“I called out to her twice,” Ketaki recalls. “I said, ‘No, don’t go.’” She also saw Nirajan running after his mother. “It was the last I saw of them. Then I heard some shrieks.” What exactly happened outside is not at all clear. None of the main protagonists lived to tell what really happened. Other witnesses saw or heard things only from a distance, and their accounts are confused and at times contradict each other.
The king’s ADC on duty that night says he “heard gunshots and Her Majesty’s, a woman’s voice, saying ‘Call the doctor.’” The Queen’s ADC, who should have recognized her voice, is not so certain. “It could have been Shruti’s or Her Majesty’s voice,” he testified. Neither of these senior ADCs moved from their office to investigate the firing. Instead, they both say they immediately tried to call the doctor. One used the ADC’s office line; the other was on his mobile. Neither of them was successful.
The shooting inside the ballroom was all over in three to four minutes. During that critical period not one of the ADCs, whose office was less than 150 yards away, made it to the scene of the slaughter quickly enough to intervene. The junior ADC to the king, Captain Pawan Khatri, called up the military police on his radio set and then “ran forward.” By the time he reached Tribhuvan Sadan the firing had stopped. He did see “a man in combat fatigues leave from the back door, on the garden side, with a gun whose light was still on.”
Several palace servants, including kitchen boy Santa Bahadur Khadka, saw a “lady in a red sari” running through the garden. Queen Aishwarya was wearing a red sari that evening. He also saw the crown prince moving backward with guns in two hands. As he was moving backward, the woman in red was confronting him. “The two were not talking; they were running, shouting, screaming. I cannot say who was speaking. The women in the billiards room were [also] screaming.”
Santa Bahadur Khadka may not recall what was said, but others within the palace that night apparently can. For besides the public report on the “palace incident,” two other secret reports were drawn up on what actually happened that night – one for the king’s principal secretary and the other for the head of palace security. Neither has been made public. Their contents are, however, known to senior palace officials.
It appears that after the shooting inside the billiards room had stopped, the gunman retreated across the gardens toward the crown prince’s private apartments. Queen Aishwarya pursued him, followed by Prince Nirajan. She always had been a tough-minded woman, and now she was furious enough to confront the armed man in camouflage fatigues even if he had a loaded weapon in each hand. She just kept screaming at him – words including a Nepali phrase equivalent to “you filthy bastard.” It was the ultimate act of confrontation. Perhaps she felt she was invulnerable, that her own son would never dare to touch her. If so, it was a serious misjudgment.
Two bursts of automatic fire were subsequently heard coming from the garden. It seems that Prince Nirajan was shot first. That view is supported from the position in which his body was discovered and the location of the spent cartridges, since no eyewitness to his death has come forward.
Nirajan may have been trying to protect his mother against his elder brother’s fury. If so, it was a supremely brave thing to do, since Nirajan was unarmed. His own pistol, the same model 9 mm. Glock that his elder brother used, was later found inside the billiards room. It had not been fired once that night.
The twenty-two-year-old prince was shot nearly a dozen times and must have died instantly. He had two gaping bullet wounds to the head. He collapsed on the lawn in a pool of his own blood. His body was so riddled with bullets that when rescuers finally arrived they could scarcely lift it intact.
Only the queen still faced Dipendra. By now his father, sister, and brother all lay dead or dying. Only his mother lived on to challenge him.
Even now, in this eye of the storm, and after all the violence unleashed on those around her, Queen Aishwarya displayed a degree of self-confidence or recklessness that is hard to fathom. Rather than flee for her life into the surrounding darkness, the queen again approached the gunman. She ran across the garden and up the marbled steps leading to Dipendra’s bedchamber, screaming as she went. The crown prince seems to have been backing off, or at least walking backward. Maybe her hunch was that he could not bring himself to shoot his own mother. Or maybe she was heading for Dipendra’s rooms so that she could seize one of the other weapons he kept there, either to defend herself or kill the man who had murdered her husband and her two other children.
