upon a time there was an ancient nomadic people of the forest, renowned for hunting honey, a practice said to have disappeared. Christophe Cousin meets the first Radjis deep in the night, a torch in hand, feet in the water: other ethnic groups have come, the river is emptying, so more water goes into the soup. There are said to be only 4,000 left, all settled; some twenty holdouts still drift to the rhythm of the elements, under a few tents. The fishermen turn out to be gold seekers: an old man once told them that their ancestors found gold, so, when the fields give them a rest, they take up the tradition again. With one gram of gold, you can buy up to a hundred kilos of rice. Ramseen Radji does not know his age, and worships the snake. A legend of Lake Rara, where all the Radjis lived before its waters scattered them, sends you further on, downstream, to those who follow the bees. Golé, a climber, learned by following the elders. Barefoot, with a little smoke, he reaches the first swarm in five minutes, some fifteen metres up. But since the forest has been stripped to the bone, bees have become scarce, and honey along with them.
You get your bearings from the rising sun, and from the stranger about to ask too many questions.
The fish brought back from the catch has its throat cut; all that remains is to grind the chilli.
No one expects to live off the precious metal: they look for gold to kill time, and above all for a change of air.
They take only the wax that holds the honey and do not touch the larvae: “We are the people of the bees.”“I don’t do this for the money. I take risks because it’s better to fall from a tree than to fall into oblivion.”Golé, honey hunter