Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali author, translator and editor. She grew up in Nepal, Canada and the United States and began writing after completing a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She later graduated with a Masters in English from the University of Washington. Manjushree’s essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Newsweek and other publications in the US, UK, Canada, India and Nepal. She has written several non-fiction titles including Forget Kathmandu, which was a finalist in the Lettre Ulysses award in 2006, The Lives We Have Lost and A boy from Siklis. Her novels include The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight and All of Us in Our Own Lives. She lives in Toronto.
THE DIARY OF A BAFFLED BOURGEOIS
There came a time, at last, when it was no longer tenable for the Kathmandu bourgeois to deny the reality that democracy was failing. For me this came about eight months before the June 2001 massacre at the royal palace. It occurred to me that I did not like my ignorance about what was happening outside Kathmandu. I, a writer, a bourgeois with aspirations to being an intellectual, was perpetually lost, living in a mist of anxiety that would not clear. I was unhappy, and I was unhappy about being unhappy, for I knew that in the scheme of things I was immensely fortunate, and so should be happy.
Yet I found that every public disaster had the power to hollow me out. I was like a bad-politics junkie, and it felt as though bad politics were ruining my life. I kept up with what was happening in the country as much as any person, but watching the television news or reading the papers or listening to the radio left me feeling defeated – personally, intimately, as though tragedy had struck me or someone I loved.
There was no objective reason for this despair, because my own personal and professional life was quiet. I kept my contract with society. Like any proper bourgeois citizen I worked, I paid taxes, I contributed to causes that I believed in, I fulfilled my family duties, I communed with friends. I roughly functioned as I was supposed to. But for reasons I could not understand, my days were getting arduous. I kept seeing signs of calamity. Something bad would happen. I was not prepared for it.
My dread manifested itself as emotional malaise, a lagging in the heart. I would wake up, and before starting my work I would read the newspapers and feel fatigued before my day. I would scan some headline – the government-owned Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation had decided to lease a B-767 jet from Lauda Air. The mind is relentless – it fixates on details, it charts out scenarios, it mulls over implications. In leasing the Lauda Air jet, the RNAC was ignoring a directive by the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. To lease the jet, the RNAC would have to offer a bank guarantee worth over a million US dollars, and an advance of one month’s rent. Could the country afford this?
Why should that matter so much to me?
You’re using everything as an excuse to be miserable, I would chide myself. But then I would pick up the papers and read something else, and my reason would dissipate. I began to believe, irrationally, that if something good happened in government all my troubles would go. If I could be sure that the country would not fall apart, I could get on with my life. I even thought: Maybe if G.P. Koirala resigns as prime minister I can be happy again. I knew this was ridiculous. But since 1990 G.P. Koirala had been prime minister four times, and the country had spent his leadership years in despair.
Didn’t he know that the royalists were counting on democracy to fail? Conservatives said, “You call the Congress a party of democrats? It’s the private den of the Koirala clan!” I was never an ardent supporter of the Congress, but like most Nepalis, I had expected much from the party. But it, like the UML, had proved wanting. Not only that, the future of the political parties also looked bleak. Not having studied at the local college campuses, I had no feeling for the Congress or UML student unions, and thought the politicization of students a bad thing: Young people should study. Yet it was true that the students had forced the referendum of 1980. Without student activism in 1990, there would have been no democracy. But today’s student activists seemed to act robotically on their party leaders’ orders, flooding the streets for every last power struggle, but never pressuring them to take seriously the scores of honest issues that meanwhile lay ignored.
*
Amid the pell-mell of the days, I sometimes found it so hard to keep my mood up that I wondered if I should get a pill that would make me cheerful. Sometimes on my errands I passed the house of a psychiatrist. I did not know him well, but exchanged greetings with his wife and children when we met on the street. The doctor was successful – he drove a car – and appeared amiable and informal. He met patients at a clinic in his house. I wondered if I should go there. His patients, coming out of his gates, were skeletal teenage girls with their families or husbands, or elderly men and women being led by the hand, or couples glancing nervously around as they got on their motorcycles. They looked like people with genuine problems. What was my business among them?
I decided instead to take up meditation, and was lucky to find a teacher who moved through Tibetan Buddhist rituals lightly, instructing students on techniques to control the mind. I read doggedly cheerful self-help books that had become available of late in Kathmandu’s bookshops. I also joined a gym where all the machines functioned, and hot water was available even in winter (when Kathmandu’s houses were all dry) and I began to feel that maybe I would be all right.