While the gunman continued to withdraw up the stairs that led to his bedchamber, she confronted him face to face. The queen had climbed seven steps when she must have realized what would happen next, for suddenly she turned around as though to flee. The gunman fired a long burst, hitting her from behind. Her skull was blown apart and most of her brains scattered over a wide area. Fragments of brain tissue, jawbone, and teeth, the red tika she had placed on her forehead, her ear-pins and broken red glass bangles were found in different places around where she fell. As with Nirajan, her body was also pumped full of bullets. Expert opinion confirms that she was shot from behind.
No one witnessed the crown prince killing his own mother. Nor did anyone actually see the final act of this tragedy. For this, Dipendra must have walked back toward the billiards room, crossing the small bridge over a stream feeding into the ornamental pond. Around this time somebody claims to have heard him shriek out “like a madman.” The next thing they heard was a single shot. Having murdered all his immediate family, Dipendra apparently turned his gun on himself.
At that very last moment, maybe even he was scared. For the clinical efficiency displayed in the shooting of so many relatives was markedly absent in this attempted suicide. Did he lose his nerve? Or was it because, for some reason, he held the pistol in his left hand? That should not have made a great difference because, although Dipendra was right-handed, when it came to firing guns he was effectively ambidextrous.
A single bullet entered just behind his left ear and went right through the brain, leaving a massive exit wound slightly higher on the right side of his head. But it was not enough to kill Dipendra outright. He was found lying on the grass, groaning loudly, near the edge of the ornamental pond. There was a Buddha statue nearby.
*
Only slowly did the full extent of the carnage inside the billiards room become apparent. The bodies of the dead and wounded lay muddled together on the blood-soaked carpet, while those lucky enough to come through unscathed were still cowering in shock. The floor was a mess of scattered articles of clothing, much of it blood-smeared, along with broken spectacles and slippers and hastily discarded whiskey glasses. After all the noise of gunfire, there now followed an eerie silence.
“King Birendra was the only one who moved at all, making signals with his hands. All the others were quiet,” said Ketaki, who by then had already lost a lot of blood. “Nobody was crying out for help,” she explained, “because we knew help would come from somewhere. Then I heard Paras’s voice.”
The younger cousin with a bad reputation seems to have been the only person capable of doing anything. Ketaki says “Paras was very, very controlled. If anyone came out alive in that room, it is due to him.”
After Dipendra had walked away into the gardens, in pursuit of or pursued by his mother and brother, Paras got up from behind the sofas and began moving around the scene of devastation. He remembers, “There were people on the floor. I approached Dhirendra to find out what happened. He said, ‘Paras, my feet don’t move, I can’t move my feet, please move them.’ I moved them a little, but he couldn’t feel it.” The badly wounded Dhirendra then said, “I can’t see straight, look after your Aunt Ketaki.” Paras says, “Then he told me to look for the children.”
At that point Paras was still unaware that his own mother, Princess Komal, had fallen too. Then he saw her try to raise herself up and slump back down again because the dead Princess Shanti had collapsed on top of her. He
helped his mother into an upright position, and she said, “I’m not well, I’m not well,” all the while holding her bloodied forehead. “At first I thought she’d been shot in the forehead,” he confessed. But on closer inspection there was no wound there. He soon ascertained that the blood was from Princess Shanti’s wounds and not his mother’s.
After that Paras ran to the queen mother, who had remained in her separate room throughout the massacre. He had heard more gunfire outside the billiards room and initially thought it came from the queen mother’s private chamber. “I ran over there,” he said, “but nothing had happened.” So he briefly explained to his grandmother and Princess Helen that the king and many others had been shot, though sparing such elderly ladies all the details.
He next ran outside to find the ADCs, who had finally arrived. He explained to them, “There are dead people as well as wounded ones. Ignore the dead, but immediately rush the wounded to hospital.” He ordered them to break down the glass panes in the French doors to permit easier evacuation.
