Valley blues

On Saturday, I at last got round to visiting the (now-vacated) Royal Palace, which happens to sit rather near my flat – nice area, don’t you know. It’s been only a few months since the Shah royal family upped sticks and went god-knows-where. Having been kept at the gates and thrown scraps of meat in the decades beforehand, Nepalis are now rocking up in hordes to get a look to get a look at the home of their former masters. There was a huge snaking queue when I got there but, being a whitie foreigner, I was ushered in through a side-entrance, where I had to pay substantially more for a ticket than the native punter.

From the outside, it looks like a blown-up Thunderbirds set. Oversized, bright-pink – yes, pink – ‘futuristic,’ child-like. An earnest exercise in Art Deco vulgarity. (Disclaimer: Art Deco can be excellent, but Asian stabs at it tend to be shit; see also the modern palace of the Maharajah of Jodhpur in Rajasthan.) Inside, the kitsch continues – but in a fun, less obnoxious way. Tiger skins, jewelled sewing machines, oversized portraits of past Kings in military regalia, precious odds and sods from around the world. It’s rather like the underground lair of a villain in a 60s Bond movie, only without the piranha pool under the dining room (although that might explain a few of the political ‘disappearances’ in recent years).

You can also poke around the palace grounds. Here, the most interesting/disquieting ‘attraction’ is the foundations of a former palace hall, now demolished – the venue of a certain royal gathering in 2001. Yes, the Royal Massacre. At a family bash on 1st June that year, all was going merrily, when Crown Prince Dipendra suddenly grew faint and retired to his bedroom. A little while later he returned in camouflage fatigues and, machine gun in each hand, opened fire on his immediate family, targeting and killing the King first, then others. Running out into the garden, he shot his mother (the Queen) and, finally, himself. Little white signposts now mark the death-spots of the royal victims, gunned down one by one. There’s still something creepy about the place.

It’s hard to fathom the national trauma that followed. For Nepali Hindus, the King is regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu; and the Royal family is inextricably bound with the birth of Nepal as a nation, what with the Gurkha invasions that unified Nepal as we know it. It is still something of a whispered subject in Nepal, but speculations abound. Many put it down to Dipendra’s frustration at not being able to marry Devyani Rana, the woman he loved, through the callous obstruction of his mother.

But that the palace was made immune to investigation swiftly after the incident, with all evidence destroyed or compromised, has stoked wild conspiracy theories. Some point to the fact that the later King, Gyandra, was alone among the immediate family in being away that evening – and his son, Paras, who was present, escaped unscathed. It certainly ensured Gyandra’s coronation soon after, unlikely to have ever happened otherwise. Others blame it on the revolutionary Maoists, for obvious reasons. The Maoists in turn point to the CIA and its Indian counterpart. Others maintain that whoever was behind it bumped off Dipendra beforehand and planted a stand-in wearing a life-like mask in his place – which would at least account for why Dipendra (allegedly) remained silent and expressionless throughout. But, as the wilder theories suggest, the public has been left firmly in the dark, with only tawdry white sign-posts to go by.

*

Next day, I took a shitty-cramped mini-van to Kirtipur, a town in the Kathmandu Valley. Weird Place. Rather eerie. Demonic-looking children stared at me from dilapidated houses, murmuring curses as I passed – as it seemed. Old men sat about on the pavements in traditional Newari costume – black waistcoat, earrings, that ubiquitous multi-coloured cloth hat – doing precisely nothing. Time seemed to have stood still in Kirtipur; certainly a step or two behind the rest of the valley in ‘development.’ And half a world away from the bouncy, enterprising (ish) capital. But it is overshadowed by one of the more sinister episodes in Nepali history:

Kirtipur was established back in the twelfth century, as a westerly outpost of Patan city state. But it had achieved a nominal independence by the time Prithvi Narayan Shah and his Gurkha hordes began their final conquest of the Kathmandu Valley in 1767. Prithvi Narayan – himself born and bred in Kirtipur – was hell bent on winning this highly strategic hill-top fortress. After one failed Gurkha assault and a later six-month siege, Kirtipur surrendered on the expectation of merciful treatment. But the Gurkha King wasn’t having that: instead, he ordered his men to hack off the nose and lips of every man and boy, sparing only musicians who played wind instruments. Eighty pounds worth of noses and lips were dumped in front of Prithvi Narayan as ‘proof.’

This historic hurt is still felt by Kirtipur’s impoverished denizens; to this day the Queen and King – directly descended from Prithvi Narayan Shah – are forbidden from setting foot in the town. As a memorial, the swords and machetes of the men who defended Kirtipur in the six-month siege still dangle from the roof of the Bagh Bharaib temple in the town centre.

Afterwards, I walked – or rather, threaded my way delicately through rice paddies – to the Chobar gorge. Not much of a gorge, as gorges go, but it’s a star player in Nepal’s folklore. It was created by one slice of the sword of the bodhisattva Manjushri, back in the aeons when the Kathmandu Valley was one great lake full of poisonous snakes. This epic sword-hack drained the valley of the water and nasty snakes – and civilisation began promptly. (See my third blog post for a more fleshed-out take on the story.) Now, this bit of myth doesn’t lean too heavily on science or anything, but archaeological research suggests it isn’t complete fancy: the Kathmandu Valley really was a lake, back in the day; and the Chobar gorge – the exit-point of the Bagmati river – is the obvious drainage site in the valley. That said, archaeologists have yet to stumble across a giant, pre-historic sword.

A wobbly suspension bridge affords a shit-scary view, but most interesting was a plaque on the bridge itself: Made in Aberdeen. From there I trekked up a steep path to Chobar village – definitely the most picturesque village I’ve seen in the valley; prime post-card material. In what is becoming a routine for me on entering Nepali villages, chirpy kids bounced out of doorways and demanded ‘one pen, one pen, one pen.’ Dunno, maybe there’s a chronic pen shortage in the Kathmandu Valley; maybe a heavy pen-tax makes them unaffordable. In any case – and this may come as a surprise – I don’t march around Nepal with a selection of pens in my pockets. Perhaps I should; give something back and all that.

Chobar village falls gently down a hill; at the crest is the idiosyncratic Adinath temple, whose outer walls are smothered with pots, pans, jugs and the like. Local tradition has it that offering kitchen utensils to Lokeshwar, the temple’s deity, guarantees a long-lasting, happy marriage for newlyweds. Let’s just hope all the crockery pays off.

It was around seven when I climbed back down to the highway, just in time to watch the last bus of the day pull up and go – well within shrieking and furious-waving distance. Balls. I stood there, mournfully, until a Nepali chap heading in vaguely the right direction took pity and offered to take me on the back of his motorbike to Kathmandu’s outskirts, from where I took a cab back to my flat. Just like that.

*

In the evenings, on the balcony of my Kathmandu penthouse – okay, fourth-storey flat – everything begins to make sense, fall into place, become real – and so on till the clichés run out. It is a kingly view; I am lord of all I survey. Steep hillsides sweep the city fringes, darkening into cut-out silhouettes as the night comes. Paper kites float above a patchwork of concrete rooftops, giving way to rice-paddies on the valley edges. Matchbox vegetable gardens stretch right to the city centre. There is a mess of sounds: shrieking kids, dogs, crows, car-horn; a city out of balance. I take a swig of a large bottle of Gorkha beer, and think of England.

And so the novel would begin – if it were a novel; which, I’ve decided, it isn’t quite.