“Birendra! Who else?”
“Well who the hell did he sell it to?” Mainali heard a trace of his barely acquired New York accent. “The Brits? The Japs? Germany? How can you sell a damned national park?”
“No, no, not like that.” Khanal laughed, and her horn-rimmed glasses leaned askew. She adjusted them with the end of her pencil. “No, what happened was this: Birendra sold it back to Nepal itself. The statement says he returned it to the ‘People of Nepal,’ with some typical bullshit wording about ‘the rights and responsibilities of posterity.’”
“How much?” Mainali’s gray eyes narrowed; Birendra’s strategy was already clear to him.
“Fifty crore. About $16 million U.S. He’s already approved the withdrawal from the National Treasury.”
Kunda nodded. His thin, feminine hands were pressed together in a prayerlike mudra in front of his mouth. A chewed-up pencil stuck up like a yellow obelisk between them.
This was it, then. This was really it. With the democracy movement gnawing the strings of his hammock, Birendra was taking no more chances. Sixteen million was a lot of money. It was enough, probably, to pay off what those in the know cynically called the “Royal Life Insurance”: a private island in the Maldives. Unbelievable. But what could Mainali do? If he ran the story, he’d lose his job, possibly wind up in prison. And even if he was to risk everything, and print a full exposé—who would believe it?
The problem was, Kunda didn’t know where the average Nepali, the so-called man in the street, stood in relation to the king. There was angry talk, dissatisfaction, yes. But that was among the educated, the literate: professionals, businessmen, university students, Rhoda. Their circle of friends. They had no trouble believing the rumors that filtered down, layer by layer, from the heights of Kathmandu society. Stories about the king’s brothers, and their links to gold smuggling and drug trafficking; about the shooting of Padam Thakurathi, a journalist who had exposed the palace mafia; about torture and rape in the prisons. But their talk was discreet, for they also knew of the Public Security Act, under which any Nepali citizen could be thrown into prison for eighteen months without trial.
When you interviewed the activists or listened to their speeches on the weed-choked lawn of the Technical University it was easy to imagine that every citizen of the valley, from computer engineers to cart-pullers, felt a common sense of disgust with the royal regime and its self-serving domination of the country. But this was an illusion. When all was said and done, the throne still commanded enormous respect. People on all levels of society—even the opposition leaders!—regarded Birendra with barely suppressed awe. In some ways the sentiment was healthy, a collective yearning to set aside caste and clan differences and unite under a single, traditional symbol. But too much of that deference was based on the insidious belief, conditioned over centuries, that the king of Nepal ruled by divine right. To millions of Nepalis, Sri Panch Maharaja Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was not a man, but a god: a direct incarnation of Lord Vishnu, eternal preserver of the human race.
The king himself had been conditioned to believe this, as well. And his role as divine, omnipotent monarch was nourished and sustained by every single person who kowtowed within the royal aura.
What would it take, Mainali wondered sourly, for people to shrug off this ancient mantle of superstition? How could they see the royal family for the bloodsuckers they were? He leaned back until the front feet of his chair tipped off the ground.
“We can’t use it, can we?” Meera Khanal still stood before the desk, shamelessly reading a personal letter on the edge of Mainali’s desk.
“No,” Mainali said. He pointedly picked up and turned over the letter. “But write something up anyway. I’ll try to interest Reuters.” He frowned, nagged by the thought of giving the story away.
“But first, try to find out where that money’s going. It went out of the Treasury, but ended up where? Listen, does your mother’s uncle still work at the Home Ministry?”
“Better than that. My stepbrother’s a VP at Rastra Bank.”
“Great. See what you can find out. Use the phone in Sports.”
AFTER MEERA LEFT the room, Mainali doodled absently on a yellow notepad. He made a squiggly line, thickened it into an elongated S, then doodled a few more alongside it. Suddenly, with a wave of revulsion, he realized what he was drawing. His reaction was strong enough to make him stop, grimace, and hide the doodle beneath a thick layer of scribbling.
