House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  This almost modern Nepal had a dark side, illustrated by the story of Padam Thakurathi. Thakurathi is a former journalist and editor. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, his publications were regularly closed down, and he was frequently jailed for his activities, a misfortune that gave him an unanticipated scoop one day when a fellow prisoner identified the King’s brother Dhirendra (one of the casualties of the night of June 1st) as a key figure in Nepal’s drug trade. Thakurathi went on to publish the story, without explicitly naming the royal family “Those people,” he told me, “were agents of the Mafia in Nepal. The royal baggage was never searched, so it was easy for them to take whatever they wanted out of the country – temple idols, antiques, heroin, and marijuana.”

  Thakurathi had been a disillusioned member of the Panchayat system, a cosmetic parliament that had been set up in the sixties by King Mahendra after he banned political parties. “It wasn’t working,” Thakurathi said. “And I realized that people had to stop blindly following the royal family. So I started publishing stories about what went on inside the palace.” The stories provoked the royal family, and there were efforts to close down his newspapers; for instance, his compositors were all arrested, and he had to scour Kathmandu for replacements and pay them overtime to get the paper out. Then he received a phone call from an aide to the King’s brother, offering him any sum of money if he would stop publishing. (“I was really encouraged! I knew I must be right.”) When Thakurathi planned to print a story linking the palace to a scandal involving heroin smuggled through the Nepalese team at the Los Angeles Olympics, the decision was made to silence him for good. Late one night, his wife was awakened by a sudden noise. When she switched on the light, she saw blood gushing from her husband’s head. A gunman had cut through the screen of their single-story house and shot him in his sleep. An ugly scar now runs across Thakurathi’s shaved head, ending in a deep indentation over his sightless right eye.

  Political leaders, too, were repeatedly exiled or jailed in their long battle for democracy. There were student strikes in the seventies, bomb attacks in the mid eighties, and a steadily mounting toll of arrests. Finally in 1990, rage against the monarchy broke out in mass protests in Kathmandu.

  As revolutions go, it was brief and relatively bloodless. During it, the young Prince Dipendra faxed his father from Eton, urging him to accept the constitutional monarchy. After two months of protests, thousands of injuries, and some fifty deaths, the King gave in.

  The era of absolute rule under contract with the gods was over. From now on, the Nepalese royal house would be subject to the doubt that undermines constitutional monarchy everywhere: what, in a democratic age, gives them their power, position, and privilege? For the Shahs, the final answer was blood “pure blood,” as defined by ever stricter and more archaic rules.

  In the short term, though, political retreat saved the monarchy. The sins of the Shahs were forgotten as the quarrelsome politicians who now took over displayed a capacity for greed and corruption that exceeded anything the monarchy had ever done. There have been ten governments in the past ten years, and out of the splintering parties of the left an armed insurgency erupted in 1996, led by self-styled Maoist intellectuals who took Peru’s Shining Path as their inspiration. By early this year, their influence extended over nearly a third of the country. The government was paralyzed for months as the opposition tried to force the resignation of Prime Minister Koirala, an unpopular man widely accused of corruption. (During the King’s funeral procession, mourners hurled stones at the Prime Minister’s black Mercedes, shattering the windows and denting both sides.) In the week before the massacre, strikes had left much of the country without transport, and fermenting piles of rubbish built up in the potholed streets of Kathmandu.

  The unassuming King Birendra had come to seem like the only man who could command the affection of his frustrated and disillusioned people. “Even I,” the businessman Prabakhar Rana said, “looked on the King as our last hope. I went to sleep saying, at least we have the King.”

  *

  On the eleventh day of mourning, a katto ceremony is held, a practice that insures that a dead person’s soul will find peace and not disturb the living. It requires an act of sacrifice by a Brahman, a holy man who takes on the burden of the dead man’s soul by eating an unclean meal. He is then given money and an elephant and is driven from the Kathmandu Valley. King Birendra’s ceremony, on June 11th, had been marred by an unfortunate incident. As the elephant was on its way to the capital, a woman had run between its legs, honoring a local superstition that this would help her conceive a son. The startled beast picked her up with its trunk and threw her to the ground, killing her instantly. But if the portent for Birendra’s katto ceremony were bad, the omens for Dipendra’s, held two days later, were worse.

