Republic or Death! (10 page)

*

There is of course one person central to the anthem's story, whose views about it I've yet to mention at all: Gyanendra, the former king – the only man alive who's had an anthem that was effectively about him, stripped away. He's someone who still carries an air of regality – I've been told to address him as His Royal Highness if we ever meet – and he seems to still cherish secrecy as if he's a ruling monarch too. He just doesn't want to talk to me. I've been chasing him for over a week now, ever since I arrived, trying to orchestrate even the briefest of meetings, but I've got nowhere.

I should probably have given up on my very first day in Nepal. I got a phone call from his assistant turning down my request for a meeting: ‘The anthem's just too sensitive a matter to discuss.' But then I stumbled across an old English émigré in a cafe off Patan Durbar Square, the heart of one of the old princely states that used to make up Nepal, its huge space littered with red and brown pagodas surrounded by flocks of pigeons (some of the pagodas were tragically destroyed in the 2015 earthquake). This man was about sixty, in white khaki trousers and wide-brimmed hat, and looked so comfortable speaking Nepali to the waitress, I could tell he'd been living in the country for decades. I guessed he was a former British army officer who came over once to recruit Gurkhas and never left, but he could just as easily have been a cleaned-up hippy, someone who came to Kathmandu's ‘freak street' in the seventies and then realised he could make a fortune if he stopped taking drugs and ran a travel agent's instead.

‘Oh, it should be easy to arrange a meeting with the king,' he said. ‘You're just going about it the wrong way. Requesting meetings: that's not how business works around here. You need to pay.'

‘What? A bribe?' I asked.

‘Well, that's a very vulgar word, but you've got to grease the wheels. Just go to one of the posh hotels – they're all owned by his relatives – and make an offer.'

‘I could spare about eight thousand rupees,' I said (about £50).

He looked at me with pity. ‘Yes, perhaps it's not for you.'

But that conversation did give me an idea. I started bothering any of Gyanendra's relatives I could find; any people I knew he'd done business with. One of the latter, Prabhakar Rana, told me, ‘What do you expect? Of course it's sensitive. If he says he dislikes the new anthem, it will anger people. If he says he likes it, it will anger people. Plus, he is still working out his options.'

‘What do you mean by “options”?' I asked. ‘He wants to come back to power?' Prabhakar laughed awkwardly and changed the subject.

I even went to Pokhara, where I'd heard Gyanendra has a summerhouse. Pokhara is Nepal's second city, far smaller than Kathmandu – the sort of place where cows run across roads forcing cars to jam on their brakes. I thought while there I might just hang around the gates to Gyanendra's house and see if he went for a stroll one afternoon around Pokhara's famous lake. He didn't. But one morning I met a few students watching a football match. They were all halfway through their degrees and were meant to be taking exams, but a lecturers' strike meant they couldn't. I asked them about the anthem and one, Suman Gautam, told me he preferred the old royal one. ‘I sang it when I was young so it means more to me, but also, in my opinion the king is better. The politicians are just chasing money. He never did that. He tried his best.' The old song also sounds like an anthem, he added. ‘The one now is like a pop song,' he said, dismissively. ‘It doesn't have any power.'

Despite his view, Suman offered to take me to his old school to watch the pupils sing that ‘powerless' anthem and so the next morning drove me there on his motorbike, bouncing over potholes and swerving between buses. In the schoolyard, several hundred children were lined up in crisp white shirts and blue ties, midway through their morning calisthenics: putting their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them, stepping left, stepping right, then doing three short claps. When they were finished they sang the anthem, the younger ones only joining in for the words ‘Nepali' and ‘Nepala' that finish the main lines, the oldest shouting every word. I couldn't stop grinning: it was funny and touching and that music, played by the teacher on a harmonium – the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Casio keyboard – sounded amazing. Yes, like a pop song, and yes, without the pomposity you might expect, or even want, of an anthem, but like Nepal.