Twenty-eight years ago—good God, was it that long ago?—Kunda had made a pilgrimage to Tengpoche Gompa with his mother. It was quite a trip; they’d taken the overnight bus to Jiri and walked ten days to reach the famous monastery, perched on a lofty saddle almost twelve thousand feet above sea level.
They spent about a week in Solo and Khumbu, visiting sacred sites and taking a day-hike in the hopes of glimpsing Sagarmatha: Mount Everest. On their return walk toward Jiri, as they were descending the long hill outside of Namche Bazaar, his mother tripped over a sharp rock and cut her foot. It didn’t seem like much; but by the time they reached the village of Ringmo, four days later, the wound was so badly infected that she could no longer put her weight on it.
The families in Ringmo were sympathetic, and there was much tongue-clucking and head-wagging. There was a health post at Junbesi, they said. But no one volunteered to go. There was only one solution: Kunda would have to walk, alone, to Junbesi. There he could hire a porter or, at the very least, return with antibiotics. He was six years old—and Junbesi was five hours away, through thick jungle. The sky threatened rain.
His mother was a relatively modern woman, but she held to a few old-fashioned beliefs. “Don’t go if it rains,” she had warned him. “Wait. The wet will bring out the leeches. They’re demons; they’ll suck your blood right out of your body and hang your skin from the branches of a tree.”
Kunda had never seen a leech; they rarely appeared in the Kathmandu Valley. He imagined them huge as snakes, with sharp fangs and glowing red eyes. They were genuine monsters, creatures of nightmare. But his mother was growing feverish. When she fell off to sleep, he put a few things into his small rucksack and left the tiny inn.
At the edge of Ringmo, an old man sat on a tree stump, rolling a cigarette. His eyes were misted over with cataracts.
“Babaji, pani aunu parchha?” Elder, will it rain?
“Eh, babu! Pani pardaina! Gaam aundaichha!”
Kunda found it hard to believe that the sun would emerge from these clouds; they stuffed the sky like gray feathers. But age was wisdom, and with the old man’s assurance and twenty rupee coins in his pocket, he set off.
The old man was right. The clouds backed away, and sunlight poured through the treetops. But an hour later the sky darkened again, and now Kunda heard thunder rolling up from the valley. The first raindrops hit the leaves above his head soon after, as he descended to the river. The last tea-house was far behind him; the next, hours ahead. He contemplated going back to Ringmo, but remembered the old man’s guarantee. Maybe the rain was concentrated behind him.
The drops fell harder. Now they were pounding the leaves, cascading down to soak the trail and the forest floor. Thunder rumbled all around him, impossible to locate; it came from all directions at once. A stick got jammed into his thong, and as he stopped to pick it out he saw a mud-brown leech, narrow as a noodle, writhing up his ankle. Seized by fear and disgust, Kunda slapped at the creature until it balled up and rolled off. Another leech fell from the leaves above, landing on the back of his hand. He shrieked and slapped at it as it twisted like a miniature cobra; in the meantime, two more leeches crawled onto his foot.
Kunda started to run, gasping for breath. From every leaf, from the mossy tree trunks and carpet of fallen leaves, from the branches above his head and even the clouds themselves, the forest filled with leeches. Kunda stopped every few steps to scrape them off, but every time he did so, half a dozen more would appear on his shirt, his arms, his feet. He began to run
blindly, in a panic, racing through the rain as the creatures crawled into the soft spaces between his toes, behind his ears, beneath his collar. He could feel a leech on his forehead, see a black wriggle on the side of his nose. He slapped at his face and raced ahead, shrieking. What if he fell? He imagined himself fainting, covered head to toes with leeches. They would suck him dry and display his skin, like a rabbit pelt, from the limbs of the spongy trees . . .
“CHIYA, SAHIB?”
Mainali jumped, startled by the tea boy. The cheap pencil he’d been holding snapped in his hands. “Danyabat.” He plucked the glass of milk tea from the cup holder and handed the boy a rupee. He held the glass with both hands, sipping slowly as he recovered his composure.