*
The problem was, my happiness tended to last only as long as I was meditating or on the treadmill. When I went back to my room and began to write a story, the anxiety would return. Perhaps this was the problem – writing was so interior; I was stuck inside myself, being of no use to society. I spent too many hours alone, uselessly, before a computer in a room that got no sun.
When I did go out on work or errands, I would see the middle-class youth of Kathmandu all looking strangely ebullient, as though they did not know that their country was in crisis. Young women were baring belly buttons and enhancing their height with platform shoes; young men styled their hair and wore body-hugging T-shirts. I was glad that they were not despairing, and wondered if I could be like them – not indifferent to the problems around me, but able to be blithe, nevertheless, on a day-to-day basis.
It was, I knew, pathetic to be disabled the way I was. I was not, myself, politically engaged. I had watched the People’s Movement from the side, and to be honest would not die if democracy were to fail. People do live in dictatorships of all kinds – perhaps they do not live fully, but they do live. And if, say, the king were to effect a royal coup, would I go to jail to bring back democracy, spend five, seven, ten, even eighteen years for this cause? Probably not. I felt passionately that the past decade had fostered many important, positive changes, but I couldn’t always say what these were.
And sometimes positive things felt negative. For instance, groups were forming everywhere to organize their interests. Strikes had become increasingly common. In December 2000, hotel employees started demanding a mandatory 10 per cent service charge. Hotel owners refused them, and the government was slow in helping to negotiate a deal, and so all of Kathmandu’s hotels closed on 11 December, forcing tourists to move into tents, private houses and makeshift accommodations. Cancellations poured in as a result, and many trekking companies went under.
My work slowed down as the rest of Kathmandu slowed down. I wrote for hours every day, yet I always felt that I was falling behind or forgetting something important. It took a lot just to start writing after reading the morning papers. Maybe reading newspapers was the problem. They disturbed me. On 22 December, the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee summoned G.P. Koirala as part of its investigation into possible corruption in the Lauda Air jet lease, and I was wearied just to read the prime minister taking a high moral tone in response.
It felt like trouble was coming from every direction. On the day after Christmas, in the year 2000, violence erupted in Kathmandu. Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan had apparently said something derogatory about Nepal. Students affiliated with the left parties were marching to the Indian embassy with a letter of protest when, inexplicably, riots broke out, at the end of which four people were killed and 180 injured. It was bizarre. Who cared what an Indian actor thought of us? Not anyone I knew. Yet, when I went out that afternoon, the streets were littered with stones and rubber tyres burned at the junctions, befouling the air. Similar riots took place around the country. By day’s end, the government had blocked transmission of Indian TV channels. The Nepal Motion Picture Association and the Film Artists Association of Nepal had condemned Hrithik Roshan. The Gopi Krishna cinema hall declared that it would never screen his movies. Scores of irate press releases flooded the newspaper offices.
When the situation calmed, reports eventually emerged that the monarchist coterie of the king’s youngest brother, Dhirendra Shah, had incited much of the rioting, alongside the Maoists.
So it wasn’t just negative thinking. Malevolent forces were indeed coalescing against democracy, and the people – caught up in their small lives – would be left watching as their rights vanished one by one. After the Hrithik Roshan riots, I no longer wanted to live in Nepal. There were more riots the next day, and people of Indian origin were attacked. Walking on the streets, I became very conscious of looking like a hill Nepali; I suddenly loathed my mainstream features. Five hundred demonstrators and 80 police were injured by day’s end. A Nepali actor, who had once offered to shoot the prime minister if he got orders from Dhirendra Shah, was one of the rioters arrested. The government announced a ban on all Hrithik Roshan movies. Hrithik Roshan, for his part, denied that he had said anything bad about Nepal – and protested that in fact he loved his Nepali servants. Scores of press releases were issued against him that day as well.
The riots stopped after it was verified, the next day, that Hrithik Roshan really hadn’t said anything against Nepalis. So what had these riots been about? Nobody knew.
It was like that. We never knew where to look for trouble, and once we sighted signs, we never knew how to interpret them. We wanted to see all the bright, good things that democracy had brought us, but in Kathmandu the party leaders were forever bickering. Was this just a part of democratic culture, and was it right? On 28 December, 56 of the Congress party’s 113 members of Parliament started an inter-party no-confidence motion against G.P. Koirala. The motion was led by the Congress’s “rebel” faction head, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. G.P. Koirala survived the motion, but only by making party members vote in an open ballot, without secrecy. Was this right?
The opposition parties were no better. Nine leftist parties, not including the UML, called for a two-day nationwide general strike. Was this democratic culture? General strikes, or bandhs, had become common by now. This one took place on 1 and 2 January 2001 – that was how we in Kathmandu started the new year, with no traffic on the streets and most shops and businesses closed. The tourism industry was hit hard by cancellations. Businesses were all beginning to flounder.
