Rabi’s generation had submitted without question to arranged marriages; for them, the issue was straightforward: it was the duty of a son or a daughter to obey. “I saw my wife only once,” he said. “In the palace. The second time I saw her, we were betrothed. The third time was our wedding. In marriage,” he added, “love comes afterwards.”
Glancing reprovingly at my skirt, he said, “My granddaughter comes before me dressed like that.” He smiled. “I cannot scold her. It is the way things are. Going to restaurants, travelling – that’s the modern thing to do. But in my time we went to friends’ houses or on picnics. After television came, people began to imitate Western hooligans.”
Some thought it was a matter of caste. Under the Ranas, Nepal was a nation of rigid social hierarchies reinforced by a Hindu caste system that had penetrated every ethnic group. Strict Brahman families still avoid eating in restaurants for fear of being served food prepared by socially unclean hands.
“You don’t see untouchables here in Kathmandu,” Arzoo Rana Deuba, the wife of a former Prime Minister, told me. “But go out into the countryside. The other day in my husband’s constituency, some Dalit women were served tea by a Brahman boy. They were terrified. They thought they would go to hell.” There had also been suggestions that Devyani’s maharaja grandfather was not quite of the first rank of royalty, even though her family is one of the richest in India: it was said to have possessed a swath of northern India the size of France before being unburdened of it by the British. In fact, Devyani’s mother had observed that her daughter would have a hard time adjusting to life in a family of such modest means as the Shahs. Surely even the royal house of Nepal could hardly view marriage with the granddaughter of such a maharaja as a social step down.
“For the royal family,” Arzoo Deuha said, “blood is the only basis of their position. They didn’t want to jeopardize it.”
The rules, I was told by Prema Singh, who herself had married into the royal family, are that the Queen of Nepal must he Hindu and of pure blood for five generations. “It means regular marriage,” she said. “A senior wife. One of Devyani’s ancestors on her mother’s side was not quite a senior wife.” It was whispered that Devyani was descended from a concubine. “The royal family minded about lineage,” Singh added. “After all, what’s the difference between them and commoners if they marry just anybody?”
Was that what it came down to – a late rush of dynastic panic, a defense against the modern world and its different ideas of legitimacy? Had the royal family destroyed itself by insisting on the irreducible meaning of royalty?
Devyani’s life, too, was riven by conflicting demands of modernity and tradition. She was educated but not employed. On the one hand, she enjoyed the privileges of wealth – shopping trips to Delhi and London, servants to fetch anything she required; on the other, she was subject to the restrictions of Kathmandu’s oppressive upper-class society: a life, for marriageable young women, of carefully screened events, extended family obligations, visits to the gym, dress codes, and the strict rules that governed with whom, and how, she could socialize.
The relationship was said to have begun in the greater freedom of England, seven or eight years earlier, when Dipendra and Devyani met at the home of a mutual family connection. It had continued through contrived meetings abroad and more circumspect assignations in Kathmandu. Lately, though, Devyani and Dipendra’s behavior had grown more reckless.
In a severe lapse of protocol the couple had been seen increasingly around town. The proprietor of the Fire & Ice Italian restaurant, a few hundred yards from the royal palace, had shown me the couple’s favorite table. They were such regular customers, she said, that she had been searching for a gift for the Prince’s upcoming thirtieth birthday.
Prema Singh had witnessed the couple’s public displays. At a party in May, she had mentioned to the Crown Prince that her daughter was engaged and in love. “I, too, am in love,” Dipendra said. At the Golf Ball, he and Devyani had sat at separate tables and talked on their cellphones.
Devyani had clandestinely visited the Prince in his quarters at the palace. And they had contrived to meet secretly at the Sydney Olympic Games, a trip that suggested a degree of intimacy that in itself would have ruined Devyani’s marriage prospects. To an onlooker like Maya Rana, Prabakhar’s daughter, the couple was heading for trouble.
“Dipendra was acting as though the King didn’t exist,” she said. “This is a feudal society. For a royal courtship, the family comes to your house to ask for your daughter, then guards are posted outside the house. You only meet under strict supervision. Devyani knows the rules.”