The leeches hadn’t killed him, of course. Junbesi had been closer than he thought. The locals had laughed riotously at the sight of the crazed little city boy, exploding from the jungle with a fattened leech above each eye. They’d removed the harmless creatures and flicked them away like dead mosquitoes before feeding Kunda a hot meal. Kunda’s feet, neck, and back were pocked with tiny round wounds, which the man at the health post swabbed with alcohol. They gave him a full dose of antibiotics in a smart plastic bottle and sent him back toward Ringmo in the clear, sunny morning with a group of porters.
That was it, after all: a few little nips. A little lost blood. And no more fear of leeches. He had never listened to his mother’s tall tales with the same gullibility again.
How much blood would it take this time, he wondered, to prove that the leeches at the end of Durbar Marg could also be resisted? How many more years of fear and intimidation before Nepal’s people realized that this self-styled deity was just a stocky, middle-aged man with a weakness for Irish whiskey, Cuban cigars, and Bruce Lee videos?
Mainali nursed his tea. He craved a packet of biscuits, but didn’t dare leave the office. He began snooping through Rana’s desk, hoping to find some kind of snack. There was a packet of roasted soybeans in the righthand drawer, and he popped a few into his mouth.
The issue, Mainali admitted to himself, was more complicated than getting rid of the king. Despite everything he’d said to Rhoda and her friends, he was terrified of democracy.
It wasn’t democracy itself, of course; that was an abstraction. It was the way the system would be interpreted by Nepalis. Political parties had been outlawed in Nepal since 1960, when Mahendra, the current king’s father, had banned them. Mahendra had imprisoned hundreds of people, including the activists who’d helped his own father, King Tribhuvan, reclaim Nepal’s throne from the corrupt Rana families in the early 1960s.
For the older generation, living in the middle hills and the mountains, democracy was synonymous with instability. It meant a loss of cultural values, a challenge to traditional authority, and a blasphemous insult to the god in the Palace. The scenes they associated with “democracy” were of stone-throwing students, battling helmeted police.
But it was the kids Mainali was most worried about. They’d grown up without any concept of what democracy was, or the civic responsibilities it carried. They did, however, have a twisted idea of its perks, based on the excesses of Western tourists and the racy images in smuggled Hollywood videos. For many teenagers—the disco crowd, the self-styled punks, the New Road cowboys—democracy was a form of anarchy. It was a ticket to the world of material affluence and social arrogance that visitors from the “free world” had flaunted in their streets for thirty years. And those guys were relatively benign. For others, Mainali knew, democracy was the right to break bottles in the streets, harass women like Rhoda and Grace, and run down the streets in packs, heaving rocks through windows.
And it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just his immediate apprehensions about what the first few months, or even years, would portend. He’d often talked with Rhoda and his friends about how democracy could succeed in Nepal, how even a spinach farmer in Simikot could watch his vote be counted. But there was a flip side to this coin. With the middle hills and Himalayan villages so spread out, the largest single voting bloc would be the Terai: the hot, flat, southern lowlands that slouched unceremoniously into India. To the casual visitor, much of the Terai was in fact indistinguishable from India. If those cities, which held nearly half of Nepal’s population, wanted closer ties with India, the rest of the country would be swept along. The average Nepali’s greatest fear—“Indianization”—would be realized. Neither the middle hill tribes, nor the Sherpas of the Khumbu, nor the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley would stand for that. Nepal would burst apart like a rotten squash.
What a marvelous dilemma, thought Mainali. Stagnation . . . or anarchy?
Back at Hunter, a Haitian friend had lent him a book by Woody Allen. There was one particular line that he had noted down; it seemed remarkably cogent.
“Mankind stands at a crossroads,” the comedian had written. “In one direction lies total destruction; in the other, utter despair. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
Kunda Mainali drew a long breath and slapped the mouth of his empty tea glass with his right palm. It made a high, startled noise, like a tightly tuned drum.
The Newars had their share of sayings as well. He remembered one his uncle had taught him: “He won’t carry the load, because it hurts his back—but it breaks his heart to pay someone else to carry it.”
Recalling the proverb was enough to make Mainali wince. He, all his friends, even his parents, had lived with broken hearts for years. Maybe it was time for Nepalis to start developing their back muscles.
Meera Khanal rapped at the door and walked in, a pencil between her teeth. She opened her mouth and let it drop onto her notepad, then flipped it into the air and caught it in her right hand. Mainali raised an eyebrow, impressed.