*
One day I thought: It is not fair to say that I blame bad politics for my unhappiness; my happiness actually is derailed by bad politics. I was keeping up with my meditation and exercise. I had even decided to take seriously to gardening, to tend to flowers. I also longed to visit my teacher at his monastery atop a hill on the outskirts of Kathmandu where the winds carried the fragrance of wild grasses and sunshine. Then suddenly it would all seem pointless: Any effort to make a life here would prove futile; the country was heading for all-out war.
In mid January, G.P. Koirala won the informal approval of the king to create an Armed Police Force to fight the Maoists. He said the Nepal Police had not been armed adequately, nor trained enough, to lead the counter-insurgency. Even so, their brutality during the Romeo and Kilo Sierra 2 operations had turned vast swathes of rhe countryside against “bourgeois” parliamentary democracy. Wouldn’t a more lethal police body just spawn more antagonism? G.P. Koirala thought not. He also hoped that by creating an Armed Police Force he could avoid deploying the Royal Nepal Army, whose first loyalties – many felt – were to the king and only then to the country. If the army got involved, democracy would be lost.
It wasn’t just I who was controlled by public events; many of my friends, too, were in the same state. We were always looking for signs. Signs that our own lives – our nice, orderly lives – might eventually be compromised by all this trouble.
Around mid January, the Maoists issued the “Prachanda Path” – their guiding principles. Prachanda – who many still believed did not even exist – was now said to be heading the CPN (Maoist). Surely this couldn’t bode well. Some friends called, their voices thin with panic. I knew we shouldn’t be so fraught, but the world was going badly, and I felt we had to keep watch.
On 5 February, opposition parties demanded G.P. Koirala’s resignation over the Lauda Air lease scandal, and over the government’s inability to curb Maoist violence. Undeterred, G.P. Koirala formed a 37-member cabinet two days later. Five people had just died in a Maoist attack in Surkhet, west Nepal, in an ambush on the Chief Justice’s convoy. The Chief Justice had survived only by chance. Immediately upon the formation of G.P. Koirala’s cabinet, three people were reported killed in a clash between the police and the Maoists. Barely a week later, the Maoists exploded a bomb in Achham, west Nepal, killing two children and injuring 11 adults.
Life in Kathmandu was also growing chaotic. The Federation of Nepalese Transport Entrepreneurs organized a two-day strike of public buses and microbuses in response to student demands for a 50 per cent discount on fares, and a recent ban on vehicles more than 20 years old. The streets swarmed with people walking to work.
The day after the strike, 12 February, was the first day of the 19th session of Parliament, the winter “working” session in which bills got passed. There was always a buzz at the start of these sessions. They were what the 1990 People’s Movement had been for, after all. Thirteen bills were pending from previous parliamentary sessions, and two new bills were to be introduced. One was a bill granting women limited rights to inheritance and abortion, and the other a bill to govern political parties. The women’s rights bill, in particular, was immensely urgent. It had finally been tabled after years of delay, and though it granted only limited rights to women (women could inherit parental property but had to return it to their families upon marriage; only married women could obtain abortions, that too with the consent of their husbands), these limited rights were great improvements on the current laws.
But the session was to end without a single full day of work. On the first day, as the Speaker of the House Taranath Ranabhat struck the gavel, opening the session, a UML member of Parliament took the floor and launched on a tirade against G.P. Koirala. Another UML MP called for a boycott of Parliament. After two and a half hours of debate, all of the UML MPs marched out of the House, followed by those of all the other opposition parties, almost half the total strength of Parliament.
On the winter session’s second day, as soon as the Speaker opened the meeting, MPs from every opposition party except for the Nepal Sadbhavana Party circled the rostrum, chanting slogans against Prime Minister G.P. Koirala. The chanting lasted six minutes, after which the Speaker adjourned the meeting.
The following day the same thing happened. Members of Parliament even exchanged fisticuffs.
The boycott of Parliament continued for days. Wasn’t the UML discrediting democracy? Weren’t all the parties doing so? On 16 February, G.P. Koirala met with the opposition parties in an effort to negotiate a way past the stalemate, but they continued to demand that he resign, and this he would not do. Three days later, a brawl erupted in Parliament as the minister for culture, tourism and civil aviation tried to present a government defence of the Lauda Air jet lease. As he headed to the rostrum, a UML member of Parliament pulled him back. The two exchanged blows, then others joined in the fracas and the meeting was adjourned.
