Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  “Ask Boris.”

  There was only one Boris of Kathmandu. He had settled in Nepal in the early 1950s, and over time he’d achieved such renown that his last name became superfluous, like Cher or Madonna. In 1961, King Tribhuvan had entrusted him with the program for the visit of Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. For the entrée at the state banquet he chose saddle of muntjac—barking deer. When it was served, the king summoned him to explain what it was, and it turned out that his reputation had preceded him even with the Windsors.

  “Are you Boris?” asked Prince Philip.

  Boris the tiger hunter, Boris the fighter pilot, Boris the trapeze artist.

  Boris the White Russian raconteur, with a bullet in his thigh from fighting the Bolsheviks, aged twelve.

  Boris who danced for Diaghilev, and at Balanchine’s request broke the news of the impresario’s death to Anna Pavlova, who swooned in his arms.

  He made music with Stravinsky and paintings with Matisse, sang with Marlene Dietrich, acted in a film with Jean-Paul Belmondo. He was seventy when I first met him, stationed by a circular fireplace in the Chimney Room Bar of his Yak and Yeti restaurant, beneath a gleaming cone of beaten copper. But he looked a robust sixty, with a dazzling smile, bright, mischievous eyes, and graying hair parted carefully in the center. Even in his habitual striped cotton bush shirt with short sleeves, he had the aura of a man of fashion of La Belle Époque. His voice, deep and accented, made everything he said sound like a confidence. Boris Lissanevitch had no listeners—only co-conspirators.

  No, he had never heard of Nigel. But he was certain that the stories were exaggerated. Boris knew himself to be the only European who had always lived in a palace there—Lal Durbar, courtesy of the late King Tribhuvan. If Nigel occupied a palace, he would have been a guest of its Nepalese owner. And if he took up residence in 1850 or thereabouts, there was no need for guesswork in identifying his host.

  That would be Jang Bahadur himself.

  “Founder of the shogunate,” he said, and explained how the Ranas reduced the Shah kings to figureheads for a century, all the while treating the national treasury as their personal exchequer. As for their palaces, he didn’t know which dated back that far, but Jang Bahadur was the one who started building them.

  He was sure, he said, that some of the senior Ranas would receive me to talk about Nigel’s connection with their forebear. If he thought it would help, he would make some introductions himself.

  But he doubted that it would.

  He smiled slyly.

  Some might say that he had earned the Rana palace bestowed upon him by a grateful king. He first met His Majesty in Calcutta during the Second World War. Boris was running an exclusive social club, and Tribhuvan was in exile after fleeing Nepal. Since his enthronement as a child, the figurehead king had been kept in isolation and knew almost no one. Boris, who knew a great many Indian and Nepalese aristocrats through the shikar hunting circuit, had made certain introductions. One of these was to a close friend of his, a disgruntled member of the Rana family. The two countrymen began meeting discreetly in the flat Boris kept above the 300 Club, and one thing led to another. When Tribhuvan made his triumphant return to Kathmandu a few years later, and declared an end to the Rana usurpation, Boris was part of the entourage that followed him off the plane.

  It was two in the afternoon. The copper chimney blazed with sun slanting down through high clerestory windows. Boris stepped behind the bar and set out two champagne flutes, chilled. He gripped an orange in the impeccably manicured fingers of one hand and expertly wielded a zester with the other. After he popped the cork on a bottle of Laurent-Perrier and poured out our cocktails, he led me down a marbled corridor to the music room. Atop the grand piano, in a heavy silver frame, stood an autographed portrait of Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.

  He had been granted British citizenship in the 1920s, he said. The queen herself had called him “our favorite Russian subject” at the end of her visit in 1961, which climaxed with a solemn and majestic salute from 376 elephants, decorated and painted under Boris’ direction with gold and silver. As she drove by, each elephant raised its trunk, one after another, down a line a half mile long.