In the event, the king was carried out first, although in Ketaki’s opinion he was by then “definitely dead.” But from there on Paras insisted that the rescuers evacuate the living wounded first, helping to get them into whatever vehicles were available and dispatching them to the hospital. Some, like Ketaki, were completely disoriented. She was losing blood fast from her shoulder wound, but still she insisted on finding her shoes because she was worried about cutting her feet on all the broken glass.
With the evacuation under way and more help arriving, Paras moved on to those still unaccounted for. “I told three people to go and look for the crown prince, the queen, and Nirajan,” he says. The crown prince’s ADC soon came running back to report that Dipendra had shot himself but was still alive. Both the queen and Nirajan were beyond hope. So Paras and ADC Gajendra Bohara loaded the two royal princes, Dipendra and Nirajan, into the same vehicle and drove them to hospital. It was a macabre load, killer and victim both propped up in the backseat together.
HIMALAYA
Michael Palin
Michael Palin is an English comedian, actor, writer, and television presenter. In addition to his numerous film and television credits, he has also written several bestselling travel books, including Around the World in 80 Days.
My guide to the Nepali capital is Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times, an English weekly with a circulation of 8,000. It’s crisply laid out and well designed and has a sharp, well-informed, provocative style. The most recent edition carries the latest World Terrorism Index, which shows that, despite the Maoists, Nepal still comes below the UK.
So I’m not entirely surprised to find that Kunda Dixit is an urbane, elegant figure with a shock of prematurely silver hair, dressed immaculately in a pale grey labada and knitted tunic. I am surprised to hear that his real love is flying and his fantasy is that, with a pilot suddenly taken ill, Kunda takes control, lands the plane perfectly and is asked to take over the national airline.
We meet up in Patan, once one of three independent kingdoms in the valley, and now almost a suburb of Kathmandu.
The jewel at the heart of Patan (pronounced Parton, as in Dolly) is Durbar Square, a dazzling collection of buildings dating back 350 to 500 years, to the days before Prithvi Naryan Shah, king of Ghorka, unified the kingdoms of the valley in 1768 and created modern Nepal. There are temples, palaces with golden gates, a huge bell suspended between two pillars and a lion on a column. Nepal was never colonized, so the architecture has no Western derivative and its distinctive fusion of Indian and Tibetan influences was created by the Newars, the people of the valley, and craftsmen of the highest order.
As we wander through the colonnades of the Krishna Mandir, a stone-built Hindu temple topped with a shikhara, the characteristically Indian, curvilinear spire, we can look across to the Royal Palace, in a completely different style, refined by the Newari architect Arniko in the 14th century. It has powerful horizontals of brick and timber with deep, overhanging eaves, projecting balconies cantilevered out over finely carved, timber supports, and, inside, an elegantly proportioned chowk, or courtyard.
Kunda tells me that the Kathmandu Valley, once a lake, is rich in fertile, alluvial soil. The kingdoms, grown fat from consistently good harvests, ploughed their surpluses into religion, festivals and fine buildings, competing with each other for the tallest tower or the biggest bell.
“They used to say there were more temples in Kathmandu than houses and more gods than people.”
The buildings are not purely for show. A family arrives to do a puja at Krishna Mandir, unsettling a flock of pigeons, who create a sharp gust of wind as they take off, circle and descend en masse a few feet away.
The most dramatic building in the square is the five-storeyed pagoda of the Taleju Mandir, with a bronze stupa at its apex. The pagoda, a tapering succession of roofs symbolizing the various stages of enlightenment, was perfected here in Nepal, and it was Arniko who took the design to the Ming court at Peking.
One of the pleasures of meandering round Durbar Square is the immense amount of carved and sculpted detail. In the Royal Palace there are stone slabs called shildayras that carry historical records from the Lichavi period, 1,800 years ago. On the beams in the chowks are intricately worked and painted lotus flowers, dragons and swastikas, and the stone walls of Krishna’s temple are adorned with athletic, erotic couplings.
“Krishna is the god of love,” explains Kunda. “He’s a young guy with a flute and girlfriends all over the world.”
I’m rather envious.
“Our gods don’t tend to have girlfriends. It’s something we’ve rather missed out on.”