  First, there was trouble finding a Brahman who was willing to lose caste for Dipendra. The man who was finally persuaded to take on the role, Devi Prasad Acharya, looked nervous and unhappy. He sat cross-legged, under an awning, surrounded by objects representing Dipendra’s possessions. There was an implausible collection of furniture: a sofa and two armchairs, a few stools, a television set, and some bedding. A photograph of Dipendra gazed out from its silver frame, as though he were surprised to see his personal effects on display. Acharya seemed reluctant to touch the meal. Flies were buzzing around an uncooked goat’s leg. There were piles of fruit and vegetables. Finally, he swallowed a few mouthfuls, then retired behind a screen to dress in his mock royal costume.

  He mounted the waiting elephant, which set off down the path to the river, followed by a solemn procession of dignitaries and a less decorous swarm of cameramen.

  Suddenly the elephant trumpeted and turned back up the path, sending politicians and press scrambling for safety. The mahout hung on to its ear and managed to swing the beast around, but, again, it turned to lumber dangerously back toward the temple. The third time, with a second mahout clinging to its tail and its decorative canopy slipping, so that it looked like a dowager who has had too much to drink, the recalcitrant beast was coaxed into the river’s brown, fast-flowing current.

  A few days later, I found Acharya. He lived with his wife and son in a dark brick building near the Pashupatinath Temple, where the royal family had been cremated. I sat outside on a low stool, and Acharya sat opposite me, his legs crossed, his breath coming in gasps. A group of curious children gathered round to stare. He wore a vest, and around his neck hung a gold chain that had once belonged to Dipendra.

  The elephant had rebelled, he said, because he had been cheated. He had held out for a house, but they hadn’t given him one. Now, he said, the landlord was asking him to leave, because, since the katto ceremony he was unclean.

  The landlord smiled apologetically. “It’s true,” he said. “My family is religious and we cannot keep him here now.” Dipendra’s restless spirit was causing unease, it seemed, even after death.

  The day after Dipendra’s katto ceremony, the word spread that the official report on the massacre would be released that night, two weeks after the killings. In the parliamentary compound, I joined reporters and television crews who fought their way into a room that was clearly too small. A collection of weapons lay on a table in the center of the room. The report’s two authors took their places, and the speaker of the parliament began to summarize their conclusions.

  He read the statement in Nepali and in English, then stepped forward to show the evidence. He picked up the guns, one by one, as television crews elbowed each other aside for shots of him posing, smiling, with the guns that had killed the royal family. He picked up an M-16 assault rifle and pointed it playfully at the press. Beside me, a Nepalese journalist groaned and covered his eyes at this leap from tragedy to farce.

  A camouflage jacket and trousers belonging to Dipendra were pulled out of a black plastic bag and displayed, like the skin of an animal that had been shot. He held up a pair of gloves and black leather boots. Over the din, journalists were shouting
questions. The speaker declined to answer. “The report will be posted on the Internet,” he said.

  *

  If the report was intended to convince the public of the official story, it was not an overwhelming success. Despite its length and the evidence, it did not attempt to answer the central question: what was it that had triggered Dipendra’s murderous attack?

  The Crown Prince’s day had apparently been normal. He had spent the morning in his office and had lunched with his parents. That afternoon, he visited the Satdobato sports complex to check on the preparations for the upcoming national games, and then rejoined his parents to attend a formal tea party at the home of a guru. They returned to the palace – a family dinner was scheduled for later that evening – and the Prince went off to play a game of billiards, his aide arranging the balls for him. The palace billiard room had a bar and a CD player, and the young set often met there. It was connected by a deep veranda to a sitting room where the Queen Mother liked to spend these evenings. Nearby was the dining room, where the buffet would be laid out. The evenings included only close family, and the aides waited discreetly in a side office; even the servants withdrew, leaving the guests to help themselves to drinks.

