House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  There were no other injuries to his patient, but there was heavy internal bleeding; there would be brain damage. Devkota cleaned up the wound, insuring that no metal fragments remained inside, and he then removed the damaged tissue. A plastic surgeon closed the exit wound.

  Downstairs, people kept arriving. Prema Singh, a relative of the King’s by marriage, was met in the parking lot by another distraught member of the royal family. “Dipendra has shot everybody,” the sobbing woman said.

  The Crown Prince? This was inconceivable. “What rubbish you’re talking,” Singh snapped.

  Inside, Singh found the Queen Mother sitting in an anteroom with the King’s aunt, who was weeping. “My baby’s gone,” the aunt told Singh. “With my own hands I said goodbye.” The Prime Minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, was in the crowded corridor with Prince Paras, the King’s twenty-seven-year-old nephew. Paras was unharmed and was trying to telephone his father, Prince Gyanendra, the brother of the now dead King. Gyanendra was at the royal retreat, in Pokhara, a hundred and twenty miles away. It was raining, and a helicopter had been sent to get him, but the weather had forced it to turn back.

  A brain scan of the Crown Prince confirmed bleeding into the ventricles of his brain. He was taken to intensive care, and his head was elevated. He was sedated and given drugs to reduce the swelling. A surgical team was preparing to operate on Gyanendra’s wife, and another to operate on the King’s youngest brother, Dhirendra, who was badly wounded in the chest. One of the King’s sisters was waiting to have two fingers amputated. A cousin and the King’s son-in-law had already been moved upstairs to the operating theatre.

  By then Devkota had left the theatre and joined a group of doctors in an anteroom. He got a glass of water. He hadn’t eaten since lunch and was in a state of nervous exhaustion. It was only then that he heard the first account of what had happened. It was, bizarrely, a relief. “I had been through hours of agony, wondering who had done this. Then one of the doctors said that the rumor was that it had happened at a private event and that the Crown Prince, the man I’d operated on, had done it.”

  Devkota waited at the hospital until dawn, when it was suggested that he get some rest and return at ten in the morning. But, just as he was about to leave, word came that Prince Gyanendra had at last been brought in by helicopter. Gyanendra was the only member of the royal family in a position to take control. Devkota watched him inspect the casualties wordlessly, his face serious and distressed.

  Gyanendra led a group of high officials up to the hospital library and closed the door. Rumors of what had happened were spreading in a ripple of telephone calls that rapidly widened across Kathmandu. By morning, CNN and the BBC were broadcasting the first news – that the Nepalese royal family had been killed at the Palace and that Crown Prince Dipendra was believed to be responsible. There had been a dispute, they reported, over whom the Crown Prince was to marry. Crowds gathered at the gates of the royal palace and outside the National Election Commission, where the Royal Privy Council was holding an emergency meeting.

  A successor had to be named before the King’s death could be made public. Inside the hospital, palace officials were searching for a form of words. Constitutionally, the Crown Prince Dipendra, was next in line to the throne. But how could they declare King the man who had just killed the King? lf Dipendra lived, he would have to be tried, but he would also be King. There was no provision in the Nepalese constitution for trying a king for anything, let alone murder.

  Gyanendra sent for Devkota and asked him to describe the Crown Prince’s condition. “I told him in clear terms that he was very unwell, and that the outlook was extremely dismal.”

  Three hours later, on the state radio channels, Keshar Jung Rayarnajhi, the chairman of the Royal Privy Council, read a brief statement in a tremulous voice. The King was dead, he said. “According to the grand traditions, we declare that His Majesty’s eldest son, Crown Prince Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, will be the King of Nepal as of six o’clock in the evening 20 Jestha 2058.” Since the new King was in the hospital and unable to carry out his duties, he continued, his uncle Prince Gyanendra was appointed regent. There was no further explanation.

  An official thirteen-day mourning period was declared. Flags hung at half-mast, and the state machine, such as it was, shut down. Civil servants were ordered to refrain from eating salt for three days and to shave their heads. Thousands of ordinary citizens followed suit; barbers offered their services free. Kathmandu began to look like a city of off-duty monks. Shops closed, and the clubs and restaurants normally frequented by Kathmandu’s wealthier young people were shuttered and empty. In the old quarter, the narrow, rutted streets were crowded with people shopping for food and the thin Nepalese newspapers that were sold from small piles on the damp pavement.

  I was standing in one of these streets, looking at a high brick wall. Behind me an alley of small houses and rundown shops descended a slight slope, empty but for a dog that was giving close attention to its fleas. The undistinguished passageway had one extraordinary claim: a river of blood had once flowed here. The blood sealed the transfer of power from the Shahs to the Ranas, the two most powerful families in the country.

  The Shahs had ruled Nepal since their warrior ancestor Prithwi Narayan Shah had conquered a scattering of rival princely states across the Himalayas and united them, in 1769. He was a legendary and merciless soldier, fierce enough to keep the British East India Company, which was already extending its power across India, from direct conquest of Nepal. He left his descendants a territory that would ultimately stretch from Mt Everest, on the border with Tibet, to the malarial plains that rolled into India in the south, and which contained dozens of different ethnic and caste groups and more than a hundred languages and dialects.