The dysfunction of Parliament was making the Maoists look justified in criticizing “bourgeois” parliamentary democracy. The political parties were behaving irresponsibly. And the bourgeoisie was beginning to want to be saved by the king... An old pattern was repeating itself.
King-watching became an obsession all over again. On 26 February, King Birendra went on a state visit to China, and while members of Parliament wrangled, the media focused, with much adulation, on this visit. Would the king please step in to save the country? That was the undertone of the press coverage.
There were also reports at this time that the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation had suffered a loss of 80 million rupees during the month and a half of Lauda Air service.
*
And then it was March. The weather got balmy, the sky seemed to lift, and all of Kathmandu was swept by winds and breezes. In between my writing hours, I remembered to take time to appreciate the small beauties of the world. How pretty, the gentians, pinks, roadflax, daisies and asters in the garden of my family home. I met friends more often, and I even, now and then, had fun. I scoured bookstores and tried to find international magazines to read so that I could gain a larger picture of the world. But the newspapers were hard to put down.
The parliamentary session of 1 March lasted for less than five minutes. There was a two-minute session four days later.
There were more sinister signs. In a single day, 34 Nepalis, mostly children, died of measles in Kalikot District. On the same day, the army was posted to the major custom points along the Indian and Chinese borders to check cross-border smuggling. According to the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, goods worth 10 billion rupees were smuggled through the Indian border every year, and one billion rupees worth of goods through the Chinese border. The police and the government’s revenue administration had been unable to check smuggling, and so the army had been called in to take over civilian duties.
Hotel employees were threatening another strike, again demanding a 10 per cent service charge. Unable to negotiate a deal with them, the government declared the hotel industry an essential service, banning its employees from going on strike.
As the days progressed the news got more and more disheartening. On 11 March, cadres of the UML and the CPN (Maoist) held joint mass rallies in Liwang, the capital of Rolpa District and the heartland of the Maoist insurgency. Had the mainstream left lost its cadres to the Maoists? Or were they two faces of the same coin? Twenty-four children died of an epidemic in Humla District on the same day. A report came out saying that there were 77,000 child labourers in Nepal. The editor of the Maoist affiliated newspaper Janaadesh was released from jail after a two-year incarceration, only to be arrested again. The lease of the Lauda Air jet was still under investigation by the Public Accounts Committee.
If things got bad enough, a strongman would step up, asking us to trade in our freedom for his efficiency. That was how democracy usually ended. King Birendra would effect a royal coup. Suddenly, everyone was saying he would take over. Many were saying he should.
Some people, of course, were able to see what they wanted to see and ignore what they didn’t want to see, the way tourists who come to Nepal look at terraced fields and see their beauty but remain blind to the hard labour they extract from tillers. Some of my friends felt confident that democracy could not be defeated. The king just couldn’t take over: democracy was too deeply rooted by now. Others just didn’t care one way or the other. Some laughed as they heard that the Maoist leader of area no. 2, cell no. 10 of Kalikot District had ordered villagers to support the insurgency by killing dogs, because their barking alerted security forces to the Maoists’ movement. “Anyone who defies this appeal will be severely punished by the people’s government according to the people’s decision,” the Maoist newspaper reported.
*
April was a harrowing month, crowded with vague, unfocused anxieties. I slept heavily, and my dreaming was dense.
On 2 April, more than 500 Maoists armed with rifles, bombs and grenades attacked two police outposts in Rukum and Dolakha Districts, killing 35 policemen and abducting 24 more. Seven Maoists were also killed in battle. This was the single bloodiest incident since the insurgency started. In Kathmandu, bombs went off at the houses of a Congress member of Parliament and a former inspector general of police. The next day, Maoists looted arms and cash in several places.
The day after, Congress leaders ended Parliament’s winter session. Not a single bill had been tabled; not a single full discussion had taken place. The final meeting of the session lasted two minutes. Though they had done nothing during the session, the members of Parliament were paid 6.2 million rupees, plus allowance and transport fares. This was the last session of Parliament the country was to have.
At about this time, a conspiracy theory that the palace was working in tandem with the Maoists gained ground. The 4 April newspaper reports had it that Maoist leaders Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai had met a royalist member of the Upper House, Ramesh Nath Pandey. Why was the palace meeting the Maoists? Was the palace’s shadowy “underground gang” supporting the insurgency to eventually justify a royal coup in the name of counter-insurgency?