The most scandalous episode occurred at a party this year at the Hyatt Hotel. The couple had stayed behind until very late, and had danced together. Then the Prince kissed Devyani in public – in the parking lot. It was Rabi Shumshere Rana, the diminutive general who told me of this episode. The recollection of it still rendered him indignant. “In front of three hundred drivers,” he said. “No Nepali Prince does something like that. The King doesn’t even wave. He never acknowledges the presence of other people. It’s impossible to imagine.”
Despite Dipendra’s apparent devotion to Devyani, he had other girlfriends. The situation, Maya said, had begun to weigh on Devyani, who was afraid that she was going to be the laughing stock of Kathmandu. She had stopped travelling. “She wanted to be with people who kept telling her that it would all work out,” Maya said. “People were beginning to say that if it didn’t happen she was finished.”
The day of the massacre, Maya saw Devyani at the gym.
“It was about five o’clock. We had a few jokes. But she was uptight on the subject. I said ‘What’s happening?’ and she snapped, ‘Nothing’s happening. What should be happening?’ She still didn’t know what the Crown Prince would do.”
Dipendra was nearly thirty, Devyani two years older – another strike against her, according to Rana elders. Both were past the conventional age of marriage in their social circle. Local newspapers had begun to comment on the Crown Prince’s not marrying. The situation had reached the point where the King and Queen had told the Prince that if he insisted on making Devyani his wife he would have to forfeit the crown. Nirajan, Dipendra’s younger brother, was soon to be married – with his parents’ approval – and it was known that he was being considered for the succession. “It wasn’t that the family had told Dipendra he couldn’t marry her,” Prema Singh said. “They were not unreasonable people. It was just that he couldn’t be King.”
*
There had been a warning of the impending disaster, but it had not been understood: although the royal astrologer had predicted a catastrophe in June, it was assumed to be an earthquake. The royal family, like most Nepali families, took no decisions without first consulting an astrologer (although, when told that the astrologer had predicted that Paras would one day be King, the Queen Mother laughed). Even in the confusion that followed the massacre, the royal astrologer had been asked to choose the auspicious moment for Gyanendra’s enthronement.
I made my way to Patan, just south of the Bagmati River, to see the royal astrologer. Patan had once been the seat of a line of Malia kings, who were conquered by the Shahs. Less than half a mile from the ancient Durbar Square, which is crowded with temples and shrines, I found the astrologer’s house. I crossed a tiny yard and came to a low doorway. It was pitch black inside. In the corner was a steep wooden ladder, which led to a small, low-ceilinged room, where the royal astrologer sat cross-legged before a low table. A group of clients sat before him in respectful consultation as a young assistant carefully filled in details on an astrological chart.
The astrologer showed no surprise at my arrival. I wondered, frivolously, if he had known I was coming. He nodded and directed me to a cushioned bench and returned to his clients. After some minutes, he rose and joined me. He gave me his card: “Prof Dr. M. R. Joshi Ph.D. (Urban study and planning), Royal Astrologer and Geo-Astro Consultant.” He gaze
d at a small window in the corner and described for me his training – long years of Sanskrit and mathematics, of geography and astro-science, with travels to the observatories in Greenwich and Mexico, a degree from the university at Varanasi in India – which had prepared him for his duties at court. These included recording the exact moment of birth of members of the royal family, choosing a child’s name according to the position of the heaven, and determining the precise time to celebrate the rites of passage, which were all observed with the solemnity due state occasions.
I asked if the Prince’s astrological chart had given any hint of what was to come.
The astrologer shifted slightly, as though pained by the vulgarity of the question. The room fell silent as the clerk and the clients listened intently, eager for the celestial explanation of recent events.
“It was a good chart,” the astrologer said. “Of course, not every planet is good for everyone. Jupiter, Saturn, and the sun are in Taurus, according to our Eastern astrology, and Taurus is not friendly. There’s a tug-of-war with the sun. The radiation is irregular and creates disturbances.” He paused. “This is a very difficult subject,” he added, giving me a firm look. Then he continued, steering gracefully toward past successes. “We predicted World War II. And the exact date of Saddam Hussein’s war.”
