Republic or Death! (8 page)

Nepal is often thought of as the most spiritual country in the world. The birthplace of Buddha, it's the country where you go to find enlightenment, either by watching the sun rise over the Himalayas or by bowing down before a golden stupa, with monks chanting nearby and the
clack-clack-clack
of prayer wheels echoing around you. Tibet may have once rivalled it, but then the Chinese moved in. India once did too, but every skyscraper that goes up there seems to dent that position.

Anyone who visits may wonder how Nepal has managed to maintain its reputation unblemished. On my second day here, I went to Pashupatinath, one of the world's holiest Hindu sites, a maze of intricately carved temples dedicated to an incarnation of Shiva, with monkeys jumping all over them. People go there to cremate relatives before pushing their ashes into the polluted Bagmati river. I watched from the hillside as one family cremated their father, his widow wailing as she covered him in bright yellow and orange powder before setting his head alight, men rushing to put wood under him to get the fire going. But as the family wept, struggling to comfort each other, a group set up a disco opposite and started playing thumping pop music. A group of sadhus – holy men – appeared, dreadlocks piled on heads, faces white with make-up, and started dancing up and down the riverbank trying to get tourists to pay for pictures or dance with them, as if the cremation was little more than an annoyance.

But despite almost every visitor witnessing events like that, Nepal's image doesn't change. Perhaps because some things are geared to protect it. The country's anthem, for one, seems almost made to reinforce that image: it's beautiful and uplifting, like the mountain views you get as soon as you leave the capital. The song is called ‘Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka' (‘Made of Hundreds of Flowers'). Lyrically, it's eight simple lines about how the 28 million Nepalese – all 130-odd ethnic and caste groups – are actually one garland, ‘woven from hundreds of flowers'. ‘Of many races, languages, religions and cultures of incredible sprawl,' it goes, ‘… all hail Nepal.'

But it's not the words that make Nepal's anthem unique; it's the music.

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You can split anthems into four main musical types. By far the largest group is anthems that sound like church hymns. ‘God Save the Queen' has a lot to answer for, as does colonialism. If you travel around Africa or Asia you'll stumble across dozens of anthems that sound as if they were written by a priest after a walk in the dewy English countryside. Some of them even turn out to be actual hymns. Take Zambia's, Tanzania's and South Africa's. All of those are based on a song called ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika', or ‘Lord Bless Africa', written by a Methodist school choirmaster, who, in turn, allegedly stole the tune from a Welsh hymn. The worst songs of this type are found in the Caribbean and the small islands that dot the Pacific, many of which are so filled with religion there's no room left for anything else. You only have to read the title of ‘Tuvalu for the Almighty' (‘Be our song for ever more!') to know what its two verses focus on, while Samoa's anthem claims the country's flag ‘is the symbol of Jesus, who died on it for [us]'.

The second type of anthems are those that sound like military marches. Russia's is a prime example. Stalin chose the tune himself to be the anthem of the Soviet Union – the only music people would hear as they languished in his gulags. It has a striking staccato melody and it doesn't take much to picture rows of soldiers, tens deep, marching through Moscow to it, turning as one to salute their beloved leader. Unsurprisingly, a lot of dictators tend to go for this type of anthem. (Russia's was actually dropped following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin brought it back shortly after he first became the country's president.)

Alongside the hymns and marches, you also have fanfare anthems, once particularly common in the Middle East. These consist of little more than a few trumpet flourishes (Jordan's and Saudi Arabia's barely last thirty seconds), which may seem apt for Islamic countries where music is sometimes more tolerated than encouraged but tend to be found more often in the Emirates. This type raises the obvious question of how something so short could inspire anyone to patriotism, but for a sultan they probably answer the bigger question of how he can get through official ceremonies as quickly as possible.

Finally – and saving the best for last – you have the epic anthems of South America. These are tunes that seem to ignore every convention of anthem composition. They're not short (FIFA, football's governing body, demands anthems are under ninety seconds, but these don't even think of stopping for four, five or even six minutes – at matches they only play the intros), and they're not easy to sing either. Instead they're set out like mini-operas, with rollicking openings in which every part of the orchestra seems to try to out-play the others; melodramatic middle sections where oboes and flutes whimsically take the lead; and huge, over-the-top finishes, with multiple false endings. They're songs that feel as if they were written for the stage, to accompany scenes of lovers being torn apart then explosively reuniting, or scenes of family feuds ending in gut-wrenching deaths. It's not a surprise that opera composers wrote most of them, although perhaps it is that most of those composers weren't from anywhere near the continent. Chile's fantastic anthem, for instance, was written by a Spaniard, Ramón Carnicer, who'd never set foot in the country (Chile's London ambassador begged him to write it because the anthems his country's own composers had managed weren't up to scratch).