  The high brick wall I was looking at had belonged to the courtyard of the royal barracks – or the Kot – the place where the Shahs had lost their power. The place was still a barracks, as it had been on September 15, 1846, a date that, until June 1, 2001, had been reckoned the most notorious in Nepal’s history.

  The kingdom had been in chaos for months as court factions fought for control and the junior queen was ascendant. That night, she summoned all the high officers to the Kot, determined to avenge the assassination of a favorite. The assassin, Jang Bahadur Kunwar, a ruthlessly ambitious son of a military family, arrived first, accompanied by six brothers and three regiments of soldiers, who waited outside. In the past, Jang Bahadur had not hesitated to kill for advancement, but that night the killing was on a scale that earned him a place in history. In the confusion of the acrimonious meeting, weapons were drawn and shots were fired; Jang Bahadur’s soldiers forced their way into the barracks courtyard. Twenty-five nobles were cut down, along with an unknown number of soldiers and retainers. When the King, Rajendra Shah, arrived at the courtyard, he was so unmanned by the screams and the sight of blood running beneath the gate that he fled back to his palace. He died the next year.

  The Shahs continued to occupy the throne, but Jang Bahadur Kunwar was now the country’s supreme de-facto power. He purged the kingdom of his rivals and distributed the top jobs to members of his family. To consolidate his position, he drew up an apocryphal genealogy that conveniently demonstrated his descent from a royal house, the Ranas, a powerful family that had been Indian princes in the fourteenth century. He adopted the Rana name, and, with his newly raised caste status, his family became acceptable to Indian royalty. At first, the “Ranas” were barred from marrying members of the Nepalese royal family, but by 1854 the ban had been lifted. Henceforth, Jang Bahadur’s descendants controlled the Shahs politically and were impossible to separate from them dynastically.

  For more than a hundred years, the Ranas ruled Nepal as hereditary Prime Ministers, building up immense personal fortunes while eighty-five per cent of their subjects made a meagre living through subsistence farming. There was no distinction between state revenues and the Rana private purse. Giant palaces were built in a
Western neoclassical style. The largest, the Singha Durbar, had more than a thousand rooms, organized around thirteen courtyards, plus a theatre, a huge galleried hall (which now serves as the parliament chamber), and a Versailles-inspired hall of mirrors. From its deep balcony, the Ranas acknowledged the crowds that had been summoned to gather in the wide avenue below.

  But under the Ranas’ rule the country stagnated. By the time their power was broken, in 1951, Nepal was among the poorest lands on earth. Two-thirds of the children died in infancy, and the average life expectancy was thirty-five years. Only two per cent of the adult population was literate. In the entire nation there were sixty miles of railway, only a few miles of paved roads, and no electricity outside the Kathmandu Valley. Nepal was isolated and unchanged, locked in a medieval past. And the Ranas, despite their splendor, could never escape the sordid associations of the founding act of their power: the Kot massacre. And now, in the official silence that followed June 1, 2001, it was easy to believe that another murderous struggle for power had occurred.

  Old stories took on new life as people tried to comprehend the incomprehensible. King Birendra, it was pointed out, was the eleventh generation of kings. As everybody knew, a curse had been pronounced on the first Shah king of Nepal by one of his defeated enemies, who had promised to serve faithfully for eleven generations, and then reappear within the family and destroy it in an act of vengeance. A curse seemed no less credible than some of the other stories. King Birendra and his son Dipendra had both been popular; Gyanendra and his son Paras were not. The previous August, half a million people had petitioned the King to punish Paras after he killed a popular musician in a drunk-driving incident. Gyanendra’s absence from the murder scene was interpreted as foreknowledge. Paras’s presence was equally suspicious – he was one of the few unscathed – and it gave strength to the theory of a power struggle. That the popular and apparently dutiful Crown Prince Dipendra had shot his whole family because he wasn’t allowed to marry the woman he loved seemed the least likely possibility of all.

  On Saturday, June 2nd, twenty-one hours after the killings, a funeral procession set off from the military hospital to the Pashupatinath Temple, bearing the bodies of the eight dead – Dipendra’s parents, his sister, his brother, his uncle, and three of his aunts. The procession was headed by a mounted guard of honor, followed by a police band playing sombre music, and then the King’s body on an open bier, wrapped in saffron cloth. The Queen was next, in a covered palanquin, then the bodies of her son and daughter. Half a million people lined the route. As the cortege passed, they wept, threw flowers, and shouted, with affecting futility, “Long live King Birendra.”

  Beneath the temple, on the banks of the Bagmati River, the royal ghats, the platforms where the bodies would be cremated, were piled high with wood. It was nearly ten o’clock, and dark, when the fires were lit. As the smoke rose from King Birendra’s funeral pyre, the first heavy drops of an approaching monsoon began to fall.

