There was no sign of the queen or her younger son, Nirajan. The last living witness to their fate was a kitchen boy who noticed them as they passed by. Prince Dipendra also went by, moving backward, a gun in each hand. The Queen was in pursuit, shouting at him. Then, from the dark garden, there was another burst of fire. Nirajan’s body was found near the path to Dipendra’s apartment. Dipendra discarded the M-16 and headed for his rooms, still followed, evidently, by the Queen. He climbed a few steps toward his bedroom, then turned and fired, killing his mother. He came back down the stairs, stepped over her body, returned to the path, and crossed a bridge. He was found by an aide, who had followed the sounds of his groans. He was lying by the bridge, shot through the head. His 9-mm. pistol had fallen from his hand into a pond.
There had been no further riots, despite a fear that the report would provoke them. Outside Kathmandu, though, there was another concern. On June 15th, the final day of state mourning, the Maoists attacked a police post in Nagar, in the west. Then, in a grim celebration on the eve of King Gyanendra’s fifty-fourth birthday, in early July, they killed forty-one policemen.
I flew down to the Tarai, the flatlands near the Indian border. It wasn’t under direct Maoist control, but the insurgents had a presence here, collecting “taxes” from businesses and aid agencies and occasionally showing their hand. I drove through paddy fields broken up by traces of a luxuriant jungle that had once covered the area. Now there was just a scattering of villages: crude mud-walled houses, thatched with rice straw. Barefoot children were filling plastic buckets at a pump. In a suffocating low brick schoolroom with a corrugated-metal roof, a woman was trying to teach an overcrowded class. She was not regularly employed, she explained. There were three salaried teachers, but they rarely appeared.
I asked the class if they knew what had happened to the King. They fidgeted on a crowded bench. A boy stood up. “Paras,” he said. “It was the son of the King’s brother who killed him.”
An aid worker told me that, in rural villages like this, only one in five women could read, and very few managed to complete secondary school and earn the School Leaving Certificate that could free a child from the absolute poverty of the village, with its malaria and kalaazar fever and its perpetual edge of hunger. Among the unemployed, he said, the Maoists found willing recruits. “They ask them what they have got out of democracy.”
Workers for an international aid agency in a neighboring district told me they pay a regular “tax” to the Maoists. When the charity was first approached and responded too slowly, a pair of masked men appeared and set fire to two vehicles. A nearby plywood factory was burned to the ground after the management declined to pay. Now the aid workers pay the taxes promptly, and the Maoists scrupulously issue receipts stamped with the heads of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
The next day, I waited at an appointed meeting place for the Maoists. Two hours went by before they filed into the building: four small, thin dark men, who greeted me not with raised fists but with hands pressed together in the traditional Nepali greeting. They gave their names and their positions, one of them standing at attention as he spoke, like a child reciting the alphabet. Another wrote my questions down carefully in a small notebook.
“This is a people’s war,” said one who had introduced himself as Mohan Shishid. “The system now is a government for only ten per cent of the people, even though it is elected.”
How long would the war take?
“Seven years, fifty years,” Mohan said. I glanced at the others. Their eyes were fixed on the table where we sat. I asked them if the palace massacre had changed their strategy.
It had before the massacre, they had called for an interim government and for an all-party convention to draft a new constitution. I had heard of this plan, which had met with a lukewarm response from the elected government. But now there was a new situation.
“We don’t believe Dipendra killed them,” Mohan insisted. “It was Gyanendra and Paras, supported by external powers – the C.I.A in Delhi, working with the Indian secret service.”
Why? I asked.
Because the Communist struggle was emerging in Southeast Asia and Birendra had been reluctant to deploy the army to stop it.
Our meeting broke off with the news that a police motorbike had been seen in the area. My visitors slipped out, one by one, and went their separate ways along the dirt road. The Maoists had vanished as quietly as they had appeared.
A short time later, in the Rolpa district, the Maoists captured seventy-one police officers. On July 19th, King Gyanendra ordered the Army in, a move his brother had always resisted.
The new King is rarely seen in public. The servants who had supplied Dipendra with drugs were dismissed, but the palace has done little to clear up the remaining mysteries. No one tested the Crown Prince’s blood to determine what he had ingested on the night of the massacre. A month afterward, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), the main opposition party, voiced a question shared by many of his countrymen: How, he asked, should the Nepali people view Dipendra, the fratricide, regicide, matricide, and suicide who had, nevertheless, briefly been their King? “Should he be honored,” he asked, “or treated as a criminal?” It was a question to which neither the government nor the palace replied.
MASSACRE AT THE PALACE
Jonathan Gregson
Jonathan Gregson was born and raised in India. He read and taught history at Oxford and Queen’s University in Canada before entering financial journalism. After working on the Sunday Telegraph’s city desk, he moved into travel writing, contributing regularly to the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Independent on Sunday and Time Out and won the Travelex Travel Writers Award 2000. He is the author of Kingdoms Beyond the Clouds, Bullet Up the Grand Trunk Road and Blood Against the Snow as well as Massacre at the Palace.