  At 7:15 p.m. the Prince’s aide ordered some wine and poured Dipendra a single shot of Famous Grouse. Then, leaving the Prince to his billiard game, he went to arrange parking for the guests, who would be arriving shortly.

  The day before, an aide had telephoned Rabi Shumshere Rana, the King and Queen’s uncle, to invite him, as usual, for seven-thirty. Rabi did not wear his watch to these functions, he told me, because the King was so forgetful about dinnertime. “Sometimes it could be eleven o’clock before we ate, even midnight. If I wore a watch, I would get nervous.” He remembers, though, that he arrived promptly and that only one other guest was there, Maheshwar Kumar Singh, an uncle of the King by marriage. Rabi is one of the few people I met who has no doubt that the Crown Prince murdered his family. Rabi was standing a foot away from Dipendra when he shot the King.

  Dipendra, dressed in the traditional informal costume of kurta and pajamas, offered Rabi a drink. Rabi chose a White Horse Scotch. Other guests arrived, and Dipendra continued to dispense drinks. Then, unnoticed by Rabi, Dipendra and his aide went off by car to fetch his grandmother from her residence, a short distance away.

  When the Queen Mother was installed in her sitting room, Dipendra and the guests paid their respects; the protocol was that nobody should drink without first toasting her health. Rabi sat down with the old woman, while the younger members of the family gathered at the far end of the room to await the arrival of the King and Queen. The King arrived last, from his office, at eight-thirty.

  According to Dipendra’s phone records, he called Devyani on his cell phone at 8:12 p.m. – apparently from the billiard room. They spoke for one minute and nineteen seconds. At eight-nineteen, Dipendra called one of his aides and asked him to bring some “special” cigarettes, described in the report as a mixture of hashish and an unnamed black substance. Dipendra had been smoking such mixtures for at least a year, even at public events.

  According to Rabi, most of the guests were in the Queen Mother’s sitting room. The Prince had returned to the billiard room along with Paras and Nirajan, his younger brother. Although there had been no discussion of his marriage, Dipendra had told Paras that both his mother and grandmother opposed it, and he planned to discuss it with his father on Sunday. Then, bizarrely, according to some accounts, Dipendra appeared to fall down drunk and was carried to his room and left there to recover.

  Dipendra sounded drunk when Devyani called back, a while later. This time, they spoke for more than four minutes. In her taped evidence to the committee, Devyani said that she was worried enough by his slurred speech to call one of his aides, Raj Kumar Karki. Karki was at home preparing for a trip to the United States and told Devyani that he was off duty. A few minutes later, Devyani called back to insist. Still reluctant, Karki telephoned the aide on duty, whom Devyani had also telephoned, and who assured him that two servants had already been sent to check on the Prince.

  They found Dipendra on the floor, struggling to undo the buttons on his kurta. They helped him undress, and he lurched to the bathroom, where they heard him retching. Reappearing a few minutes later, he sent the servants away and called Devyani again to reassure her. “I’m going to sleep now,” he said. “Good night. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  But Dipendra did not go back to sleep. He got up and dressed in a camouflage shirt and trousers, black boots, an Army vest, a heavy leather ammunition belt, a military cap, and black leather gloves. Armed with an M-16 assault rifle, a 9-mm. Glock pistol, an MP-5K automatic submachine gun, and a twelve-bore shotgun, he left his apartment. His aide, seeing him leave, asked if he needed an emergency bag.

  “It’s not necessary now,” Dipendra replied.

  Rabi was still chatting with the Queen Mother. By the time he went to refresh his drink, most of the company had drifted back to the billiard room. The King was standing near the billiard table with a Coke, in conversation with his uncle Maheshwar Singh, his brother Dhirendra, and a brother-in-law. A group of women, including the Queen, were seated on a group of sofas near the billiard table.

  “What’s happening?” the King asked Rabi.

  “No news,” he replied.