Yet if the royalists and the Maoists were succeeding in squeezing out democracy, it was because the party leaders were doing their bit to discredit themselves. On 4 April, again, the student wing of the splintered-off communist party, ML, called for a chakka jam, a shutdown of traffic. Two days later the same student group effected a nationwide general strike, and all schools, industries and businesses were forced shut. Meanwhile, a wave of panic was sweeping over the bourgeoisie. The Maoists were winning! On 8 April newspapers reported 80 people dead in the past six days of the insurgency and counter-insurgency. The police had started deserting their remote posts. On 9, 10 and 11 April, the Maoists held elections for the representatives of each of Rolpa District’s 51 Village Development Committees, which they had renamed “Village People’s Committees”. They planned to form republican governments in their strongholds.
G.P. Koirala was bent on suppressing the Maoists by force. On 12 April, the king re-promulgated the Armed Police Force Ordinance. Three days later, the Maoists looted nine million rupees from a Jhapa District bank. The UML and the other left parties, meanwhile, continued trying to unseat the prime minister. At 9 a.m. on 16 April, leftist activists formed a human roadblock along Putali Sadak, the main road to Singha Durbar, to prevent the prime minister from reaching his office. It turned out he had entered Singha Durbar an hour earlier. Enraged, the leftist activists burned 12 government vehicles in a rampage.
Three days later, they held a mass rally demanding that G.P. Koirala step down.
*
G.P. Koirala had decided, by then, that even the Armed Police Force were not up to quelling the Maoist insurgency; the army had to be mobilized. On 18 April, he ordered the deployment of both the Armed Police Force and the Royal Nepal Army for the first phase of the Integrated Security and Development Programme, a newly developed “hearts and minds” operation targeted at Maoist strongholds. In so doing, G.P. Koirala came smack up against the army’s resistance to civilian command. Two days later, the Chief of the Army Staff General Prajwalla Sumshere Jung Bahadur Rana publicly asked all the major political parties to reach a national consensus on the deployment of the army. This was unheard of. Was he questioning the Defence Council’s orders?
This unleashed a storm. Or yet another storm. Kathmandu was once again shaken by rumours of a royal coup. Even G.P. Koirala got skittish. He skipped Kathmandu without informing anyone, and went to his hometown Biratnagar, near the Indian border. Word had it that he wanted to be able to evade arrest should the army come for him, as they had decades earlier for his brother B.P. The UML and other left parties should have helped the prime minister to stare down the army; instead they announced another round of public protests against him. The UML General Secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal vowed to disrupt the next session of Parliament if G.P. Koirala had not resigned by then.
ln the middle of all this, King Birendra received, from the Supreme Court, a bill that he had sent them for an opinion. The bench had unanimously found it in violation of the constitution. The bill had been passed on 26 July 2000 as the 6th amendment to the 1964 citizenship act. It allowed less xenophobic standards for establishing citizenship, and granted citizenship to men married to Nepali women (previously, only women married to Nepali men were allowed citizenship). It was the first bill that the king had not ratified immediately, as he was supposed to, but sent to the Supreme Court for an opinion. Now he ratified it, but with the Supreme Court’s opinion attached. The king, too, was playing politics.
Meanwhile, 100 policemen had deserted their stations in remote outposts, and armed Maoists had staged an attack in Sunsari District in the east. There was always one thing or another, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. On 26 April, the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority ordered the arrests of a former executive chairman and a former board chairman of the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation. A Congress party member, a former minister of tourism and civil aviation, was asked to hand in his passport. The Congress party immediately deemed the investigation to be politically biased.
The UML crowed. The same day, left parties carried out a chakka jam, in the evening rush hour, demanding G.P. Koirala’s resignation. This was followed by a blackout. Over the weekend of the 28th and 29th, leftist activists patrolled the streets and stopped government vehicles, including the car being used by the Speaker of the House.
The prospect of a coup was looming large, but the political parties were too shortsighted to see it. April ended with the deployment of the army to Rukum, Rolpa, Jajarkor Salyan, Gorkha, Pyuthan and Kalikot Districts as the beginning of the Integrated Security and Development Programme. Army troops would reach the districts in two weeks to get the security situation under control. In the second phase of the programme, the army would be deployed to Kavrepalanchowk, Ramechhap, Lamjung, Dhading, Dolpa, Jumla, Sindhupalchowk, Sindhuli, Nuwakot, Dailekh Baglung, Myagdi, Tanahun and Achham Districts, where it would build infrastructure like roads and bridges. In the third phase, there would be long-term work to alleviate rural poverty. The Integrated Security and Development Programme seemed to be handing the development responsibility of the civilian government to the army. But the political parties were not concerned. They only wanted G.P. Koirala’s resignation.
