The young woman twirled the M16 rifle like a baton, placing the weapon upright, its butt firmly in the dust. At less than 5ft tall, when she talked her lips moved just above the barrel of the gun.
Navina Khatri Chhetri, 26, is a veteran of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), having led soldiers eight times into "battle" against the Royal Nepalese Army.
From a poor village in midwestern Nepal, she followed her parents into the underground Maoist movement, starting as a student activist eight years ago. With a quick tongue and a gift for sloganeering, Navina rose quickly through the ranks.
"In my village there is no water, no electricity, no roads, no doctor. Nepal needs progress and we will only get these things by following the Prachanda Path," she says, referring to the doctrine of the Nepalese Maoists' chairman.
With the party's permission Navina married a fellow communist, a member of the party's cultural wing. Five years ago she picked up the gun, joining the ranks of women fighters that comprise a third of the rebels.
She is now a battalion vice-commander in charge of 270 soldiers, both men and women, and says that the Maoist party policy of "total equality" means she has no problems being a female leader.
For Navina, life is more about war than love.
"The people's war is the most important thing in my life," she said. "Then family. I will think about children when the war is won and the king is gone."
Costly war
Navina's story is a glimpse into Nepal's civil war that in less than 10 years has cost almost 13,000 lives. A landlocked nation pressed against the Himalayas and not much bigger than England, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world.
What began in the villages of Rolpa district strung across the foothills of the Himalayas is now the world's longest-running communist insurgency, spreading hope and fear.
To their critics, the Maoists are a throwback to the bloody absurdities of Cambodia's Pol Pot and China's Mao Zedong (毛澤東). Led by an elusive leader called Prachanda, who comes from a peasant family, Nepal's revolutionaries have been accused of using terror to flatten centuries-old social hierarchies based on caste and ethnicity.
Landlords have been driven from villages; children have been kidnapped for indoctrination. Those who speak against Maoist beliefs have been tortured. Political opponents have been killed.
The army and police of the Nepalese government have been accused of similar human rights violations.
Nepal tops one international league table: for unexplained disappearances.
Contrary to the global trend of the last decade, communism in Nepal has flowered, attracting recruits convinced that only revolution will end the rule of the royal court and usher in modernity.
The result is that the war today pits a generation of gun-toting youths clad in fatigues and trainers led by leftwing ideologues against an absolute monarchy ruled by King Gyanendra, a chain-smoking royal who many in the country believe is a living Hindu god.
More than 1,350 people have been killed since February, an average of five deaths a day.
Last week thousands of villagers gathered in a natural hillside amphitheater waving red banners and banging drums. Beneath the snow-topped peaks were large hand-painted flags that lined up Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Above their faces were the words Prachanda Path.
RSS