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Outside Magazine September 2001

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Mountain Kingdom (cont.)

Alice wakes up from her dream, and time begins to move forward again, bringing with it small signs of the depressing realities that grip present-day Nepal. In Libang, I meet Chairman Gore-Tex's nemesis, Harikrishna. He's the government's chief district officer for Rolpa, a conceited, high-caste politician who shows up an hour late, awash in flunkies. Although he can't even visit most of his guerrilla-controlled territory, he insists that the Red Army rules by fear alone. "They have no support," he tells me, cleaning his nails with the tip of a key.

We meet a 75-year-old refugee, Ratibhan Oli, one of hundreds of people the Maoists have chased out of their base areas. These are the "revisionists," people who won't, for one reason or another, toe the party line. And at a mud-floored boarding school the same day, 300 students assemble on the parade ground to hear me, at the insistence of their teachers, give another speech. Staring at their upturned faces, beneath guard towers, I am at a loss. Should I tell them to pay no mind to communist dingbats and court astrologers? Should I point out that the Maoist revolution will inevitably turn inward and eat its children, like every revolution everywhere?

I can't think of a damn thing to say.

Another day of brutal road travel and a prop plane back to Kathmandu. In the terminal, I spot a plastic box for donations to the Red Cross and shove the remaining rupees, the Maoist bribe money that we didn't spend on Fantas, through the acrylic slot.

Soon the king will die. Kathmandu, like the countryside, is already seething, as if by premonition. There's another general strike on, one in a series that has paralyzed transport and turned the city into a ghost town. For days we wander avenues so quiet that the holy cows are confused by the lack of traffic and moo in despair. Without the pollution of tailpipes, the fresh mountain breeze is a reminder of an old Nepal. But the empty sidewalks and shuttered cybercafés of Thamel also look like another Nepal, some future place where the Maoists have come to power and dispersed the modern world with a harmless cultural revolution, emptying the city like the Khmer Rouge with good manners.

There are Nepali journalists who predict just such a Maoist takeover, but that worst-case scenario is unlikely. The army will deploy, the old guard in Kathmandu will rally to defend itself, and India, China, and the United States will stir themselves from indifference. "The Maoists are a real problem," says University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus of political science Leo Rose, a leading Nepal expert. "But it's hard for me to see them overthrowing the present government. What are they offering? They don't have any achievements or accomplishments. My own guess is they'll be an irritant, a problem, but not an alternative."

It is more likely that the Maoists will be undone by their own quest for ideological purity, by their faith in a violence that, as they themselves admit, is not supported by the Nepali people. The U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu argues that there may be as few as 2,000 hard-core communists, and that, as an American diplomat there told me, the "masses" backing the Maoists "are really ordinary people more disgusted with circumstances than Maoist in ideology." Their support for the guerrillas is "wishful thinking in a desperate situation," as Nepali political scientist Vijaya Sigdel puts it. But the more the Maoists expand, the quicker the people will learn that opposing a corrupt government is not the same as supporting a fanatical insurgency. Nepal can still evade the dark garden of Maoist dreams, but the exceptional kingdom is already losing its distance from the world, becoming instead a troubled, unexceptional place.

In the last days of the old Nepal, it is lovely to walk the strike-bound streets or roll about town in rickshas, pausing to watch aimless bands of students and communists march listlessly through the city, lifting their fists, occasionally tossing a brick. There's something wonderfully feeble about the scene. Perhaps the Maoists' grim ferocity will yet founder in the traditional incompetence of Nepali politics. There is always the hope of farce, rather than tragedy.

I stop around the royal palace a few times, but nobody is allowed to visit. The Gurkha guards in puttees and plumed hats shoo me away, and I have to settle for looking through the fence at the lush grounds, the pine trees, and the ornamental gardens.

In a few days the king will be dead. Long live the king.

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