  That, of course, was down in the Terai. He had organized a tiger shoot for the visiting royals there on the king’s behalf. Unfortunately, Prince Philip had been obliged to forestall an outcry by wildlife conservationists by diplomatically begging off on the morning of the outing with a hastily bandaged trigger finger. (Another member of the party, an admiral of the Royal Navy, bagged a Bengal.)

  Nigel hunted there, I told Boris. In fact, that was how his relatives in England believed that he had died. A tiger got him.

  He considered this. He had bagged no fewer than seventy-eight of the species himself in the 1930s and 1940s, a total that secured his place as the top-ranked big-game hunter in India. And he had certainly done his share of shooting in the Terai, where the local history was almost exclusively oral. Sitting around the campfire with the beaters who flushed out the game, you heard tales dating back to the heyday of the Raj, passed down from one generation to the next. A sahib carried off by a tiger was a sahib to be remembered, all those years later.

  Quite possibly Nigel had died in the jungle.

  Many Englishmen did.

  But like that?

  Devoured by a Bengal?

  Boris thought not.

  He would have heard about it.

  NOT LONG AFTER I spoke with Boris at Lal Durbar, I left Kathmandu on a trek to Mount Everest Base Camp. I returned in the fall, expecting to spend a few days in the city before departing on another trek to Dolpo, where I meant to winter over while working on my research project. After three weeks I was still there, waiting on a permit, and I decided to seek an audience with one of the leading lights of the Rana family, recommended by Boris as historically minded and a likely source of information about Nigel.

  He was called General Samrajya Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana, and I sought him out at his palace to ask about one of the more persistent family legends about Nigel: that he was an opportunistic jewel thief. One version of the story held that he had got his hands on the fabled Koh-i-noor diamond, which had been turned over to the Lawrence brothers in 1849 as a spoil of the Anglo-Sikh War. When the diamond was examined in London after it was presented to Queen Victoria, it was found to be eighty-three carats short of its historical weight of two hundred sixty-nine carats, lending credence to the theory that Nigel had conspired with a gem cutter to portion off a sizable chunk for himself before returning the mutilated gem to the treasure house in Lahore.

  It was the subsequent discovery of the diamond’s deficiencies, then, that explained his exile in Nepal, remote from the reach of British justice. Alternatively, he might have stolen the Koh-i-noor outright, substituting in its place a lesser diamond—obtained, perhaps, in Nepal? One way or another, believed the Hallecks, he had ended up selling the diamond to a blue blood in Nepal and lived sumptuously off the proceeds for the rest of his life.

  Few Nepalese in modern times were as conscious of the azure in their veins as General Rana, a round, moustached gentleman in his fifties who spoke English with the cut-glass accent of the home counties. The first time he said “often,” I heard “orphan.” Only eight of his countrymen had ever been created honorary knights of the Royal Victorian Order, and he was one of them. He wore the order’s rosette on his lapel—a silver Maltese cross with a central medallion depicting the royal cipher of Queen Victoria on a red background, surrounded by a blue ring bearing the order’s motto and surmounted by a Tudor crown. The motto was simplicity itself: VICTORIA.

  Elizabeth II had invested him during her state visit in 1961. The order, he told me, honored those who had personally served the monarchy.

  The details of his service he left unspecified. It was not, at any rate, of a military nature. Though he insisted upon being addressed as “General,” according to Boris he had never commanded any troops, let alone
an army. Nor, Boris added, would his bearing strike one as military, except in the most elastic sense of the word. But this was Nepal, where the old ways died hard.

  He received me beneath an art nouveau chandelier of Murano glass, in a room floored with pink marble. Both were imports from Italy, conveyed from Genoa to Calcutta by ship, and thence from the Indian border to Kathmandu by coolies.

  “A great many coolies,” he added pointlessly. I pictured them laboring up Chandragiri Hill beneath their burdens like Egyptian slaves in old engravings of the raising of the pyramids, their backs at right angles to the slope.

