Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  “I advised the king that, in my opinion, the Maoists had a silly name but a valid point of view. The poverty in the countryside was unacceptable,” Ruit says. “I told him I’d operated in some of the angriest districts, and cautioned him about the fires the government could start by cracking down too hard.”

  By the spring of 2001, Tilganga had become widely recognized as one of the kingdom’s finest hospitals, ophthalmic or otherwise. By then, Ruit had prescribed glasses and performed cataract surgery for several members of the royal family. And after he’d replaced the Queen Mother’s aging cataracts with crystal-clear locally produced IOLs, her daughter, Queen Aishwarya, had become one of his strongest advocates. Ruit was frequently invited to dinner at the palace. “During these visits, I became friendly with Prince Dipendra,” Ruit says. “He was a good drinker, and we shared a fondness for a few pegs of scotch whiskey.”

  Dipendra, the twenty-nine-year-old heir to Nepal’s throne, was even less formal than his father. He was a popular figure in Kathmandu, where he was known as “Dippy” for the carefree way he carried himself in public. “Dipendra was a modern fellow, educated in Britain,” Ruit says. “He always had the latest-model computer, and one day, when I walked into the palace, he was talking on the first mobile phone I’d ever seen. He also had a reputation as something of a playboy who collected mistresses. But I never saw that side, or he never let me.”

  During Ruit’s visits to the palace, he and Dipendra often discussed the Maoist uprising. The prince knew that the country’s leadership would have to come to some accommodation with the Maoists, Ruit says, and he hoped to absorb them into the political system, rather than face them on the field of battle. During their drinking sessions, in the cozy billiard room behind the pink modernist palace’s austere public spaces, the prince sought out Ruit’s opinion as if he were speaking to an architect of social change rather than simply an eye doctor, and perhaps, if Ruit had his way, he was. “I wanted Tilganga to show other Nepalese, including the royals, that we can care for our own people,” Ruit explains. “To be a model for what we can build when we don’t let our efforts get buggered up by corruption.”

  Ruit believed that, by example, he could influence Nepal’s monarchy to alleviate the poverty it presided over. But his hopes came crashing down on June 1, 2001. According to eyewitnesses interviewed by the official commission charged with making sense of that evening’s events, the crown prince had a violent argument with his parents during a large family gathering over his desire to marry his girlfriend, an elegant aristocrat named Devyani Rana, rather than the wife they had chosen for him. During the argument, servants heard Queen Aishwarya threaten to disinherit her son if he refused to accept the marriage she’d arranged for him.

  Servants saw the prince drink a tumbler or two of Famous Grouse whiskey and, at his request, brought him a pack of cigarettes laced with hashish. Multiple witnesses confirm that his voice was slurred and he was swaying, unable to remain upright, before four guests, including his brother, Prince Nirajan, helped him across the palace’s inner gardens, over a footbridge, and to his room, where they left him.

  Telephone records indicate that he made two brief calls to Devyani Rana that evening. Whatever the prince said worried his girlfriend enough for her to call his aides and ask them to check on him. Shortly before 9:00 P.M. one of these aides walked to the prince’s room and saw him emerge from his bedchamber wearing black military boots, a camouflage army jacket and trousers, black leather gloves, and a camouflage vest with bulging pockets.

  “Shall the emergency bag be brought, sire?” the startled aide asked.

  “It’s not necessary now,” the prince replied.

  Dipendra began firing the moment he entered the billiard room, strafing the ceiling with an MP5K automatic submachine gun. He strode toward his father, who was standing by a billiard table, and shot the king in the chest. Then he began firing indiscriminately. His brother-in-law, Gorakh, survived his wounds, but the prince killed his uncles, Dhirendra and Khagda, before throwing the spent weapon aside and hunting down the rest of his family with an M16 rifle.

  The bodies of his sister, Princess Shruti; his aunt Shanti; and a cousin, Princess Jayanti, were all found just outside the billiard room. His brother, Prince Nirajan, was located by palace officials, unconscious and bleeding, by a hedge in the garden. He was rushed to the army hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead on arrival.