“What’ve we got?”
“Okay, here’s the scoop. No one knows where the money went. But I called in some favors at the Home Ministry anyway, and guess what?”
“Go on.”
“Next week, the United States Army is sending in a military transport plane via Pakistan. The contents will be one Sikorsky helicopter—ideal for an evacuation—and two escorts. Total price: $14 million, U.S.”
“What an uncanny coincidence.” Mainali breathed deeply and stared at the doodles on his notepad. He’d heard enough. It was time to deal with Kathmandu’s little leech problem. He felt calm and resolved; an odd state, he reflected, for a man about to forfeit his job.
Mainali picked up the phone. He punched the code for the print shop. Static. He tapped the cradle and tried again. On his fourth attempt the call went through. The line was so bad it sounded like he was talking to someone on the moon.
“Deepak? Kunda Mainali here. I’m on the National Desk today. Yes, it’s going well. Thanks; listen. No, just listen to me. Hold the presses. That’s right. Yes. We have a bit of late-breaking news.”
28
Critical Mass
ON THE NIGHT of April 4, I got home from a late showing of Dead Poets Society to see the light blinking on my answering machine.
Hi there, it’s Paula. Hope it’s not too late to call. Listen, if you get this and have a shortwave, try to find the BBC. Or I think it’s on NPR here in the city. There’s a lot going on in Nepal. I thought you should know. Anyway, hope all’s well. Give us a call. Gina misses you!
I didn’t have a shortwave, but I had DeLauer’s. The all-night newsstand had been a fixture in downtown Oakland since 1907 and stocked an amazing selection of international newspapers and magazines. It was a short drive at midnight, and by the time I got out of there I’d dropped 20 bucks on newsprint.
Back home I made a pot of tea, put on an Ali Akbar Khan CD, and planted myself on the living room carpet with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times of London, and the Times of India.
Paula hadn’t been kidding: Nepal was big news. Two centuries of repressed rage was surging through Kathmandu in peristaltic waves. I pulled out a notebo
ok and made a chronology of the month since my departure.
Nearly everything had happened within the past week. On Saturday, March 31, more than ten thousand demonstrators had marched through the streets of Patan, Kathmandu’s neighboring city. The protestors attacked a police station and tried to burn down the mayor’s office. Women threw buckets of water from windows to neutralize the tear gas, while volunteers ran through the crowds distributing onions (which, strangely, help to counter the gas’s weepy effect). Two people were killed in the melee. That evening Nepal’s foreign minister, S. K. Upadhyaya, handed his resignation to the king.
On Sunday, the king fired nine other ministers who backed Upadhyaya’s view. Meanwhile, a coalition of banned political parties held a rally in Patan’s Nag Bahal (“Snake Square”), building crude barricades to keep the police at bay. Kathmandu’s physicians staged a wildcat strike, refusing all but emergency calls, to protest the arrest of seven doctors. They weren’t the only high-caste professionals who’d been tagged by the Palace; scores of college professors and activist attorneys had also been dragged off to jail.
The following day—Monday, April 2—at least fifty thousand people, many armed with hoes or scythes, converged in the unassuming village of Kirtipur. Their plan was to march across the Bagmati bridge, and into Kathmandu. Every strata of Nepali society was represented: shop owners in black topis, banner-waving schoolboys, mothers with babes in arms. The police fired into the crowd, killing or wounding more than thirty people.
Among the casualties was Bijaya Maharjan, a twenty-five-year-old college student. He was rushed to Bir Hospital, where he died on arrival. A police squad raided the ward, demanding his body. The government, clearly, did not want the nature of his wounds, from lead dum-dum bullets, to reach the press. The doctors refused to surrender the corpse. When the body was taken by force, medics lay down in front of the police vans. That afternoon, as Maharjan’s funeral procession swelled through the streets of Patan, police tried to drive a bulldozer through flaming barricades of Nag Bahal in an attempt to rescue more than three hundred troops being held by the demonstrators. They failed. Jubilant mobs overturned the bulldozer and set it ablaze.
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