ROYAL processions are usually jovial occasions. Most of the faces on Dublin’s streets attested to this recently as I watched the motorcycles, squad cars and ultimately, Queen Elizabeth’s Range Rover, flash past. But as I stood there, I remembered a grisly royal procession witnessed almost exactly a decade previously on the streets of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu.
I had never heard of the Crown Prince Dipendra Shah on the night of June 1st, 2001 when I crawled into bed in my budget hotel. Outside, the slumbering capital was, as usual, a labyrinth of brick-walled streets and expansive squares. The temples, with their flickering candles and bathing pools gave way to internet cafes and travel agencies in an odd marriage of the pre- and post-modern.
This was the Nepal the outside world knew, famous for Mount Everest and Gurkha soldiers and, at that time, attracting some notoriety, as a rebellion by Maoist guerrillas gathered pace in the hills west of the city.
The latter was no doubt troubling the mind of Dipendra’s father that night. King Birendra Shah (55), having reigned since 1972, was viewed as a pragmatic liberal, consenting to multi-party democracy, following mass protests in early 1990. But 11 years on, so much remained constant: the feeble, short-lived coalition governments, the venal corruption in the cities, the poverty and illiteracy in a countryside that the Maoists were coming to dominate. Closer to home, he had his authoritarian, conservative military to worry about. They had an ally in his 53-year old brother, the dour Prince Gyanendra.
However, conversation in the dining hall of the Narayanhithi Palace, a few streets away from me, was turning to another topic that evening. Prince Dipendra (29) had, by many accounts, matured into a rather troubling heir apparent. Contemporaries at Eton in the 1980s recalled an often dissolute youth with an aggressive streak. Back in Nepal, he was known to collect automatic weapons.
But worse was his choice of future bride. Devyani Rana belonged to a rival branch of Nepalese royalty and was considered most unsuitable by Dipendra’s mother, Queen Aishwarya.
I was, I believe, already asleep when, rebuked over this matter by his sister, Dipendra stormed off from the crowded dining hall. On Saturday morning, I tramped downstairs, still yawning, and found horror-struck staff and guests ranged around the lobby’s television. All Nepal was stultified.
Prince Dipendra, apparently drunk and drugged, had returned to the dining hall later the previous night, brandishing two of his weapons (an M-16 rifle and MP5k submachine gun it would later emerge) and opened fire. He killed nine royals, including his parents, sister and younger brother before shooting himself. The shot was not fatal but Nepal’s new king was said to be in a vegetative state.
By afternoon, I was one of thousands of people lining the eight-mile route from Kathmandu’s military hospital to the Pashupathinath Hindu temple. There, the murdered royals would be laid on stone pyres decked in garlands of marigold and sandalwood.
One by one, their funeral pyres would be lit and their ashes cast into the adjacent Bhagmati River.
Waiting for the royal family’s arrival, I scanned the crowds around me. Women, clad in saris had smeared their foreheads with fragrant red ash. Many of the men had already shaved their heads in a show of mourning. Knots of police congregated on corners, visors drawn.
Then the first mounted soldiers and vehicles passed and a pained murmur rose from the crowds. Borne on bamboo poles by priests in white vests and loin cloths, the bodies were heaped in flowers and jasmine. The face of the Queen Aishywara, destroyed by the gunshots, was replaced with a china mask. The scene made me reflect on how human history can sometimes outflank anything fiction has to offer.
There was a wise king with a scheming brother. There was a doomed romance between two antagonistic dynasties. And there was a palace massacre set against the backdrop of a war whose ultimate outcome would be the fall of a Royal House. Shakespeare could have exhausted many quills writing tragedies about Nepal.
And all these elements collided in a single blood- splattered act one evening. Already the conspiracy theories were flying hard and fast. Wasn’t it suspicious, locals were suggesting to me, how Prince Gyanendra just happened to be out of the capital that night? But to accept the official version of events was to be left no less mystified. Was it some titanic clash between the ego and id that culminated in Dipendra’s act of familial self destruction? Was it just a genetically weak brain addled by drink and drugs? By Sunday afternoon, the capital was closing down. Walking back to my hotel, I happened upon a surreal sight. So many men had spontaneously shaved their heads that little hillocks of black hair ranged across Kathmandu’s empty pavements.
The regicide was now all around the world, dominating news channels. And while commentators talked of kings who were cabbages, an appalling conundrum presented itself. No equivalent of Magna Carta, a contract curbing the absolute rule of the monarch, was ever signed in the Himalayas. What if King Dipendra, his throne a ventilator, made a full recovery? He was technically above the law. But Nepal would have a mass murderer for a monarch.
Of course, the Divine Right of Killers was never tested. On Monday afternoon, at the behest of his grandmother, Dipendra’s weekend-long reign ended when he was taken off life support. I remember walking across a city where gangs of youths held King Birendra’s portrait aloft and waved the Nepalese flag about. Down on Ratna Park, it was starting to rain as the Royal Nepalese Army fired off canons. If the conspiracy theorists were correct, if King Gyanendra had really “set up” the blameless Dipendra and seized the throne in some fiendishly arcane plot, he would ultimately be Nepal’s last monarch. By the end of the decade, the Maoists, having renounced their “People’s War”, would form a government and declare a republic.