  The body of the prince’s final victim, his mother, Queen Aishwarya, lay crumpled on the staircase that led to his room. She’d been shot in the head so many times, at such close range, that she could be identified only by her clothing.

  Security forces rushing into the palace found Dipendra sprawled on his back, with a head wound but still breathing, on a small bridge spanning a pond near his residence. They fished a nine-millimeter Glock pistol believed to belong to him out of the shallow water.

  For three days, Dipendra lingered in a coma at Kathmandu’s army hospital, where, according to Nepalese law, he was formally crowned as the nation’s king while lying unconscious in his hospital bed. His reign lasted only the three days it took him to die.

  As all of Nepal struggled to make sense of the massacre, Gyanendra, King Birendra’s younger brother, who’d been away in the city of Pokhara during the killings, became the country’s new king.

  Despite the Maoist conflagration that had been burning steadily in rural Nepal for five years, the world still mainly associated the country with cheerful, ruddy-faced Sherpas and mountain tourism. The massacre, the most high-profile wholesale slaughter of a royal family since the slaying of the Romanovs after the Russian revolution, splashed Nepal onto front pages around the world. Foreign journalists unfamiliar with the intricacies of the kingdom’s politics packed the daily flights from Delhi and Bangkok, and as Nepal’s dazed public took to the streets in mourning, conspiracy theories were lobbed at them like grenades: The Maoists were responsible. They had long called for abolishing the monarchy; now their fighters had wiped out most of the royal family in a single storm of bullets. Prime Minister Koirala was really behind the murders. He had eliminated the royals so he could speed the nation’s transformation to a republic, or to distract protestors calling for him to step down after his latest corruption scandal. King Gyanendra was guilty; he was a power-mad monarch who’d orchestrated the killings of his rivals, so that he could wear the crown he would have been denied by Dipendra. Indian or Chinese operatives were the culprits; they had infiltrated the palace and killed the king, so they could take advantage of the ensuing chaos and seize territory from their weakened neighbor.

  Riots broke out across Nepal as the news spread. Two people were killed and nineteen others injured as mobs sought scapegoats for the violence they couldn’t believe their beloved Dippy had perpetrated. “Like everyone else at that time, I was in shock,” Ruit says. “I’d seen the prince only a few days earlier. And it just didn’t seem possible that the free-and-easy friend I’d known could snap in such a way. But love can do surprising things to any human mind. And people I trust, people at the palace, told me what really happened.”

  The queen had had a long-standing feud with the family of the prince’s girlfriend, Ruit explains, whom she considered lesser nobility, not fit to produce a bride for her son. But on the day of the massacre, the prince’s grandmother had called Dipendra with good news; she’d told him that she’d convinced his mother to accept his marriage to Devyani. Just before dinner, where the prince was planning to announce the engagement to the entire family, the Queen Mother had approached the prince and given him devastating information: Queen Aishwarya had changed her mind.

  To this day, many Nepalese don’t believe that Prince Dipendra was responsible for the massacre. But Ruit does. “He started drinking and taking drugs,” Ruit says. “His mind went dark, and that was that. The foreign press rushed in and stirred up all these conspiracies. All that was nonsense. What caused the killings was love. Blind love. I’m certain of it.
”

  On June 2, Ruit shaved his head in mourning for his king and, like everyone else in Nepal with access to a television, watched the funeral. Twelve pallbearers wearing white vests and dhotis carried the flower-strewn body of King Birendra on a funeral stretcher. Queen Aishwarya was carried behind her husband, with a mask over her mutilated face, and both were accompanied by a palace guard of Gurkha soldiers in khaki dress uniforms. The procession traveled six miles, from the army hospital, through the streets of the capital, thronged with hundreds of thousands of mourners, to the burning ghats on the banks of the Bagmati.

  Sitting beside Nanda and his parents, and surrounded by his anxious children, Ruit watched as the king’s pallbearers circled his funeral pyre at Pashupatinath three times. The pyre had been built at an exclusive spot upstream, reserved for royalty, Nepal’s caste system intact even in death. And when he saw his friend Krishna Thapa dutifully standing by the king as the sacred flames leapt out of the dead monarch’s mouth, Ruit wept.

