HUMLA - The old man sits in a corner of a tea shop along the trail between Simikot and the Tibetan border, spinning raw wool into yarn. He sips from a dented metal cup. Three or four porters sit on the bench beside him. The shop owner stirs a bubbling infusion of spring water and mountain mint, occasionally adding generous handfuls of sugar. The smoke is thick but the stone walls keep the warmth of the cooking fire inside; the funk is bearable. It occurs to me that this is the real Nepal. Time then to listen to what the real Nepalis have to say.

"So what's the situation around here," I ask, to get things going. A short burst of laughter is followed by contemplative silence. The men are ondering-obviously-whether to trust the Khaire who might well have come from Mars or even Army headquarters to intrude rudely on their lives.
"Well," the old man says, hands never pausing in their furious spinning, "it's bad, very bad." Then he lapses into silence again, still pondering how much to say.

"Back in Simikot," I venture, "the Chief Development Officer says the situation is normal here, so does the DSP." More laughter, bitter now, rhythmic, incredulous snorts and shaking heads.

"Normal is it," asks the oldster, cynicism overcoming earlier reluctance to speak to a stranger. "CDO sahib says this is normal? Is it normal to have soldiers and police take jewellery from our women, and search our homes. Some people lost money too. Is normal having the Maoists steal our food and get us into more trouble with the army? Is this what CDO sahib says is normal?"

Some of the porters take up the refrain and everyone more or less tells a similar story. They say that a village down the trail lost money and jewellery after an army party came to investigate reports of Maoist movement in the area. Of course, the authorities deny this and over-stressed, modern Kathmandu-wallah that I am, I haven't got time to go and investigate myself. I ask the old man how he copes, how the increasingly unbearable burdens of being a rural Nepali are affecting him.

"Well, there's rakshi," he says to general laughter, "and we have our work." Here he holds up his half spun skein of yarn, revealing the incredible fact that he pays Rs 3000 rupees for the raw material, works for four months on a blanket and sells it for Rs 4000. Something, I dare say, for the finance ministry and its generous Kathmandu-based donors to take note of next time there's talk of increasing productivity amongst the Nepali workforce.
Another silence falls and we sip our fragrant tea. The sugar bites into my teeth but it helps ward off the evening chill that's building up outside. We discuss my video camera for a moment and I hesitate to tell them that I spent the equivalent of about ten years of their income to buy this crucial tool of my trade. But they simply marvel at the technology and speak approvingly of the need to have the best you can afford.

Then the old man gets agitated with all the small talk and stares at me, his eyes watering and barely visible through the smoke. "Look, you want to know how we feel, how the situation affects us. You tell those people back in Kathmandu the truth, you tell them how the Nepalis are feeling.

"If the Maoists come, and we feed them, 40 or 50 at a time, we watch our food supplies dwindle but what can we do, ke garne? And we know that next day the army and the police will come and accuse of being Maoists. They insult us and look at our possessions. It's like they're all working together to make us miserable. Well, tell them in Kathmandu that they're succeeding. We are miserable.

"But here's something else to take back there. We're alive today. Yes, and we're happy to be alive. Tomorrow, who knows, we might be dead. Does anyone care about us? We're all alone out here."

He calls for more tea and another round of steaming metal cups arrive on the table.

Silence falls again. Outside, a few wisps of snow are blowing by. The old man keeps spinning, nodding and thinking. There's not much else to say.