Had he no inkling of what Dipendra was going to do?
He had heard about the massacre, the astrologer said, just like any other citizen: a friend phoned and told him. He was summoned to the palace for the death rituals. The astrologer admitted that he had been surprised. “But I drew no conclusions,” he said.
Was there anything unusual about Dipendra, I persisted. Any clue at all?
The astrologer could not remember. The chart was usually burned with the body, and the ashes thrown into the river. He did remember the expensive and elaborate chart of the Prince’s great grandfather King Tribhuvan, the astrologer said, brightening. He’d seen it as a child. It had been edged with gold and was so large that it required four men to carry it. Then the astrologer was suddenly melancholy. There was little opportunity these days, it seemed, for calculation on such an epic scale. “If only there was time.... I love to calculate charts, but there is no time.”
There was a living to be earned, however. The astrologer sighed and returned to the more modest requirements of his waiting clients.
*
As the Prince grew up, the traditions of highborn semi-divine males still informed his education. As a teenager, he was taken on a hunting expedition in the royal game park to kill his first tiger, though the days of abundant tigers were over. He had been a scout, under the supervision of his great-uncle Rabi Shumshere Rana, and a guru to the royal family took charge of his education in ritual and spiritual matters. The formalities of royalty, and its many rules, were constantly reinforced by his parents.
The senior members of the family had perfected an unblinking stare, disdaining to acknowledge the presence of lesser mortals. They were iconic and aloof. They were there to be displayed to their subjects, not to see them. (In the mid-eighties, after some consultation about the habits of Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Aishwarya persuaded her husband that she should occasionally be permitted to smile in public. Her first smile was the talk of Nepal.)
But the Prince’s generation was starting to enjoy growing social freedom. His father had studied abroad and had negotiated his own truce with Western modernity. For his sons, the King chose an experimental school in Budhanilkantha, a suburb of Kathmandu, that had been set up, with the help of the British government, to provide a modern education for bright Nepali children of any background. To avoid discrimination against lower-caste boys, the English headmaster had proposed a radical system in which each boy would be known not by his family name but by his first name and a number. No discussion of family status was allowed. In Nepalese terms, it was a social experiment of an advanced order.
Everybody knew, of course, who the Crown Prince was, and they also knew his cousin Paras, who attended the same school. The Crown Prince, the principal told me, was a cooperative and hardworking student. Paras, I later learned, was made to leave the school early, after returning drunk from a weekend at home and driving his car around the campus at high speed. With some embarrassment, the school was forced to suspend him.
I looked at the school yearbook for 1986, Dipendra’s final year. There he is, frozen in grainy black-and-white, a slender, good-looking boy, grinning in the front row of the football team, dressed in a toga for the school production of “Julius Caesar,” and, again, in the formal class portraits, as No. 832 Dipendra. The caption reads, “Enjoys football and golf, shooting and scouting. His first aim is to serve his country in the best way for the common good.”
In an earlier generation, Dipendra might then have been confined to the palace and the hunting park, his friends and acquaintances screened for suitability. Instead, on leaving school he went abroad. After a summer of coaching by his tutors – John Tyson, his English headmaster, found him intelligent but thought he was lonely in the palace (“I remember thinking that the only friend he had there was his dog,” he said) the Crown Prince continued his education at Eton.
He returned to Nepal and took up his post in the Army, where he flew helicopters and honed his shooting skills. He had always loved guns and was allowed to “test” new weapons and recommend purchases to the King. He kept an M-16, a twelve-bore shotgun, and a small pistol in a gun cabinet in his room.
