THE ROYAL ASTROLOGER
The royal astrologer lived in Patan, just south of the Bagmati. Hardly a move was made by the king or any other members of the royal family without consulting him. He advised them on auspicious dates for travel plans, diplomatic engagements, business meetings and every major personal decision in their lives. He was also a key figure in the selection process of the Kumari and determined auspicious times for all her rituals. If things went wrong, the royal astrologer was, alongside the tantric priests, first to be consulted. I hoped he would be able to shed some light on what had been going on in those fateful weeks leading up to the royal family massacre.
Patan is still often referred to by its older name – Lalitpur, City of Loveliness. Once, the two Malla cities of Lalitpur and Kathmandu would have been totally distinct but now, thanks to the continuous sprawl of buildings in between, Patan has become virtually a suburb of the capital. Its Durbar Square is barely three miles from the centre of Kathmandu.
Even now, however, Patan adheres to a gentler, kinder pace of life. Down labyrinthine backstreets, hidden courtyards echo with the sounds of hammers tapping against bronze, the rush of bellows and blowtorches, the insect whine of metal-grinders. Most of the original medieval layout survives. Elderly men in topis sit on resting platforms watching the world go by; women in saris wash their hair under makara spouts in sunken bathing-tanks; children chase each other around courtyard chaityas.
In Kathmandu, it was Mahendra Malla who had made his mark on the Durbar Square; here the temples and statues, pavilions and palace courtyards, devotional gongs and bells, sing the praises, first and foremost, of Siddhinarasimha Malla, Mahendra’s great-grandson. Siddhinarasimha was the king who, according to legend, had recaptured the mantra of Taleju as it blazed across the heavens, having escaped the dying lips of his elder brother Lakshminarasimha incarcerated in the royal palace in Kathmandu. The Goddess’s mantra, it is said, had given the young prince the power to defeat the notoriously hostile nobles of Patan and take the throne.
One of the first things Siddhinarasimha had done to secure his lineage in Patan was establish a temple to Taleju next to the royal palace, with a separate shrine for her in a courtyard he called Mul Chowk – a carbon copy of the system in the palace complexes in Bhaktapur and Kathmandu.
Siddhinarasimha’s devotion to Taleju and his powers as a siddha were legendary. He would meditate for days on a stone platform in the palace courtyard of Sundari Chowk, sitting naked in the biting winds of winter and intensifying his austerity in summer by lighting fires all around him. And every morning the Rajarsi – Sage among Kings – as he was known, would walk across the water of the magnificent tank he had built in Taleju’s honour in the palace gardens known as the Bhandarkhal, to pick lotuses for the Goddess.
While his private worship focused on his lineage Goddess, Siddhinarasimha was – like all Malla kings – conscientious in his patronage of the other gods. The stone shikara to Krishna at the entrance to Durbar Square was built by him; and at the far end, the magnificent Vishveshvara temple dedicated to Shiva, guarded by a pair of colossal stone elephants, was his doing too.
Siddhinarasimha, it is said, had vowed never to leave his people for the kingdom of heaven until the stone elephants of Vishveshvara temple had gone down to nearby Manidhara fountain to drink. He died, according to the chronicles, in 1710 at the grand old age of 104, his spirit living on in his beloved city, as the stone elephants, still firmly in their place, attested.
Walking through Patan’s Durbar Square, meandering between temples, is far less stressful than negotiating the square in Kathmandu. Cars and motorbikes have been excluded from the area and pedestrians can take their fill of the temples without fear of being run down. On a clear day the snow peaks of Ganesh Himal power into the sky beyond the northern end. It is easy, strolling between the pagodas, to feel how a Malla city was intended to be – a bridge between heaven and earth.
The royal astrologer was up to his eyes in paperwork and consultations. His narrow house in the corner of a tiny courtyard, five minutes’ walk beyond Durbar Square, was full to bursting. I joined the queue outside his door. Hill women in patterned tunics and full skirts, with heavy nose ornaments and ears dragged down with gold, squeezed up the narrow staircase; beside them, suited businessmen, sari-ed grandes dames with black handbags, and boys jangling motorbike keys. They had all come, bringing their birth-charts with them, for help with life’s decisions and conundrums – what date to fix a wedding, whether to apply for a job in the Gulf, how to get a child to do better at school, what day to move house, what business to invest in, what time to set for a sacred-thread ceremony or first rice-feeding ritual, in what compass direction to start looking for a husband.