Once it finished, the headmaster whispered in my ear, asking if I'd like to hear the old royal anthem too. I said I was surprised they knew it – most looked too young to have even heard it. ‘Oh, they know it,' he said, with a conspiratorial smile, and led me off to a classroom where he sang it boisterously, while the thirty children mostly looked confused. ‘I'm not saying I'm a royalist,' he said afterwards, ‘but there's a lot wrong with this country today and the anthem's part of it. It doesn't make you feel proud like what we had before.'

That moment seemed to sum up my whole time in Nepal. When I spoke to people about the anthem, anyone who'd welcomed the Maoist revolution and felt freed by it – basically anyone from a minority or a low caste, or anyone who supported their campaigns against drink and patriarchy – told me it inspired them and that they loved singing it. But anyone who still had royal ties seemed to cling to the old song. Often they'd criticise Amber and Pradip's effort – either the music wasn't bombastic enough, and was too weird to be an anthem, or the words weren't stirring. I'd explain how unique it was, and how brilliant it was that they hadn't just copied a Western march, that to my ears it couldn't be better, but they wouldn't listen. The anthem seemed to be a small reminder of a change they regretted, even if they'd never say that openly but only with a nod and a wink. And then they'd go into a long list of ways the country had gone nowhere since the revolution and perhaps talk about moving away to somewhere better like Delhi.

*

I was still in Pokhara and about to give up hope of getting anywhere close to Gyanendra when my phone rang. It was a secretary from the Hotel Annapurna in Kathmandu, one of the city's oldest, situated a stone's throw from the royal palace. ‘Shreejana Rana will meet you tomorrow,' the secretary said. I didn't know who Shreejana Rana was, but hastily agreed, then pulled out a book I'd bought that contained a copy of the royal family tree. I started at Gyanendra and went down through his children. No luck. I slowly moved further and further away, checking the names of relative after relative, until I found her, sitting quite alone: Shreejana Rana, the wife of one of Gyanendra's second cousins. Her stepmother had been at the royal massacre in 2001, somehow getting out with only a bullet wound to a hand. Shreejana was not a royal. She wasn't a princess and she definitely wasn't a queen. I doubt she'd even run our meeting past Gyanendra's assistants. But if this was the only opportunity I was going to get to speak to a member of the Nepalese royal family, I'd take it with both hands.

*

‘We're very much commoners,' Shreejana says, for the third time since we've met, before blowing on her tea to cool it down. We're sitting in the cream-coloured cafe of the hotel she runs which has the air of an imperial tearoom, with suited waiters speeding around carrying trays of white china and crisp cucumber sandwiches. ‘We don't hold any titles. We run a business,' she adds. ‘Of course my mother-in-law was one of the victims of the massacre, but …' She doesn't bother finishing the sentence; the massacre was so long ago, it's not worth talking about. Instead she starts happily explaining her relationship to the former royals. Of course she used to go to the palace, she says.

‘Did you ever hear the anthem played in front of them?' I ask.

‘Oh, very much so. Nothing started without the national anthem. There was a lot of protocol just like with the British royal family. Wherever the king went, even weddings, the ceremony would start with the anthem and everyone would stand up and sing. Not the king and queen of course. Now the royal palace is no more, you hardly hear it. When do they play the new one? State's day?'

We have a few minutes of such polite conversation, then she gives me a piece of paper containing answers to some questions I've sent through in advance. ‘I prefer to get my thoughts down in writing,' she says. ‘This should tell you all you need to know.' I look at the list.

‘How did you feel when the anthem was replaced?' I'd asked.

‘The anthem has to reflect the political reality and status of the country. It had to change,' she's written, very on-message.

‘What do you think of the current anthem?'

‘It is too new to arouse patriotic sentiments, or any sentiments at all. It is a ditty which ends rather abruptly, leaving one standing, literally.' It's a little more revealing; maybe she will be open after all.

And then the key question: ‘How do you think Gyanendra would have felt about losing the royal anthem? It was about him, after all.'