  The enormous Belgian mirrors in gilded frames on the opposite wall were carried in as well. And so, over the years, were a number of automobiles, including a dove gray 1936 Standard Flying 8 saloon weighing twenty-five hundred pounds, by sixty-four men in twelve days.

  The General, like Boris, had never heard of Nigel. He felt confident, nonetheless, in dismissing as “fantasy” the story of his diamond dealing, at least as far as it had anything to do with Nepal.

  It was true that gemstones could be found in certain districts of the kingdom, if one knew where to look.

  Not, however, diamonds.

  Of that he was certain.

  Nor was it probable that Nigel had entered Nepal as a trader in gems. Except for the General’s forebears, there weren’t any customers for luxury items in those days. (For the simple reason, I later learned, that his ancestors had murdered the rest of the nobility.) And the Ranas, for their part, had dealt only with a few trusted merchants, Muslims for the most part, from what is now Pakistan and, especially, Afghanistan.

  Like Boris, too, he insisted that no foreigner in Kathmandu had ever built or occupied a palace of his own.

  (Not while Ranas steered the ship of state; in the present day, he sniffed, all things were possible.)

  Or her own, for that matter.

  Not even the Queen of the Sikhs.

  Did I know the story of Rani Jindan? In the Punjab? After the first Sikh war, the British deposed her as regent and took away her power; after the second, they separated her from her son, the heir, and imprisoned her in India. When she escaped she fled to Nepal, and Jang Bahadur granted her political asylum. His government even granted her a pension.

  But a palace?

  No.

  She was provided a residence in Jang Bahadur’s Thapathali. It was the last of the old-style Oriental palaces, he said, built before Jang Bahadur visited England and France and acquired a taste for Occidental Gothic. It was really nothing more than a succession of gigantic square houses a mile long, fronting on the Bagmati River.

  “Not very splendid” was the General’s verdict.

  “Not like Singha Durbar?” I asked.

  He sighed.

  “Nothing at all like Singha Durbar—as it was.”

  “Was?”

  “You have seen it?”

  I nodded. What I had seen, he informed me, was only the frontage. The frontage was all that remained of the seventeen wings constructed on orders of his grandfather Chandra Shumsher, longest-serving of all the Rana prime ministers. Two years before, a fire had gutted sixteen hundred rooms. A paltry hundred escaped the flames.

  Among them, most fortunately, was the Hall of Mirrors.

  No, there was nothing like that at Thapathali: no indoor fountains, no Carrara marble, no crystal windows, no stained glass doors from England. It was actually rather plain. He remembered Thapathali well, from his boyhood. Almost all of it collapsed in the earthquake that devastated Kathmandu in 1934.

  What was likely, said the General, was that Nigel was a guest of Jang Bahadur’s at Thapathali. He simply enjoyed the kingdom’s hospitality, and for a good long time if he made for agreeable company.

  That would not surprise him in the least.

  “Jang Bahadur admired the English, you see.”

  Admired and liked.

  Which, in a nutshell, was the difference between the Ranas and the Shahs.

  (Historically speaking, he meant; now, with a Shah king and a Rana queen—his niece—a sort of equilibrium had been achieved.)

  His forebears had embraced the English, and preserved Nepal’s independence. The Shahs only wanted to fight them, a battle they could never win. Nepal would have ended up a colony. The country had done very well for itself under the Ranas.

  As had the Ranas, I thought, but it seemed impolitic to say so. As for Nigel, the General invited me to look through the family archives in the personal library of the late field marshal, his father.

  Like so much else in modern times, he said wearily, it was open to the bloody public.

  THE LIBRARY OF Field Marshal H. H. Sir Kaiser Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana was located, predictably enough, in a palace. Kaiser Mahal occupied twenty-odd acres directly across the street from Narayanhiti Palace, home of King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. Its grounds, however, were nowhere near as immaculately kept as those of the royal residence—not so much overgrown as jungly, with fat, snaking vines smothering tree trunks and corrugating the surface of green-slimed ponds. No one lived there anymore, and high brick walls screened the neglect from the eyes of passersby.