THE FAMILY REUNION
The invitations to the usual Friday soirée at Tribhuvan Sadan had been sent out by the Palace Secretariat, as usual. Only members of the royal family and their in-laws were on the list. It was to be an informal family gathering: first drinks, and then a late buffet dinner at which everyone helped themselves. No ADCs or bodyguards would need to be present, since this was a strictly private occasion held in the safest cordon of the palace. Servants came only to bring in the food or refresh the ice as required. The king and queen, their three adult children, and some twenty other royal relations were expected.
There was nothing unusual. Such informal family reunions had been going on for nearly thirty years. The tradition was started by King Birendra himself, shortly after he ascended the throne. It was a good way, he thought, to keep the extended royal family together. The gatherings were usually held on the third Friday of the Nepalese month. In the Nepalese lunar calendar, the date fell on June 1.
The venue for the family gathering shifted around the palace complex according to who was host that evening. Sometimes it was held at Sri Sadan, the private apartments of the king and queen. At other times it was at the queen mother’s residence. On June 1 it was the turn of the crown prince to play host, so the guests were invited to his private residence at Tribhuvan Sadan, the cluster of buildings that had grown around the hall where the king’s grandfather used to receive guests.
Now the original hall was used mainly as a billiards room, though it had been enlarged into an L-shaped room with a bar area, a music center, and an adjacent sitting room. It opened up onto a veranda and gardens on one side. The crown prince’s private apartments and bedchamber were just to the north, across a little bridge that spanned a stream leading to an ornamental pond. Other additions had been made to Tribhuvan Sadan over the years, obscuring the building’s original plan but making it a comfortable enough spot for a family get-together.
For this evening, the six sofas in the billards room had thoughtfully been arranged in two semicircles – one at each end, so the elderly royals could sit and chat together apart from the more boisterous younger members
of the family. When dinner was served, usually quite late in the evening, they would move to the dining room next door, where the food was already laid out. It was very informal. For the immediate members of the royal family, who as part of their “jobs” had to attend endless banquets and receptions, such cozy informality was a welcome relief. It was good to be able to talk without always having the servants around.
The only slight deviation from routine practice was that the invited guests had all been phoned personally by the crown prince’s ADC to confirm they were attending. Usually, if anyone were to trouble to check on this, it would have been the queen’s ADC and not the crown prince’s. It was only a minor alteration to the customary form, not the kind of thing to think about twice.
*
The evening light was fading as the crown prince crossed the bridge from his personal apartments to the main part of Tribhuvan Sadan. He had showered and changed since returning from the tea party with the royal guru, and seemed to be in a much better mood. As host for the evening, it was incumbent upon him to be there well before any of the guests arrived. He was accompanied by his usual ADC, Major Gajendra Bohara. He went to the bar and poured himself a stiff whiskey. From the generous choice available he selected his favorite brand, The Famous Grouse.
Dipendra told his ADC to stay with him while he was waiting for the first guests to arrive. He moved down to the billiards table and had Major Bohara feed him balls so that he could practice some shots. Servants were setting the dinner places next door. The clock ticked on toward 7:30 p.m., when the guests were supposed to arrive.
The first to appear was Maheshwar Kumar Singh. It was his habit to arrive early. Maheshwar had been born into an Indian princely family and had married one of King Birendra’s aunts. He had lived in Kathmandu for more than forty years and was a regular at the Friday night gatherings. A dapper figure in his Nepali cap and tight-fitting trousers, he bowed respectfully to the crown prince upon entering the room. Dipendra asked him what he would have to drink and poured out a whiskey with ice and water. At this point, the crown prince appeared to be “completely normal,” smiling and making small talk.
Next to arrive was another of the king’s uncles by marriage and a member of a great Nepali dynasty, the seventy-four-year-old Rabi Shamsher Rana. A retired general of the Royal Nepal Army, he too was a regular guest, though since his wife’s death four years previously he had attended the family reunions alone. As acting bartender for the evening, the crown prince served him a large scotch. Rabi toyed with it as other guests arrived, for the tumbler had been filled to the brim, and he could no longer drink as he had in the old days. Dipendra asked Rabi whether he would like a game of billiards, to which the old general replied that he could not play properly because he had hurt his hand in an accident.
The queen appeared, wearing a red sari, just as the king’s three sisters, Princesses Shanti, Sharada, and Shobha, arrived. Then Prince Nirajan wandered in with a CD in his hand. Princess Shruti was accompanied by her husband, Kumar Gorakh, but was without their two young daughters. There had been another party for the youngsters the previous week; this was for adult royals only. Besides, it was only a short distance to the palace from their family house in Kesar Mahal.
By now a stream of vehicles with assorted royal cousins and aunts aboard was entering by the palace’s West Gate. Smartly uniformed guards snapped to attention and saluted as they drove first up a tree-lined avenue toward the main palace before turning left, past the back of the Secretariat buildings, to Tribhuvan Sadan. The royal guests were dropped off outside the ADC’s office, from which it is but a short walk through a flower-filled garden to the veranda entrance to the billiards room. Cousin Paras arrived with his mother, Princess Komal, his sister Prerana, and his elegant Indian-born wife, Himani. He was escorting all the ladies this evening since his father, Prince Gyanendra, was out of town.