*
Despite all this, sometimes for brief periods I thought everything would be all right. I would attend a lecture by an articulate intellectual, and suddenly see some light. A journalist would report bravely on what was happening in rural Nepal. A civil rights activist would say something pithy. One or another Nepali would achieve international success, or someone very young would climb Mt Everest. One day I went to Kathmandu’s zoo and saw that the animals were kept in conditions that were more or less humane. I watched a particularly effusive chimpanzee and felt my sense of normality restored.
But then my view would grow cloudy again. On 2 May, the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority asked G.P. Koirala for clarification of his role in the Lauda Air jet deal. By this time, even his own party members wanted him to resign. But G.P. sent back a three-page letter challenging the Centre’s jurisdiction to question what had been a cabinet decision. The head of the rebel faction within the Congress, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, publicly demanded G.P.’s resignation. G.P. shot back: “Bhattarai’s job is to ask for my resignation; mine is to refuse the same.” Even the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister suggested that he resign, but at 78, G.P. wanted to keep holding on to power.
And I saw that terrible things would happen any day now, as the Congress leaders bickered among themselves – something nobody was prepared for – and everyone’s lives would be given up to naked survival.
On 8 May, scores of members of a Maoist-affiliated student body, the All-Nepal National Federation of Student Unions (Revolutionary) – ANNFSU (Revolutionary) – attacked two “bourgeois” private schools in Kathmandu, destroying their computers and photocopy machines and setting the furniture on fire. Brandishing khukuris and iron rods, the assailants demanded that the schools lower their fees, and – because the schools’ principals were of Indian origin – they chanted slogans against India. One million children all over the country stayed at home as the Public and Boarding Schools Organization decided to shut down all 8,000 of its member schools for three days in protest.
The news was, meanwhile, filled with the deployment of the army in the Maoist-affected districts. Gorkha District, home to the Shah kings, was also home to Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai. It was, we now learned, to be a model district for the Integrated Security and Development Programme. The army would carry out 40 development projects here, constructing bridges and irrigation canals, implementing drinking water and electricity schemes, and supporting the collection, processing and distribution of herbs.
The Maoists carried on unhindered, skirting the army. On 13 May, three Maoists were killed in Surkhet District, two of them women. Five days later, the Maoists looted weapons in Kaski and Parbat Districts. On 19 May, the Maoists killed three policemen and injured 11 civilians in an attack in Okhaldhunga District, in the east. On the same day, their cadres held a mass rally in Bhawang village in Rolpa District, and announced the formation of their “People’s Local Government” throughout the district. This took place just weeks before army troops were due to arrive there. The People’s Local Government consisted of a 10-member committee, including members of the ethnic rights group Magarat Mukti Morcha, members of the Dalit rights group Dallit Mukri Morcha, local intelligentsia, women and Maoists area commanders. The Maoists vowed to form similar governments in Rukum, Salyan, Jajarkot Kalikot and Gorkha Districts, establishing a parallel government.
*
In Kathmandu, G.P. Koirala resigned as the general secretary of the Congress, only to appoint a relative. He also appointed two other relatives to the party’s Central Working Committee.
Word had it that the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority was going to announce any day now its findings on the Lauda Air jet deal. Before that could happen, though, the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament announced that it was charging both the Congress’s and the UML’s former ministers of tourism and civil aviation with corruption in another deal involving Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation’s lease of a China Southwest Airlines jet. The UML suddenly lost steam; its leaders denounced this decision, though feebly. Days later, the Centre for the Investigatien of the Abuse of Authority announced that it was prosecuting 10 people in connection with the Lauda Air jet lease, including two foreign Lauda Air executives based in Italy and Austria. No mention was made of G.P. Koirala’s culpability. I found myself wondering whether these prosecutions were politically motivated.
The UML rallied back and announced a three-day-long nationwide bandh from 27 to 29 May, demanding – what else – G.P. Koirala’s resignation. No taxis or tempos or buses or cars ran for these three days, no shops or offices or businesses opened. So zealous were party activists in enforcing the shutdown that even the few vegetable vendors who defied other bandhs decided not to risk it this time.
During one-day bandhs, people generally cleaned their houses or caught up with chores. This time, though, they lost all will. They sat and watched Hindi movies and tele-serials. I did the same. On the first night I watched a ghost movie, though I didn’t usually like those. I watched religious programmes the next morning, and a gleaming guru told me to keep Krishna in my heart. That day, two patients died in hospital because leftist activists had obstructed ambulances. On the third day, there was unrest throughout the country as people tried to defy the bandh. More than 600 people – and a line of cars – took out a rally in Kathmandu in protest. Most people, though, just sat home and watched soap operas, police shows, sitcoms, docu-dramas – anything that was on.