  From the librarian I learned that the field marshal’s collection consisted of thirty-five thousand volumes, of which only those shelved at floor level had been gnawed by mice. I was told that His Highness had begun collecting books at the age of fifteen, when he accompanied his father, Maharaja Chandra, on a visit to England. I was told that “he was very much impressed by the ruling system of England,” and also by “the proper management of books there.” I was assured that His Highness could tell with uncanny precision where each of his holdings could be located.

  “Every book,” said the librarian admiringly. “Every document.”

  Unfortunately, His Highness had died in 1964. When I said that I hoped to learn whether a certain Englishman had once resided in Jang Bahadur’s Thapathali Palace, he did not hold out much hope that I would find the answer. There were household ledgers, of course—

  “Expenditures, inventories, rosters of servants.”

  That sort of thing.

  He sighed.

  But what with the climate, and the insects—

  His voice trailed off and we took in the view, through a bay window thirty feet tall, to the grounds that surrounded the palace. In its original form, he said, the elaborate ensemble of formal gardens, fountains, pools, pergolas, balustrades, urns, and trellises included six freestanding pavilions, representing the seasons of South Asia: spring, early summer, summer monsoon, early autumn, late autumn, and winter. After three were demolished to make way for commercial development, the “Garden of the Six Seasons” became the “Garden of Dreams.”

  Whatever the condition of the ledgers, I said, the General had suggested that I should have a look.

  He squared his shoulders so reflexively that a salute seemed imminent.

  The General’s wish, he made clear, was his command. If I would be so good as to allow him an hour or two—

  By the slack reckoning employed in Nepal, that meant three or four, but I had time on my hands. Spending the winter in Dolpo was no longer in the cards. The Ministry of Home Affairs had denied my request for a trekking permit. After I got the news, I had stopped by the Yak and Yeti to console myself with a plate of boeuf bourguignon, prepared with buffalo meat in a country where even inadvertent “cow killers”—reckless lorry drivers, more often than not—were routinely sentenced to life in prison. Boris had advised me to keep my chin up. Prominent among the refugees in the “Little Tibet” of Bauddha, outside Kathmandu, were exiles active in a guerrilla movement called Four Rivers, Six Ranges. They could assist me in making a surreptitious visit.

  He knew trustworthy people who would be happy to help.

  Delighted, in fact.

  Even if worse came to worst and I was taken into custody, he promised, foreigners in Nepal were treated well by jailers—rumors of flogging were greatly exaggerated.
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  After thinking it over—and recalling that Boris seemed to revel in speculation that he was some sort of secret agent without actually denying it was true—I chose to demur. I rented a small flat in a bucolic neighborhood on the outskirts of Kathmandu, about a mile away from Kaiser Mahal, and began casting about for a substitute research project. I had vague aspirations of writing a book. In the meantime I felt I owed it to my mother to try to find concrete evidence of Nigel’s presence in Nepal.

  When I returned to Kaiser Mahal, the refectory table was stacked with a dozen soiled pasteboard cartons, each marked boldly, though not sequentially, with a Roman numeral. There was a III and a VII and a XXX. What I took for a pebbled effect on the rotting leather covers of the ledgers turned out to be calcified remains of innumerable small snails. The librarian held out a pair of cotton gloves—to keep my hands clean—and a long, thin knife with a finely honed blade and full tang handle.

  I mustn’t hesitate to use it as necessary, he said.

  It would only be a help to others.

  For an uneasy moment I wondered whether patrons were expected to dispatch any vermin that intruded upon their research. But he was only encouraging me to separate pages that I deemed “intractable.”

  It took me most of that afternoon to ascertain which volumes might be worth perusing. It was not until the next day that I first came across a name that stood out to me, on the face of it unrelated to Nigel but seeming confirmation of the General’s belief in the provenance of the Rana family jewels. Several ledger entries identified one Sa’adat ool-Moolk as the recipient of outlays for “dimond stones and rubees.”