  The next morning, Prince Gyanendra issued his own statement, trying to disguise the horror of Dipendra’s last act. “According to a report of the incident received by us,” he said, “an automatic weapon went off suddenly, seriously injuring His Majesty King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, Her Majesty Qyeen Aishwarya Rajya Laxmi Devi Shah, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, His Royal Highness Prince Nirajan Bir Bikram Shah, and other royal family members and relatives.” As an explanation, it was worse than silence. Fearful of what might happen next, people formed lines outside the few functioning shops in order to stockpile kerosene and cooking gas.

  By Sunday afternoon, Dipendra’s condition had worsened. Devkota informed Gyanendra that the Prince had no chance of survival. What did he want to do? Gyanendra consulted the Queen Mother. Dipendra’s life support, he told Devkota, was not to be switched off unless his heart stopped. It stopped at three-forty the following morning. Dipendra had been King for less than forty-eight hours.

  Gyanendra was now King of Nepal, the third king in four days. The enthronement ceremony was conducted in a misty rain within the walls of Hanuman Dhoka, the Shahs’ first royal palace. Gyanendra looked profoundly depressed. There was still no credible official explanation of the events that had placed him on the throne. He rode back in an open chariot drawn by six white horses. As the procession passed, an unusually silent crowd watched. There was little clapping. In one spot, hecklers jeered, “Death to Gyanendra!” When the chariot disappeared into the palace, crowds gathered just outside the gates, shouting “Gyanendra the murderer!” and throwing stones at the palace walls. The police responded with tear gas.

  The new King was known as a less sympathetic leader than his brother – a hard-nosed businessman – and his image wasn’t helped by his son Paras, with his heavy-drinking swagger and his readiness to draw a gun. That evening, the new King addressed his subjects in a brief television broadcast. Now he promised the truth. He appointed a three-man commission – the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, and the leader of the Unified Marxist Leninists, the main opposition party to investigate the events at the palace and report their findings within three days. The leader of the opposition party resigned the next day. To add to the confusion, a Maoist rebel leader published an article in a local newspaper lamenting the death of King Birendra and accusing Gyanendra and sinister foreign forces of being behind the massacre. The newspaper’s editor and two of its directors were arrested on suspicion of sedition. For those in search of an explanation, it was further evidence that the truth was being suppressed.

  A curfew was announced: anyone in violation would receive one clear warning before he was shot. The streets had emptied by that afternoon, when Dipendra’s body was driven on an Army truck to the same sacred site where his victims had been cremated, two days earlier. That night, two protesters were shot.

  On the night of the killings, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the family home of Devyani Rana, the woman who had been linked to the Crown Prince. There are hardly any photographs of her. She had never courted publicity, ruled few people outside her social circle would have recognized the woman who might have become the Queen of Nepal. After June 1st, her name was known everywhere.

  The heavy gates of her home remained shut. Devyani was said to have left for Moscow, where her family had business interests. She was also said to have fled to the family home in Delhi. (Her presence in India was indirectly confirmed when her brief statement for the inquiry was delivered to the Nepalese Ambassador in Delhi.) There were rumors that she was pregnant, that the couple had been married in a secret ceremony. A relative said she’d been ill.

  I called the house in Delhi, one of several there that belonged to Devyani’s Indian relatives. There was no answer. Later, I drove around Delhi, testing the resolve of the guards on several of the family’s large properties (one consumed an entire city block). The guards insisted that nobody was there.

  “I saw her father at the funeral,” an elderly politician told me. “We were at the military hospital, and the bodies were in the open air. The place was full of flies. He was so downcast, almost fallen. He’s a respectable gentleman, educated at Oxford. He knew me and how close to the palace I was, how intense the pain was. He gave me his arm. I felt he was barely containing himself. He must be overwhelmed, thinking about his daughter’s future.”

  Few people outside Devyani’s intimate circle had known the details of her relationship with the Crown Prince, although the fact that they were a couple – and that the royal family opposed it – had been the subject of gossip. But the mystery at the root of the Prince’s desperate act, and the reason that the royal family had objected so stubbornly, was not explained. According to Prabakhar Rana, a business partner of the recently enthroned King Gyanendra, “Devyani is attractive, well educated, and well brought up. She does have a filthy temper, like all Rana girls, but I was very fond of her.” As a Rana, Devyani was a member of the family that had married into the royal house assiduously fo
r a hundred and fifty years. She was also the granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of an Indian maharaja.

  “Why did they not let them marry?” Prabakhar Rana said. “Her father is a politician – ambitious but not popular. Perhaps the late King felt he was a liability.”

  It was one theory; there were many others. There had been hints of a family feud – Devyani was said to be in some way the wrong sort of Rana. Rabi Shumshere Rana, uncle to both the late King Birendra and his Queen, a diminutive former general in his seventies (who, like many family elders, has a passion for lineage expressed in long recitations of the family tree), explained Devyani’s ancestry – after several digressions involving collateral sub-branches and a few asides on the progeny of junior wives. Devyani was descended from Dhir Shumsher, the brother of Jang Bahadur, the perpetrator of the Kot massacre. As it happened, the Queen was also descended from Dhir Shumsher, but from a different branch. “The Qieen,” Rabi said, “had in mind a different bride for her son, one who was from the same line.” He shrugged. “I don’t see the issue, but the late Queen was a very powerful character. If she made a decision, it couldn’t be changed.”