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On June 2,
when we arrived in Kathmandu barely 15 hours after the grisly carnage
at the Narayanhiti Palace that had decimated an entire line of the Shah
family ruling Nepal for 233 years, I felt lost as the plane landed at
Tribhuvan Airport. The driver of the car I hired could be coaxed to carry
us to the hotel with a hefty incentive. Yet he was so grumpy all along
that I feared he'd suddenly park the car and disappear. The roads were
empty, except for a few army trucks trundling by. At the hotel reception,
we were told of a 24-hour curfew about to set in.
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IN WORDS AND DEEDS: As a gesture of grief,
men tonsured their heads
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Fact was a still bigger casualty. The Indian TV networks had just Deputy
Prime Minister Ram Chandra Poudel saying the carnage was perpetrated by
Crown Prince Dipendra, 29. But Dipendra was on life support system. His
parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, were dead, together with sister
Shruti, brother Nirajan, and many other royals. A curfew had dried up
all sources who could have thrown light on what might have had occurred
over a dining table across a kilometre-long periphery of high iron-spiked
walls. The problem was to locate anyone who'd attended the dinner at Tribhuvan
Sadan and was alive. None of the survivors were prepared to talk.
My saviour from the Himalayan silence was Ramesh Nath Pandey, the king's
representative on the Raj Parishad (State Council) who shared umbilical
links with the Narayanhiti Palace. He used his royal network and drew
back and forth in time to reproduce an excellent cause-and-effect picture
of the tragedy. Of a king who'd been too protective about his son. A queen
who'd held the memories of centuries-old royal feuds so close to her heart
that she'd not let her son make compromises on honour by marrying into
enemy family. And a son who pressed the trigger of an assault rifle on
his parents and relatives with desperation made lethal by alcohol and
drug.
That's the stuff good stories are made of. The pity is, the mountain
kingdom was too swaddled-up in the royal mist to own up that kings are
men and the crown doesn't fit the head of a murderer.
 
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CURRENT
ISSUE DEC 31, 2001
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