By the time I reached the front of the queue it was getting dark. The astrologer’s office was a low-ceilinged room with pea-green walls, lit by a single strip-light. On one side several students in jeans – the astrologer’s assistants – sat around a formica coffee table poring over heaps of scrolls, tapping at calculators, pulling battered reference books and curling papers down from pigeonholes on the wall.
The royal astrologer himself was on the other side of the room, nearest the window. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind a low desk, wrapped in a grey shawl with a brown woolly hat on his head, rocking from side to side like an irritable old elephant. His fingers were covered in chalk and chalky fingerprints covered his spectacles. There were birth-charts and blackboards, ink pots, exercise books and mathematical tables scattered all over his desk, and rupee notes floating about which he stuffed distractedly into a drawer as if trying to clear his mind. Behind him was a portrait of Ganesh, garlanded with Christmas tinsel, and faded photographs of himself and King Birendra with ’70s sideburns.
He looked up as we sat down at last on the floor in front of him. “Ah! British lady,” the ageing astrologer said, peering at me with interest through his spectacles. “I was speaking to the BBC on the telephone just the other day. They wanted to know if I had any new predictions.” He flicked a hand towards the customers still waiting beyond the doorway. “But you see what my life is like. I have no time now for catastrophes and revolutions. Every minute is taken up with the flimflam of day-to-day.”
He handed me his card – “Prof. Dr. M.R. Joshi PhD (Urban study and planning), Royal Astrologer and Geo-Astro Consultant”.
“My family have been astrologers for thirty-two generations,” he said. “I am eighty-two years old. I have spent seventy-six years at this desk and now I work harder than ever. I wake at 2 a.m., I see my first clients at 6 a.m. Sometimes I see my last clients at ten at night. I have no computer. All my calculations take a long time, the old way. I have barely time to sleep. It is not like in the past, when we had dozens of scribes and apprentices at our beck and call.”
He gestured with the same dismissive flick towards his assistants. “They want to be astrologers but they don’t have such good training. They have their minds filled with I don’t know what. They don’t know how much they have to study. They want quick answers.”
He rattled off his own education, beginning at the age of six painting almanacs under his father; then sixteen years of Sanskrit, higher mathematics geochemistry, geophysics, geography and astra-science at university in Benares; followed by long sojourns abroad, studying at the Greenwich Observatory in London, poring over ancient charts in the Map Room of the British Museum, and then at universities in Mexico and the United States. But, like being a doctor, he said, no amount of training could beat experience.
“My father predicted the great earthquake of 1934 when I was a boy of fourteen,” he said. “He worked it out two months before. He knew when it would happen so he told us to escape. We ran to Durbar Square. All these buildings collapsed. I rebuilt this house in clay with my own hands.”
The old astrologer’s life flashed by in a series of numerical computations.
“In 1942, when I was twenty years of age, my father and I pr
edicted the end of the Second World War – our prime minister at the time wanted to know how long it would last. In 1991 I predicted the start of the Gulf War. It took thirty-five days to calculate the time of the first attacks.”
Traditionally there were four royal astrologers who would cross-check their findings to make the most accurate predictions. Being the oldest, Mangal Raj Joshi was the most senior. Though the royal astrologers also had the country’s interests to safeguard, their primary responsibility was to the king. They were invested with the vital task of drawing up horoscopes for members of the king’s family. From their reading of the position of the heavens at the precise time of birth, it was the astrologers who would suggest the name of each royal child and who would inform the palace of the right moment for all the customary rites of passage. No state business, no foreign trips, meetings or receptions, no pujas or ceremonial duties were carried out by any members of the royal family without first consulting the astrologers. Horoscopes were drawn up, too, for important visiting dignitaries so the most auspicious days could be chosen for meetings and to give the king some indication of the characters he was dealing with.