  Nepal, despite its poverty, took pride in the fact that it had never been conquered. Several unusually shrewd kings had ruled during the Shah dynasty’s two centuries in power. “King Mahendra, the assassinated king’s father, was one of those,” Ruit says. “He was a really sharp cookie who ruled with a hardened fist. He unified our country of so many tribes, castes, traditions, and languages into a modern nation and beat back foreigners who tried to tear us apart. His son Birendra was a weaker sort who at least had the wisdom to start our experiment with democracy and call for a constitution. But the new King Gyanendra was weaker still. I feared he would be easy for others to manipulate, and unfortunately I was right. Up to that point I felt, slowly but surely, we were making progress in Nepal. Taking baby steps toward true democracy. Now I was sickly with worry for the future of my country.”

  When the newly crowned King Gyanendra came to Tilganga to have his eyes checked, Ruit attempted to offer more than medical advice. He hoped to reprise his role as someone familiar with conditions in rural areas, an unofficial adviser who could convey to the monarchy the validity of many of the Maoists’ grievances and the necessity of initiating peace talks. Ruit ordered a platter of tea and biscuits for the king and tried to discuss the crisis spreading through the countryside. But after Ruit examined his eyes, Gyanendra didn’t stay long enough to touch his tea. He cut their conversation short in Nepali with a formality the former king had never shown.

  The Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai slipped into Tilganga two months after Gyanendra’s visit to ask Ruit a favor. “He knew I’d been friendly with the former king,” Ruit says, “and I’d treated so many Maoists by then that they trusted me. He asked if I could open a pipe to the palace.”

  Ruit told Bhattarai he’d try, but he advised him that he should consider changing his movement’s name and turning it into a political party. “Everyone knows you’re strong,” Ruit said. “But they’re not going to negotiate with you if they think you’re crazy.” Bhattarai said it was too late for that; the movement’s most radical elements would turn on the leadership if they labeled what they were fighting for anything short of a revolution.

  “That cat,” Ruit says, “had crawled from the bag.”

  Ruit’s worst fears were confirmed; with Gyanendra on the throne, his country’s crisis was bound to escalate. After ordering a curfew to crush the rioting, the new king addressed the nation and denounced the Maoists. “He had a tremendous public mandate to move the country forward and bring the Maoists on board,” Ruit says. “But he buggered everything up from the start. He was trying to be tough like his grandfather, but times had changed and the situation required more subtlety.”

  Three months later, on September 11, 2001, planes struck prominent American landmarks. Nepal, formerly a strategic backwater, a pleasure posting for American diplomats with a taste for trekking, was suddenly elevated, in coded diplomatic cables, to a “new front in the War on Terror.” In the rush to take the fight to all their perceived enemies, the Bush administration formally declared Nepal’s Maoists a terrorist organization. And that change in status triggered an olive-drab avalanche of American “advisers,” automatic weapons, and ammunition, which swept across the runway of Tribhuvan airport.

  “I’m trying to keep a clear mind and calm my voice while I’m telling you this,” Ruit said when I pressed him to talk, at length, about his country’s crisis. “But you’re an American.” The edge in his voice when he said that word revealed the strain it took for him to remain polite while discussing my country’s foreign policy. “You’ve done so much harm jumping into situations you don’t understand. The Maoists were not a terrorist group. They were not leading a terrorist uprising but a social uprising. Their target, primarily, was poverty. In the early years of their revolt, they carried sticks. But your Bush and his British friends flooded Nepal with modern weapons. Then the Maoists began attacking police posts and army barracks to seize them up. And where did that leave us? Standing knee-deep in the shit you stirred up.”

  On September 11, 2001, Tabin, Ruit, and his friend Him Gurung, the deputy inspector general of Nepal’s police force, were dining at the Jolly Gurkha restaurant on Tridevi Marg. Gurung’s mobile phone began ringing, and he took call after call as they ate. The news nearly, but not quite, quashed Tabin’s appetite. “First he told us that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center,” Tabin remembers. “Then he took another call and explained that the Pentagon had been hit. My mind was spinning, and I told him that was impossible.”