*
One day sometime after that, I got into a conversation with the manager of my gym about Upstairs, a jazz bar that the man frequented. I had been meaning to go there for years, I said. I’m there every night after nine, he told me as he did his abs. He also talked about a resort not far from Kathmandu where he had done some bungee jumping: “It used to be the second highest jump in the world, but the highest closed down, so now this is the highest.” Moving on to bench presses he said he had attended a fancy dress party at which two men had shown up in drag. “One really looked like a woman,” he grinned.
So surprised was I by all the fun he was having that all I could say was, “Wow. That’s great. That’s cool.” I did not begrudge him his fun; I knew, after all, that I would not feel any more lighthearted dressing up for parties, or jumping off bridges with my life on a rope, or even dropping by a bar to hear jazz. But the man’s appetite for fun got me thinking.
Later, at Himalayan Java, a hip new cafe in Thamel, I looked at the young people of Kathmandu – a blithe, carefree generation – and found that I did resent them. The cafe was filled with people of my economic class – the Kathmandu bourgeoisie, who were unaffected, in any real sense, by the failure of democratic politics. They got on with their lives despite it all. Close to me sat a young woman in a halter top, bell bottoms and platform heels, a navel ring showing on her sleek stomach. Her face was frozen in a come-hither expression as she listened to the young man across her. He had gelled, spiked hair, and earrings, and sleek clothes offset by a big-buckled belt and bulky Doc Martens.
Why were these young people being so relentlessly hip? No, this was good. I sipped my iced mocha, thinking, here is a whole country writhing with youthful energy. There is an age, isn’t there, at which one wants to smash all that is traditional, at which one wants to destroy the old and usher in the new? The youth were following the paths open to them. Those in Kathmandu were mimicking MTV VJs, and those in the villages were joining the Maoists. They were both, in their own ways, trying to force change.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International had begun to criticize the country’s police for execution, torture and disappearances, and the Maoists for passing death sentences in their “People’s Courts” and recruiting children into their ranks. Nepal could soon have one of the highest rates of human rights atrocities. Panicked, more and more of the bourgeoisie began hoping that the king would do something, anything, to restore order. Most of the royal family was unpopular, but about King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah the bourgeoisie had always been addle-headed. He was such a pleasant fellow. Because he now did so little as a constitutional monarch, he committed few mistakes. Because he controlled so few public funds, he was not tainted by money. Because he spoke so little, what he said sounded sage. He shone in comparison to the coarse, bungling party leaders of the day.
Eternal dynasty. The hows and whens of a royal coup became topics of endless conjecture in Kathmandu. All of us were convinced that it would happen. It almost seemed like there was a Panchayat propaganda hex on us. Our political parties would muddle endlessly, and the king would return to power, claiming that it was for our own good. We did not want a royal coup to happen. But we felt helpless to prevent it. And so all we did, when we heard a fresh round of rumours, was to hunker down and brace for the worst.
*
On 30 May, just as the Lauda Air jet lease hearings began at the Patan appellate court, the jet in question flew to Bangkok for routine repairs, never to return.
The next day, the Maoists set off a bomb at an offset press in Kathmandu, accusing the press of printing “obscene materials”. No one could figure out exactly what printed material had angered them so much. Local UML leaders in faraway Musikot village, in Rukurn District, boycotted the chief district officer’s all-party meeting on the army’s Integrated Security and Development Programme. The country was in a shambles.
By now my interest in my work was petering out. It seemed to me that fiction couldn’t keep up with our reality. Or I did not know how to make it. My friends were beginning to worry about their career prospects. Non-government organizations could no longer work in the villages without the fear of local Maoists turning against them. The cancellations in the tourism industry were affecting not just Kathmandu hotels and travel agencies, but also village inns and lodges. Businesses were closing. Artists were unable to find clients. The garment industry had declined in the last year, though the year before it had grown by 30 per cent. Eight people died of gastroenteritis in far-western Jajarkot on the last day of May.
As I walked through the Kathmandu streets late that afternoon, it occurred to me that all I ever did any more was worry. And if the way that Kathmandu’s hip youth ignored their country’s troubles helped nothing, neither did my anxious and burdened attitude. I thought: My life has become so aimless, so desultory, that I feel a compulsion to link it to larger, more compelling collective narratives. I am infusing my experience with an importance that is otherwise absent. I am trying to make my life interesting by linking it to bad politics. I had to do something to lift my mood. I might start by doing something small, I thought, something different to alter my days, or at least this day, or the next few hours. Perhaps being happy required nothing much: no marches or demonstrations, no political action, no grand gestures. Our lives are small, our problems are small, and maybe their solutions are also small.
