Free Republic or Death! by Alex Marshall Page B

expectantly, asking me what I want to know next. I tell him I’d heard he almost had the anthem taken away from him as quickly as he won it; that everything he has today almost didn’t come about. ‘What happened?’ I ask.
    Pradip struggles to keep smiling.
    *
    Pradip came to Kathmandu to study law. He hadn’t wanted to, but his older brothers had decided it would be a good course for him. It was here he started writing poems, feeling lost and homesick in a city of about a million where there’s no escape from the honks of car horns and the whirr of generators. He was a fan of the country’s then king, Birendra, as most Nepalese were. Birendra was your archetypal ‘man of the people’ – a king who wore thick-rimmed, oversized glasses that looked as if a doctor had forced them on him, and who was known more for serving drinks in plastic tumblers at parties than any extravagance. He’d once held almost total power, enabling him to act like a god among men – some thought he was actually the living incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu – but in 1990 he allowed political parties to form and elections to happen. Some of the politicians who came to power proved so venal many started to wish he hadn’t.
    But Pradip’s pro-royal outlook changed somewhat in 2001. On 1 June that year, the royal family gathered for dinner at their palace in Kathmandu. One of Birendra’s sons, Crown Prince Dipendra, suddenly fell down, apparently drunk. He was taken to his room, helped to bed and left with some cigarettes filled with a substance no one’s ever identified, probably cocaine. But he soon reappeared, walking back into the room where everyone was drinking, only now dressed in army fatigues and carrying an assault rifle, a Glock pistol and a shotgun. He smiled at one of his uncles and then shot Birendra three times in the chest. He then briefly left the room before returning to shoot his brother-in-law and an uncle, then left and returned a third time and shot Birendra once more in the head. Birendra’s last words were apparently, ‘What have you done?’ Dipendra then shot another uncle and several aunts, his sister, and some family friends. Other guests saved themselves by cowering behind a sofa. He then walked out into the garden, his mother, the queen, one of those chasing after him. Perhaps she wanted some kind of explanation or just to hold him and try, somehow, to make it all right. But he shot her, then shot himself.
    There are many explanations for why he did it – that Birendra had disagreed with his choice of wife; that some past members of the royal family had suffered from insanity and he’d inherited their genes – but it feels like no explanation could ever help anyone understand that evening.
    You can visit the palace today. It’s now a museum with royal knick-knacks everywhere, including a china dog collection. The rooms where the massacre took place have been knocked down, and all that’s left of them are a few small stone walls, making it look rather like an archaeological excavation site. There are signs pointing to spots on the ground that say things like, ‘Queen Aishwarya fatally wounded here.’ Nepalese queue to take photos.
    After the massacre, Birendra’s brother Gyanendra was named king (he had actually been king once before, for a few weeks at the age of four, when the rest of his family fled to India fearing they were about to be killed). Fat and with a drooping mouth, Gyanendra was known as a hard-nosed businessman with interests in everything from turpentine to incense sticks. He had an air of arrogance, disdain even, and was far from popular. Many Nepalese actually assumed he was behind the massacre, trying to secure the throne for himself with the help of Indian security forces. The fact he was not at the dinner that night was apparently all the evidence they needed; his wife might have been one of those shot, but that was clearly just a ploy to divert people’s attention. (The