  “Why is that?” Gurung said. “Do you think Nepal is the only country that can have a crisis? Now it appears your United States is also at war.”

  Tabin finished the surgeries he had scheduled and flew home to be with his family. From Vermont, he called Ruit frequently and monitored the deteriorating conditions in the kingdom until his next scheduled trip to Nepal.

  “Sanduk, can you hear me?”

  “Hardly, Geoff. Can you repeat?”

  “I said we’ve been watching news about the riots on TV. Jean’s worried, and I’m wondering whether I should come or wait a bit until everything calms down.”

  “I don’t think waiting will help.”

  “If you say it’s safe, I’ll be there in a few days.”

  “I’m not saying it’s safe.”

  “Well, do you think it’s stupid for me to come?”

  “I wouldn’t say that either. We have lot of work to do.”

  Despite the State Department bulletin warning all Americans to stay away from Nepal, except for those with “essential business,” Tabin returned to Tribhuvan airport in the winter of 2002. He noticed the changes before he’d even deplaned. The runways were ringed by machine-gun nests. Soldiers in the green camouflage uniform of the national army tracked the Airbus as it taxied past their positions. On the drive to Tilganga, Tabin saw sandbagged fighting posts at every busy intersection, and he wondered if he’d made a mistake. But once he reached the hospital, he found the heightened sense of mission intoxicating. “Ruit was at his best,” Tabin says. “Rallying the troops. Reminding them he never said their jobs would be easy, and I knew I’d made the right decision to return.”

  Tilganga employees had taken risks traveling the countryside, where they’d treated the mounting number of casualties on both sides of the escalating war. During one especially daring mission, Khem Gurung drove a jeep to a Maoist military post, parked it under a tree to hide it from the government’s new helicopter gunships that were rocketing the area, and removed shrapnel, as calmly as he could while the explosions continued, from the local rebel commander’s eyes.

  Ruit was delighted that Tabin had the courage to come join them. He was particularly pleased when Tabin told him that the HCP had received a pledge from American donors and they could soon expect $110,000 with which to buy Tilganga higher-quality surgical microscopes.

  “Marvelous news, Geoff, really,” Ruit said. “At least America will be sending some technologies to Nepal that help rathe
r than hurt.”

  “For the first few years, I’d been running the HCP like a family business,” Tabin says. “Buying surgical supplies with my own salary and hitting up relatives like my uncle Seymour when I needed a microscope for projects in Pakistan or Sikkim.”

  With Reeta’s help, Tabin had also launched an internationally accredited three-year surgical residency program at Tilganga, so that foreign doctors could receive comprehensive training in Kathmandu, rather than flying in for a month or two at a time. Tabin’s dream of turning Tilganga into a training center, fully equipped to unleash an army of surgeons who’d mastered Ruit’s technique on the developing world, was slowly becoming a reality.

  But with the country he’d come to love in a state of war, the stakes had been raised; he had to move faster. Tabin needed to wage a fund-raising campaign for the HCP with the same ferocity that Ruit’s team fought to serve their country’s most vulnerable citizens. When he returned home, he decided, he would hire a small American staff, people with the time to turn his piecemeal campaign into a professional organization.

  The royal massacre and the growing Maoist insurgency may have made work in Nepal more difficult, but it had also opened a few important doors for the HCP. Media outlets suddenly found Nepal sexy. For years, Tabin had been trying to convince American journalists to cover the quest he was on with Ruit. But now that Nepal was a war zone, more of his emails and phone calls to editors, producers, and reporters in Washington and New York were being answered. Some media outlets even began contacting him. National Geographic Television had been inquiring about filming Ruit’s work for years. But the present political crisis gave the green light to Lisa Ling, who hosted a series for National Geographic, to accompany Ruit and Tabin on an upcoming trek to an HCP-funded eye camp in Mustang and shoot a documentary about their work. Tabin discussed Ling’s request with Ruit, and he agreed that the exposure such a film might provide could mean a dramatic uptick in donations.