  Maheshwar Singh apologized for his wife’s absence – she had an attack of gout. The King sympathized. Gout, he said, and high cholesterol ran in the family.

  It was then that Rabi noticed a man in full-camouflage fatigues, wearing black boots and a cap. “He had come up behind me as I was looking at the King,” he said. “It took me a minute to realize it was the Crown Prince. He was carrying a gun, one I hadn’t seen before. It was no more than a foot long. It could have been a toy.” Rabi said that he had raised his eyebrows in a gesture of inquiry. “I thought it was a joke,” he explained. “He always liked to dress up and play jokes as a boy. He was a lighthearted man.”

  Dipendra smiled at Rabi and, with no change of expression, fired three shots into his father. Then he left the room.

  Rabi could scarcely take in what he had seen. “The King had been shot in front of me. I was stunned. He didn’t jerk or flinch. He just leaned over very slowly and began to sink. He was wearing a pale-yellow silk kurta, and a patch of blood began to seep through it. He looked surprised, and said to his son, ‘What have you done?’ I still half thought it was a joke.”

  Rabi shouted for a doctor. As it happened, there was one in the room, a young Army doctor, related by marriage to the royal family. He rushed over and the King sank into his arms. Maheshwar Singh held the King’s head.

  The Queen went outside to call for help. Rabi left the billiard room and ran across the veranda to take care of the Queen Mother. Mastering his panic, he entered the room. The Queen Mother had not heard the shots, and Rabi closed the heavy door behind him, trying to think of a pretext for locking it. But the key was not in the lock.

  In the billiard room, the guests were still trying to register what had happened when Dipendra returned, his cap now pulled low over his eyes. From the doorway, he shot Gyanendra’s wife, Komal. Then he shot his brother-in-law Kumar Gorakh. As the Prince advanced into the room, the King’s brother Dhirendra tried to intercept him. “Baba,” he remonstrated, “you have done enough.” Wordlessly, the Prince shot him twice at point-blank range. The Prince then dropped the submachine gun and left the room. For a moment, there was silence – then pandemonium.

  At the far end of the room, Paras had kept his head. He pushed the young women down behind a sofa, then shouted to Maheshwar Singh to get out of the line of fire. Maheshwar sprinted toward Paras and threw himself onto the floor beside the young princesses. The King’s daughter, Shruti, dashed in the opposite direction, toward her father, but as she reached him she found her husband, Gorakh, lying wounded nearby. The Army doctor and the King’s sister Shoba were still trying to stop the bleeding from the King’s neck.r />
  The King struggled to get up. He picked up the discarded gun, but his sister snatched it from him and threw it on the floor. Then Dipendra reappeared at the door, this time holding the M-16. Terrified, the doctor dashed for the safety of the sofa. The Prince approached the King and shot him again, at point-blank range, in the head. Then he shot and killed another uncle, the helpless Kumar Khadga, then his aunt Sharada. The light on the M-16 flashed on and off as he fired. He shot his sister, and as she fell on top of her wounded husband Dipendra shot his aunts Jayanti and Ketaki.

  He turned toward the group that was cowering at the fur end of the room. Paras took a step toward him and shouted desperately, “What are you doing? What are you doing? Please go!” The Prince looked at him and hesitated. He did not open fire. He turned and left the billiard room, heading toward his own quarters.

  The Queen Mother, meanwhile, unaware of the slaughter next door, had grown so irritated by Rabi’s odd behavior that he felt obliged, at last, to tell her that the King had been shot. He told her to wait while he returned to the billiard room to see what was happening.

  The King’s aide-de-camp, on duty in a nearby office, as usual on these family occasions, had heard the gunfire, followed by the queen’s shout for a doctor. He called for the guard and was moving, with military caution, toward the billiard room when he heard the second burst of shots. The room’s glass door was locked, and he saw the royal family lying on the floor. The guards broke the door in, carried the King to a palace car, and raced to the hospital. By the time Rabi appeared, palace troops were frantically carrying the other casualties to cars.