The smallest of the old kingdoms was centred on Bhaktapur, seven miles east of Kathmandu. On our way out there we’re waved past a police checkpoint set up since the Maoists recently brought their attacks to Kathmandu itself. They’re searching all the buses that run out to the country areas in the east. According to Kunda, journeys that took 12 hours can now take 48.
Kunda’s view is that the Maoists’ recent change of tactics, targeting civilians in the capital, has lost them support.
“It’s not that the Maoists are terribly brilliant or strong, just that successive governments have been weak and fractious and corrupt, and they (the Maoists) have tapped into that bedrock of neglect and apathy and frustration in the people. They’ve grown so fast precisely because everything else has been in such disarray.”
With an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 rebels, with looted arms from the police and the army, how does he see the future?
There can, he is sure, be no military solution. There has to be compromise. The institution of monarchy is quite strong and Nepalis identify their country with it, but the King can no longer be an absolute ruler. He must be firm but fair. (Which seems to suggest he’s neither.)
He points to achievements brought about by strong policies resolutely applied.
Forestry conservation has been a big success since local people were given their own areas of forest to administer, the hydroelectric programme, building of roads, water improvement projects. All give him hope.
“And,” he concludes, “Nepal’s press has never been freer.”
We’re turning into the bus park below the walls of Bhaktapur.
“The Prime Minister has been sacked, parliament is in limbo, but the press is free.”
The day that started promisingly is growing grey and gloomy as, having paid our $10 fee to enter the city, we climb up the steps and in through a narrow, rose-brick gateway.
For Basil it’s a nostalgic return. Much of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, on which he worked as both actor and stills photographer, was shot in Bhaktapur. Though smaller than Kathmandu or Patan, Bhaktapur, whose name means “city of devotees”, once boasted 99 separate chowks. A powerful earthquake in 1934 did serious damage and now only five of these grand courtyards are left. That they are here at all is largely due to a German-sponsored reconstruction programme. The con
nection with Nepal seems a curious one, but it goes back a long way. A German Jesuit sent one of the Malla kings of Nepal a telescope as early as 1655. Hitler sent a later king a Mercedes.
As in Patan and, indeed, old Kathmandu itself, there is some glorious work in Bhaktapur. The Sun Dhoka (Golden Gateway) is an arched entrance surrounded by richly ornamented deities covered in gilded, embossed copper. The figures of the gods are still worshipped and I see young Nepalis touching them and then their foreheads as they pass. All over the temple area there are statues and carvings worn shiny by touch. We clamber up into a small, octagonal, carved timber gem called Chyasin Mandap, the Pavilion of the Eight Corners, an 18th-century original, meticulously restored around an earthquake-proof, steel shell. A much grander building stands nearby: Nyatapola, the tallest pagoda in Nepal. Five-tiered and standing 100 feet high, it somehow survived the 1934 earthquake quite unscathed. One might imagine this would increase its attraction for devotees, but when I climb up the long, steep staircase past sculpted ranks of temple guardians – wrestlers, elephants, lions, griffins – I find only dust and a group of street children. Apparently, this magnificent building is dedicated to an obscure Tantric goddess, Siddhi Lakshmi, who very few people have heard of, let alone worship. As the temples rely on rich patrons for their upkeep, Nyatapola remains neglected.
There is hope. Kunda is generally optimistic about the way the old city centres are looked after (all three are UNESCO sites). He’s much less happy about the way modern development is going. The urban sprawl around Kathmandu is, he feels, destroying the identities of the three cities. They are becoming part of a Kathmandu conurbation, which is bad for Nepal. It increases the centralization of wealth and government in the valley, further alienating the country areas, and puts great pressure on limited resources. Water supply is becoming a major problem. The latest proposal is to bring water in direct from a glacier, 15 miles away. It will be the biggest engineering project in Nepal’s history, and if it works it will only bring more people and more money to the central valley, further dividing the country. And it would not go unopposed. Only yesterday, Kunda reminds me, the Maoists destroyed a hydroelectric plant.
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