‘One cannot presume to know how His former Majesty feels,' she's written. ‘It might be strange to put it this way, but I am glad His late Majesty King Birendra was not alive to suffer this change.' I read that last sentence several times, initially disappointed that she's batted away the key question, until I realise that it says a lot. Birendra, the man of the people, didn't deserve to lose the song people sang at him with love. Gyanendra never had that love to lose.

Of course, that still doesn't explain how he'd have felt. I try to find out in a roundabout way. ‘Do you think he's happy being a commoner?' I ask.

‘Look, what I really admired about him was that he said, “I'm Nepali. I have a right to live here and I will,”' she says. ‘Because a lot of kings, when a monarchy has been abolished, they leave. But he said he would never do that. I think that was the best way to show his acceptance of the changes. To be honest, I think he is happy leading the life he used to, that of the businessman. I mean, how many years was he king? It was only, like, five.'

I think about asking why, if he was happy to be a businessman, he fought so hard against the Maoists to stay in power, but I know she won't answer, fearing being misinterpreted and having already explained that rumours start far too easily in this country, and that she doesn't want to start any more. But after she leaves, I look back over the sheet of questions and see I've missed one other question: ‘What do you feel the future of the monarchy is in Nepal?'

‘A country of diverse peoples, cultures, traditions, languages and aspirations is now in the process of actively examining its priorities,' she has written. ‘When this comes to a natural conclusion, the citizens will decide what institutions – old and new – will be retained, reinstated or abandoned.' I know I'm just seeing what I want to, but that word ‘reinstated' seems to stick out, almost as if she's typed it harder than the rest of the sentence.

*

Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoist prime minister of Nepal, races into his official meeting room. Literally. He's going so quickly he has to swerve to avoid falling over a leather sofa and crashing into the intricate woodcarvings of dancing deities and snakes eating their own tails that decorate the walls. ‘I'm sorry I'm late,' he says, somehow composed. He's wearing a blue suit, open-necked shirt and the traditional triangular Nepalese hat called a topi, which sits bolt upright on his head. For a man in his fifties, he looks vibrant and youthful – every bit the game-changing politician. He offers his hand. This is the moment I've come to Nepal for. This man spent ten years at the head of a revolution – hundreds of thousands devoured his every word and were inspired to fight in the conflict that went on to claim some 15,000 lives. Now he's a trusted statesman, turning that revolution into a respectable government. He's not become a dictator or a laughing stock like so many revolutionaries before him. I reach forward, half afraid, half excited.

He has one of the limpest handshakes I've ever come across.

We sit down and he doesn't even wait for me to ask a question. ‘Every national anthem reflects the aspirations of the people and should reflect the unity of the country,' he says, as if rattling through a prepared speech. ‘In that way, an anthem is historically specific. That means it should keep changing according to the political and historical situation in a country.

‘Here, we had absolute autocratic monarchy for more than two hundred and forty years. So when the people's war was launched and the people's struggles were waged against that monarchy, one of our slogans was of course, “Abolish this so-called national anthem.” It wasn't a national anything – it was just praising the ideology of the monarchy. So when the monarchy was abolished, it was natural that the anthem would be changed. This new anthem reflects the circumstances of the country today. It's about republicanism. It's about democracy. It's about the socio-political diversity of Nepal and the unity of our country.'

‘I've been told you wanted a much stronger anthem,' I say quickly, before he has a chance to get going again. He ‘mms' as if to say ‘Go on'. ‘One that reflects the people's war better and the struggles people had?' He ‘mms' once more. ‘One that perhaps had slogans like “arise workers” and “march on” in it?'

He pulls a quick, wry smile. ‘Of course if the anthem had been written by the revolutionary forces, they would have written a more revolutionary song,' he says. ‘If we had our own way we would have created a better anthem than this. But we've had to compromise on many issues since coming to power and this is one of them.'

Do you feel pride when you hear it then? I ask.

‘It's okay for the time being. Personally I'm quite happy with it.'