At Tribhuvan University, in Kathmandu, he took a degree in geography and was working on a doctorate, but opinions of his intellectual abilities varied from “above average” to “mediocre.” So did opinions of his character. In public, he appeared affable, approachable, and dutiful; he could work a crowd. When he met the Nepalese team at the South Asian Federation Games two years ago, he shook hands and mixed with the athletes, in an act of unprecedented informality. But some who met him socially saw him as a spoiled member of Kathmandu’s jeunesse doree – rich, arrogant, and willful, a young man who had been drinking since the age of fifteen, and who had no scruples about using his position to rescue his beloved cousin Paras from the police station after a violent incident; someone who had fitted a silencer to a gun so that he could blast away at cats and crows on the palace grounds without disturbing his parents.
I talked to Dipendra’s friends and acquaintances, looking for anything that would shed light on his transformation from respectful son to mass murderer. Nothing I was told explained what he had done, beyond several accounts of a streak of insanity in the family and the hazards of inbreeding. One professor showed me a chart he’d drawn that purported to illustrate that the Crown Prince was the direct recipient of the genetic inheritance of several of the madder members of the family. I puzzled over how this squared with the same professor’s description of Dipendra as an intelligent and rational man. But we were all guessing.
I had begun to feel that cognitive dissonance was a Nepalese national characteristic. Day after day, the newspapers were filled with black-ruled photographs of the royal family, displayed along with the condolences of local business firms, with no mention of the circumstances of the deaths. Tributes to Dipendra were published that omitted the fact that he had killed his family. “Hearty felicitations” on the accession of King Gyanendra appeared that made no reference to the gruesome prelude to his enthronement. There was a sense of waiting, but nobody seemed sure for what. Foreign residents talked of leaving. Parliament was closed, and of the government there was no public trace. As I travelled around the city, there was still talk of an attack – from India or the Maoists. The sense of helpless drift created apprehension of further catastrophe. Anything seemed possible except perhaps the story that Dipendra had shot his family in a rage over its refusal to let him marry the woman he loved. It was the one thing that, in the absence of plausible alternatives, I was increasingly convinced was true.
The monsoon rain had settled in and a heavy, humid morning gave way to a sudden a
fternoon downpour, which sent people scattering for shelter as street traders hastily threw plastic sheets over their goods. Outside the high south gate of the royal palace, formal state portraits of the late King and Queen had been propped up against the railings, and incense perfumed the warm, moist air. The palace, a glum modern structure, reminded me of the Beijing railway station: a gray tower set on an uninspired red brick building.
Under the Ranas, the Shah kings had been virtual prisoners in their palaces, revered as the incarnation of the god Vishnu but serving only as a decorative stamp to legitimatize the rule of their rivals. Then Birendra’s grandfather King Tribhuvan orchestrated the overthrow of the Rana prime minister, with the support of a democracy movement inspired by the end of the British Raj, in India, four years earlier. There were even elections in 1959, won by the Nepali Congress Party; the following year, Tribhuvan’s son King Mallendra jailed the leaders and banned political parties.
But by then the outside world had begun to arrive. At first, there were only a few diplomats and adventurers, but in the seventies the hippies hit town, drawn by the low cost of almost everything. Overland to Kathmandu became the pilgrimage route of the counterculture. They settled on a run-down street, rapidly nicknamed Freak Street, near the city’s ancient temples, and cultivated a mind-altering ethic of drugs and mysticism. Thirty years later, the street is a jumble of cheap lodgings, drug dealers, and tourist shops. Most of the founding freaks are long departed, although a few of them have gone into the trekking business. But the door they pushed open admitted other foreigners – the tourists and the aid agencies, who challenged old habits by example and by design. The result is a bizarre reality, a dissonant collage of medieval traditions and the modern world. In the streets of the capital, the sixteenth century seems to exist in a chaotic patchwork with the twenty-first. My taxi-driver, fighting his way through the choking traffic of Kathmandu, carefully circumnavigated the somnolent cows who had parked their sacred rumps in the very center of a narrow street. At impromptu shrines to the dead royal family, people were praying and burning incense. Semi-naked holy men mingled with teenagers in tight jeans who teetered in platform shoes along the lethally uneven pavement. I passed a jumble of crudely painted signs advertising Internet providers, computer courses, and classes in English on my way to houses occupied by people whose status derived from their place in a society that, for all its changes, is still essentially backward-looking and jealous of its privileges.
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