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Rain of Shadows (Cont.)

In the days after the murders, all Nepalis had one unified reaction. Nepal kutam huncha: Nepal is finished. Nepal is destroyed. That feeling faded slowly. Dipendra died a few days after his father. Birendra's brother, Gyanendra, was crowned King the next day.

None of that future was alive that night as the corpses of King Birendra and his family were carried toward the burning ghats at Pashupati. In the distance, as I followed the dead king through dark streets, I could hear the multitude's receding voices as they returned to the city. They carried something with them, something the king had given them, though none could name it. Perhaps it was simply my imagination, after living so many years in Nepal, that wealthy hands were already reaching out, like ghosts, to mold this popular discontent. In fact it was just the corpse of a murdered man that was burned at Pashupati. Birendra, his wife, his sons, his daughter, his sisters—each was laid upon a four-foot-high pile of logs and set alight. In a day in which every fact was hidden, there at the end of it, when the fires were lit, all was naked and clear.

For a long time the fires burned. They cast shadows all around the ghats, and the ancient temples wavered in their orange light. Priests poured gallons of clarified butter on the fires when they ebbed. When the muscles in King Birendra's left arm shoved his flaming hand out of the fire, a Brahman took up a long bamboo pole—one pulled from the bier they had borne him on—and delicately shoved the burning flesh back into the fire. Streaks of sparks flurried up into the sky.

Young soldiers from the palace's royal marching band slept as the fires burned low. After being woken in the middle of the previous night by the sound of gunfire, after marching across the city in the procession, after standing at attention for hours as the pyres snapped—at last they lay down their trumpets and trombones, their clarinets and drums, and slept. It was past two in the morning, with the troops collapsed in slumbering huddles near temples and along stone steps, that the Brahmans tending the pyres began to pour water onto the coals. Nothing human remained. All was left to ash.

Only then did the monsoon, which had threatened all day, arrive. Only then did the rain come down from the black sky. The first fat drops of the monsoon spit and hissed as they fell onto the king's pyre, just as it dwindled to nothing. Just in time to help the Brahmans wash the ashes into the river.

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