Joanna Lumley in Nepal:
Around 2,000 Gurkhas and family members greeted the 63-year-old star with banners praising "goddess Joanna" and declaring "Joanna Lumley - daughter of Nepal."
The actress and Gurkha campaigner Joanna Lumley waves to supporters at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu.
Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty
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From Rhys Blakely in Kathmandu
Joanna Lumley met with the Prime Minister of Nepal today before sharing tea and biscuits with the country’s President. The actress is visiting the tiny Himalayan state for a victory tour, after she fought the British Government to win Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain. It was fitting, then, that the meeting that appeared to move her most was with Harka Bahadur Pua, an 84-year-old veteran of the Second World War, who fought for Britain while serving in the 1st Battalion, The 8th Gurkha Rifles in Assam, Burma and Java. The frail Mr Pua had walked six hours from his tiny, remote village to the town of Parbat, where he began a 12-hour bus ride to Kathmandu to meet Ms Lumley. Asked what had moved him to undertake the journey, he said simply that he had wanted to see the visiting Briton - a woman Gurkha veterans say they now regard a goddess - for himself. He described seeing scores of dead bodies when he came under heavy Japanese fire in Burma in 1944 - a theatre in which Ms Lumley’s own father, a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, was saved by one of his Nepalese troops in the same year. The thing that frightened Mr Pau most, however, was being ordered to cross a river during battle. Nepal is a landlocked country; he could not swim.
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After leaving the British Army, Mr Pua returned to a life of subsistence farming, tending a small plot of rice and vegetables. His pension from the Ministry of Defence provides him with 3,800 Nepalese Rupees a month. He was one of about 600 Gurkhas to turn out to meet Ms Lumley at the Kathmandu City Hall. They greeted the former model with a thundering yell of “Ayo Gurkhali!” - echoing their war cry: “The Gurkhas are coming”. Ms Lumley also laid a wreath at a memorial to fallen Gurkhas - known as “the bravest of the brave” - at the British Embassy. The rest of the week she will spend visiting remote Gurkha communities in rural Nepal and an orphanage and refuge for victims of sex trafficking in Kathmandu. The Government announced in May that all Gurkha veterans who had served at least four years in the Army could apply for residency in Britain. The climbdown followed a campaign fronted by Ms Lumley. Previously, only those who retired after 1997 had been eligible to apply. [rc] Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.