The king’s other brother, Dhirendra, arrived along with his three daughters and his son-in-law, Captain Rajiv Shahi. Following his divorce, Dhirendra had lost his royal title and all the privileges that go with it. But plain Mr. Dhirendra Shah was back in favor with the king, who still considered his youngest brother very much a part of the royal family. Moreover, recently he had been on better terms with his former wife, Princess Prekshya, who had also been on the invitation list for that evening. But she was unable to attend.
Another royal divorcée, Mrs. Ketaki Chester, arrived, as did her mother, Princess Helen, and her physically tiny, immensely sharp-witted sister, Princess Jayanti. Princess Helen was there mainly to talk to her sister-in-law, the queen mother, and they were to spend almost the entire evening closeted together in a separate room.
The crown prince busied himself welcoming guests and dispensing drinks. The younger crowd sat at the end of the room farthest from the billiards table, where they could smoke without being noticed. Dipendra was a heavy smoker, but even though he was nearly thirty he dared not light up in the presence of the king or queen mother. It was contrary to protocol. If he was smoking when his father appeared he would immediately stub out the cigarette and have someone carry it away surreptitiously.
Dipendra joined the young set and started talking with Cousin Paras. As ever, the “marriage question” was in the air, and Dipendra told Paras he had been called in by his parents to discuss it. Paras did not mention it for the time being because it seemed obvious to him that the crown prince had been drinking. “What will you have?” asked Dipendra, still acting the host. Paras said he was thinking of just having a Coke, to which Dipendra replied, “You just want a Coke? I’ve been drinking whiskey.”
Others present had begun to notice oddities in the crown prince’s behavior. Dipendra was a hardened drinker, capable of downing a dozen whiskeys without his composure becoming ruffled. “He certainly wasn’t drunk,” commented Ketaki Chester. “Normally when he’d been drinking he just went quiet. This time he was putting on an act, bumping into tables and so on.” Something abnormal was going on.
Paras asked the crown prince what had happened during the talk with his parents. “Oh, nothing,” he replied. “We’ve been talking about the marriage. I talked with my mother and grand-mother, and they both said no. I will talk about it to His Majesty on Sunday.”
Dipendra was closer to his cousin than to most of his immediate family. He admired Paras’s recklessness and envied his “bad boy” reputation, while he had to play the “model prince.” Paras had backed him in his decision to marry Devyani and remained Dipendra’s closest confidant for discussions about his troubled marriage prospects.
Around eight o’clock Dipendra left his guests to drive around the other side of the main palace to Mahendra Manzil, the queen mother’s residence. As host, it was his duty to greet his grandmother and escort her to the party. Whether anything was said between them concerning the marriage situation is not known, for Queen Mother Ratna has remained resolutely silent on the subject to this day. What was clear to everyone present was that when the crown prince returned to the party his mood had changed for the worse.
The queen mother went straight to the smaller room, known as Baitho Bathak, where she was accustomed to receive visitors. The older royals all trooped in to perform the ritual welcome on entering the queen mother’s presence and then to pay their respects. Dipendra stayed behind in the billards room, pulled out his mobile phone, and called Devyani.
They talked for a little over a minute. The contents of their conversation remain Devyani’s secret. It could well have been no more than small talk. They were in love, after all, and because they often could not see each other the two of them were in the habit of constantly chatting on their mobile phones. Devyani was preparing to go out to a party hosted by some wealthy Indian friends, Sanjay and Shilpa Dugar. If the crown prince could get away early after the family dinner party ended, it had been tentatively agreed they should meet afterward. But something said during their conversation appears to have upset Dipendra. His next call after Devyani was t
o his ADC, Gajendra Bohara. “Fetch my cigarettes,” he commanded brusquely.
Similar orders had been received many times before, and Bohara asked a royal orderly called Ram Krishna KC to make up a packet of five of the prince’s “specials,” containing the usual hashish plus some mysterious black substance. ADC Bohara then proceeded to walk over to the billiards room. Rather than enter a room full of royals, he stopped at the east door and entrusted the cigarettes to Prince Paras. It seemed the right thing to do, since Paras was all too aware of the crown prince’s smoking habits.
*
Only six minutes passed between Dipendra’s ordering up the drugs and the next call. It was incoming, and it was from Devyani’s personal landline. Dipendra did not accept the call, so it was transferred automatically to his ADC. Devyani said she was worried about the crown prince. His voice had sounded slurred. Could Bohara check out the situation? Curiously, she asked the ADC to look for him in his private rooms because he might not be feeling well.
Devyani was obviously very anxious about something. Once she had spoken to Bohara, she phoned another of Dipendra’s regular ADCs, Raju Karki, on his home number. He was off duty and preparing to fly out on a trip to the United States for further military training. Devyani insisted he go immediately to the palace. Whatever she told him, it must have been persuasive. He dressed in his ADC’s uniform and drove over to Narayanhiti at once.
Maybe she knew more than she was letting on. She was familiar with Dipendra’s sudden mood swings and what he was like on drugs. But why ask the ADCs to look in his rooms? After all, he had just called her from the party.
House of Snow Page 31