On a whim I veered into a tandoori restaurant where my friends and I used to go when we were all feeling more upbeat about life. It wasn’t the kind of place where women went alone – for a price the restaurant arranged girls. Most of the clients that day were male, though at a few tables couples were huddled over tea and snacks. I phoned a friend from there and said I’d come over with some food, and he said all right, so it was a date. I ordered a half tandoori chicken and naan, saag paneer and daal, and asked the waiter to home-pack it.
As I waited, my eyes fell on a couple at a corner table. The man was much older than his partner, who was another one of those image-conscious young women. She was wearing tight black pants and long, sharp heels. Her face was heavily made up. She could not have been more than 18. The man was in his 40s, the age when men bore of their wives. I wondered whether he was her lover or client.
As I looked on, something about the man struck me. The width of his back. He was wearing a chequered jacket, and was stooping slightly. I recognized the stoop. He had the same frizzy hair as the psychiatrist I had thought of visiting months ago. Most of his clients were young women who wore defeated expressions. This woman was not like that. She was the kind of woman that even insecure women warm to: bright, unapologetic about her youth, happy to claim her due. The man, leaning into her, wiped away a crumb on her lips. She laughed in a way that was meant to be both girlish and sexy.
When my home-pack order came, I paid and went outside, suddenly feeling confused. Evening was falling, and the first few cars had turned on their sidelights. My friend’s street was blasted through with the sounds of car horns. The gap-toothed unevenness of the sidewalk frazzled me as I pushed through the crowds.
I did not enjoy dinner that night. My friend was going through a bad patch, and we talked awhile about the difficulty of finding work, and then we gossiped about common friends. We had dinner, then put on the television news. Once the headlines were over, my friend told me a joke that he’d heard that day.
“It’s a little indecent,” he said, slightly embarrassed. Then he went on. “There was a man on a crowded bus, and he was standing with his hands like this.” He cupped both palms, and said, “No matter how much the bus jolted him around, the man wouldn’t change the position of his hands.” He smiled in anticipation of the joke. After a while, the people around began to notice this. Every time the bus stopped, all the passengers would reach for a railing or a chair back to hold onto, but this man would just balance himself with his legs, never changing the position of his hands.
Now one of the passengers on the bus was a policeman, who thought, this man is a Maoist. He’s got explosives in his shirt, and the detonator is in his hands. Otherwise why would he keep from touching anything even when the bus turns?
So the policeman followed the man when he got off the bus. Even on the streets, the man kept his hands cupped. The policeman was sure he had found a Maoist. As they neared a police post, he arrested the man.
“But even after he was arrested, the man wouldn’t stop cupping his hands. The police thought, This man is a hardened Maoist, we’ll have to beat him into confessing. So they took him straight to the investigation cell. But before beating him, the inspector said, Now we’re going to beat you, but you can avoid that if you just tell us why you’re holding your hands like that.”
My friend’s face was flushed with glee. I was smiling along expectantly. Holding up cupped hands, my friend said, “And then the man said, Sir, this is the measurement of my wife’s breasts. I was going to buy her a bra!”
My friend burst out laughing, and I also laughed, because it was silly, the man walking around with cupped hands. But my friend found it unusually funny. “It was just a man going to buy a bra!” he hooted, and began laughing so hard that he had to bend over to be able to breathe.
He was still bent over, his shoulders shaking, when I stopped laughing, and I looked at him, doubled up, convulsing, making a sound halfway between a sob and a squeal, and I realized that I hadn’t seen him laugh this hard for a long time. He had been low for months on end now. When he lifted his head again he was still laughing, and his lips were stretched thin, his teeth were showing and his eyes were sparkling with tears. He looked like someone I didn’t know. “A bra!” he sputtered and bent over once more.
I laughed, uncertainly, to keep him company, but I was also thinking – for my mind was merciless – why was he laughing so hard at a joke that wasn’t that funny? How rare laughter had become in our lives.
For his sake I should have laughed longer, but my breath would not carry false emotion. My mirth died completely.
“A bra,” my friend said again, weakly, then he finally sat up, and for a while we remained as we were, both facing the television, which was on sports news. My friend wiped away some tears and I smiled at him, but inside, I was pierced with sadness at the meagreness of happiness in our days.
I stayed on a while, as my friend made a few good-humoured remarks about the sports news. But the sadness inside me kept growing till I could no longer bear to stay on. “I’ll go,” I said, and I left him still watching the news.
*
Barely 24 hours after this, King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah and his entire family succumbed to the massacre at the royal palace.