“I have King George V’s horoscope somewhere,” said Mr Joshi with a twinkle in his eye.
“What about Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles?” I asked, trying to steer Mr Joshi closer to the present.
“I have theirs, too,” he said.
“How did you find the details of their birth?”
“Ah, for people like the queen of England these events are always well documented. But nowadays it is easy to find out, even if someone is not famous when they are born. My students can get information from the Internet. Recently we did charts to see who would win the American presidential election. I was able to tell the king the probable outcome.”
“Were you right?”
“Fortunately,” he grinned.
He unwound a scroll that was lying on his desk. The chart, known as a chinna in Nepali, or jata in Newari was made of shiny yellow paper, about six inches wide and two feet long, edged with decorative floral borders in red and green. It was covered in red and black letters or ‘syllables’ in Devanagiri script – black being the given letters of the known astrological formula; red, the added letters of that person’s particular details, such as the exact time and location of birth, as recorded by the midwife; the name of the nearest shrine or temple to which they were born; their parents’ star signs; number of siblings; the individual’s name. This is the name the priest gives a baby at the time their chinna is drawn up and is often quite different from the familiar name used by friends and family. It is the official name used for all subsequent ritual purposes and pujas, including weddings and old-age ceremonies.
At the top of the chart was a figure of a deity in white; the bottom was divided into squares. There were wheels and geometric designs and tiny numerical figures all over it. I stared at it blankly as Mr Joshi prattled on about “lunar mansions” and “divisions” and “signs in the ascendant”. It looked utterly incomprehensible.
I asked if this was what the king’s birth-chart looked like. He couldn’t show me that, he said – no one could see it except royal priests and astrologers; but royal birth-charts were always much more elaborate than anyone else’s. The horoscopes of even the minor royals could be several metres long. In the past, royal birth-charts were truly magnificent things. Mr Joshi remembered seeing the horoscope of King Tribhuvan when he was a child. It was edged with gold and so large it had taken four men to carry it into the room.
“Nowadays, the palace is not willing to spend money on a horoscope like this,” Mr Joshi said. “But without details – and without time to analyse – it is difficult to make accurate predictions.”
“Were you able to make any predictions about this year?” I asked.
The royal astrologer shifted uncomfortably.
“This is a very difficult year,” he said, “very inauspicious. Everyone knew there was going to be some disaster. We knew the six days around the cusp of May/June were going to be very bad for the king. But it was complicated... I thought there was going to be an earthquake. I told the newspapers that.”
For decades seismologists had been warning that an earthquake in the Kathmandu Valley was long overdue. The astrologer was under considerable pressure to predict when this would be. In 2001 it seemed to have blinded him to other possibilities.
The world over, 2001 had been a year of exceptional turmoil, the astrologer explained. He cited the Gujarat earthquake that had killed 20,000 and left 600,000 people homeless in January, a spate of typhoons in Taiwan, tornadoes in the United States, floods in Bangladesh, earthquakes in El Salvador, numerous high-profile plane crashes and, of course, most recently, the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September.
But it had also been a year of portent for King Birendra. A month or so before the massacre, Saturn had moved into Taurus – the sign it had last entered twenty-nine years ago. In the West this was known as a “Saturn return”, an astrological phenomenon occurring at twenty-seven to twenty-nine or thirty-year intervals in a person’s life, coinciding with the approximate time – twenty-nine and a half years – it takes Saturn to make one orbit around the sun. According to stargazers, a “Saturn return” has dramatic impact on a person’s life, triggering a midlife crisis, perhaps, or a divorce or a volte-face in careers. It is the moment when a person crosses a major threshold, leaving behind one stage of their life and moving into the next. Birendra had been crowned on 31 January 1972, at the age of twenty-seven when Saturn was in Taurus. Twenty-nine years later, the return of Saturn into Taurus signified dramatic upheavals in the king’s personal life, quite possibly jeopardizing his very position on the throne.
“What happens when there are bad planetary influences like this?” I asked. “Is there anything to be done to avoid them?”