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So you have your hymns, your marches, your fanfares and your epics, but then you have Nepal's. There isn't a brass instrument or rattling snare to be heard in ‘Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka'. There's no trumpet flourish for a king, or stately rhythm for soldiers to parade to. There's no cymbal-crashing ending and nothing that could be hummed in four-part harmony. Instead there's a folk tune, and one that, in the version you hear throughout Nepal, is played on the cheapest of Casio keyboards at that. It's little more than a few synthesised strings bouncing up and down an addictively sweet melody and the sound of some hand drums tapping out a bassline. And because of that simplicity and difference, it's wonderful. It's the sort of music you imagine schoolgirls singing as they skip to class or farmers using to pass the time while stood thigh-deep in water in the middle of a rice paddy. If you heard it in a restaurant here midway through a plate of lentils, you wouldn't look up – it'd fit in perfectly with all the other songs coming out of the radio. It couldn't seem a more fitting song for this country. Although, obviously, if you heard it at the Olympics, or at a palace, you'd think something had gone seriously wrong.

Nepal isn't entirely alone in having an anthem that actually sounds like the country it comes from. Most of the ‘Stans' of central Asia have anthems that sound as though they couldn't have come from anywhere but former Soviet states. They trudge along in minor keys, like armies across the steppe. Mauritania's, similarly, is an astonishing piece of music that's like a trip into the Maghreb's most menacing souk. Then there's Puerto Rico's ‘La Borinqueña', which has a certain heat to its trumpets, a remnant of the fact it was originally a dance tune called ‘Gorgeous Brunette', written for swinging partners around rum-soaked music halls. But on the whole you'd be surprised how rare it is to have such local character in an anthem. There are no rumba rhythms in Cuba's, for instance, and no bossa nova in Brazil's; there's no oud being plucked in Iran's and no highlife guitars in Ghana's. It's as if everyone's afraid of sounding unique – as if they heard ‘God Save the Queen' and ‘La Marseillaise' and decided, ‘This is the music that means patriotism, let's copy this,' even when their musical heritage couldn't be further from the West's.

But even bearing that handful of examples in mind, no one has taken the leap into local music quite like Nepal. It's surprising that a country this small is the only one to have had the guts to stand up to 450 or so years of anthem history and pick such a unique tune. It's also a surprising choice for another reason: ‘Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka' isn't at heart a peaceful song as the music and lyrics imply, but a song of revolution and struggle. It's also one with a far from gentle story behind it, one that involves four men: Baburam on one side; the former king, Gyanendra, on the other; and two poor composers – one poet, one musician – trapped in the middle.

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Pradip Kumar Rai is, I'm almost certain, the only man to have met his wife thanks to an anthem. On 1 December 2006, a poem Pradip had written – under the pen name Byakul Maila – was chosen over 1,271 others to become ‘Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka', Nepal's new anthem, and help end over 200 years of devotion to Nepal's royal family (Nepal was created in 1769 when a family called the Shahs came down from the hills to conquer a host of princely states; in 2006, King Gyanendra was still on the throne, but the Maoist agreement meant it was clear the monarchy would soon be abolished).

From that day, Pradip, then a shy thirty-four-year-old from a one-road village in the eastern mountains, became a celebrity. He got invited to events all over Nepal, where people would drown him in garlands made from bright orange marigolds, piling them around his neck until he could barely see, or else they'd ask to touch his feet, the most respectful gesture a Hindu can make. People would come up to him in the street (‘They always recognised my moustache'), while bus drivers would refuse his fare. Once he crashed while driving in Kathmandu, smashing another car's sidelights. The driver demanded all the money Pradip had, until he realised who he was.

‘Wait, aren't you Byakul Maila?' he said. ‘I can't charge you anything.'

As the plaudits built up, a family friend, Nanu, kept calling him to ask how he was doing and where he was going next, to tell him she was so happy he'd brought attention to their home region. Pradip didn't get the hint until one day she came to his house to say thanks in person and asked to greet his wife. ‘I haven't got one yet,' he said. She blushed.

Pradip tells me all this with a proud grin on his face. We're drinking milky spiced masala tea in the front room of the house he rents in Lalitpur, a city just to the south of Kathmandu. His daughter is sitting on his knee in a pink dress, pulling faces and throwing a Barbie doll around, while Nanu is hiding in the kitchen cooking lunch, embarrassed to hear herself mentioned. The walls are covered in silver plaques and a portrait of Pradip – prizes he's been given for writing the anthem. It feels like the home of a genuinely content family and that's the story Pradip would like me to tell. But the problem is his tale of overnight success isn't as straightforward as he makes out. Pradip finishes talking then looks at me 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.

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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.