“The planetary positions in the heavens and their effect on human beings are like the signals we receive through a radio or TV set,” said Mr Joshi. “We have no influence over the programmes – but,” he added with a wry smile, “we can use the remote control to change channels.”
This was where the dyas came in. Worshipping a particular deity at a given time could ameliorate or even banish bad influences. It could change the course of fortune. Much of Mr Joshi’s work was advising his clients on which puja to do, when, where and to which deity.
“Sometimes though, the influences are too strong to change,” added Mr Joshi cautiously. Usually a family’s chinnas are kept together in a jewellery box in the safekeeping of the eldest female member. But sometimes a horoscope is so powerful that it has to be kept in its own box, sometimes even in a separate room. If arguments break out within a family, it could be because opposing chinnas are kept too close together.
“What about Dipendra’s horoscope?” I asked. “What was that like?”
“I drew Prince Dipendra’s horoscope myself,” he said. “It was not bad – it was quite good, in fact. Only the raj yoga – the rulership signs – were destructive. It did not look likely he was ever going to become king.”
Another astrologer had interpreted this to mean that the prince’s existence could prove destructive to his father’s. Another read in it signs that were antipathetic to Dipendra’s mother and had recommended, immediately after Dipendra’s birth, that the baby crown prince be separated from Queen Aishwarya for a week in order to purify their relationship; but this was apparently not done.
“The birth-chart showed also complications with marriage,” said Mr Joshi. “We advised King Birendra to delay his son’s marriage until the prince was thirty-five. This seemed the safest way to proceed.”
But it was precisely this delay that seemed to have triggered Dipendra’s fury. The crown prince had been determined, according to his friends, to become officially engaged to the “love of his life” before his thirtieth birthday – 27 June 2001. His parents’ refusal to grant him his wish had made him apoplectic. It
was not just his age but his girlfriend that was the problem. Two years older than Dipendra, Devyani Rana was wealthy, beautiful and highly educated but she was also, according to the press, descended from the “wrong type” of Rana: the Chandra Shamsher Ranas – the Ranas who had been responsible for keeping the Shah dynasty prisoner for generations. Her father, Pashupati Shumsher Rana, was one of the most powerful men in the country. She was also the granddaughter, on her mother’s side, of an Indian maharaja: a provenance that would have provoked further opposition from Dipendra’s dictatorial mother.
I wondered, though, if there hadn’t been other objections to Devyani as the future queen. Had Mr Joshi seen Devyani’s horoscope?
“It was not compatible with Dipendra’s,” he said solemnly.
Devyani’s mother, Rani Usha, however, had been ardently in favour of the match. In the 1960s she had been rejected in her own bid to marry Birendra, then the crown prince. It seemed she was determined her daughter would succeed where she had failed. Rani Usha herself went, with her husband, to consult Mr Joshi.
“I told Devyani’s parents – I said to them, ‘No matter how many pujas you perform, your daughter will never marry the crown prince.’ They refused tolisten...” said Mr Joshi.
I began to sense something of the power play that was supposed to have arisen between the palace and Devyani’s family. Rumour had it that Devyani’s mother had commissioned two priests from Gwalior to travel to Nepal to perform a tantric puja to remove the obstacles to the match. Apparently they had arrived at the Yak & Yeti, one of Kathmandu’s top hotels, in late May where they had aroused suspicion by asking how to procure certain puja materials such as parrots and snakes. The puja in question was thought to be that of Bagalamukhi, a fearsome weapon-wielding Hindu goddess. Devyani’s mother had commissioned a painting of the goddess from a renowned citraikar in the previous weeks, sending it back repeatedly to the artist to add more arms and weapons. Officials at Narayanhiti Palace had been alerted and Queen Aishwarya was supposed to have commissioned a counter puja to block their efforts. Many people claimed this exonerated the crown prince. Dipendra had clearly not been the master of his own actions. He had merely been caught in the crossfire of tantric warfare. I remembered the account one of the survivors of the massacre had given reporters, describing the crown prince bursting into the room looking like the goddess Kali wielding countless weapons.
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