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Rain of Shadows (Cont.)

Flowers showered down from the multitudes leaning from every window, standing on every wall, climbing every gutter pipe. In the near night, the falling flowers became a rain of shadows from a black sky. The wailing voices and the raining flowers fluttered into a dark pit. The king's corpse lurched through the bottom of this pit, borne aloft by the expressionless Brahmans. His mouth was open to the black sky, his teeth glinting; his nose pointed skyward. Generals surrounded the Brahmans, and the king's surviving brother, Prince Gyanendra, walked behind the bier. The gold-trimmed hats and dress uniforms of the generals were incongruously covered with flowers and the red dust lofted at the king by the crowd. The king's corpse was nearly invisible; at some moments only his teeth in his gaping mouth stood out. There, at the dead eye of the dark storm, the Brahmans who bore the king and the generals who surrounded him yielded to the crowd's rolling wave of grief. They walked forward 20 steps and stopped. And then 20 steps again. Around them the people wailed and shadows fell in a constant hail. They must carry through this. Twenty steps more. And stop.

The king's corpse lurched through the bottom of this pit, borne aloft by the expressionless Brahmans. His mouth was open to the black sky, his teeth glinting.

Walking that dark crack in the mind of a nation, I wondered if perhaps the Shah dynasty itself had been cut down. The Shahs have led Nepal since they unified dozens of petty Nepalese principalities in the 1760s. For 233 years the eldest male in the house of Shah has stood as father to generations of Nepalese peasants-all of whom were farmers, and many of whom viewed the king as a living incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu. That whole feudal order, with its strengths and weaknesses, has cracked during the last 30 years as the population of Nepal surged from seven million to 24 million, and more worked for money instead of planting rice. Women with cell phones hardly think of King Birendra as an incarnation of Vishnu, and the old social order has been slow to face this new reality. Nearly every Nepali, except the Maoists in the hills, will still swear—whether left or right in the political spectrum—that Nepal cannot survive without a Shah king. Like the grief of the laughing crowds, that devotion to the crown is often invisible to the average visitor. The king's funeral exposed its roots.

No one can say whether Gyanendra can tap the popular need and rule Nepal as the Nepalis wish him to. What was visible there in that dark crack, watching the king's corpse pass the people, is something far more primal than political history or analysis.

I saw a man dressed like any office worker in New York crumble in the street. He fell to his knees and then wobbled back and forth. He wavered there in a wide, clear space as the cortege passed, and then he fell. His arms and legs sprawled, exposing his belly to the sky. His face cracked as his body writhed in despair, twisting slowly with the fury of the whole grieving land. Like a broken child. Or a woman in labor. His pain made you want to turn away.

A woman in a pink sari peered intently over the crowd. She shoved forward, stepping on anyone in her way. Upon seeing the king, her face shattered like all others, and her voice cracked too. Losing her will to shove, she was swept back into the crowd. No longer desperate to see outward, she fell into an inner world of despair.

Shoving through the crowd myself, I followed the body along its route. For hours I stayed with the breaking wave of women as they strained to see the king's face, followed that wave of recognition as it broke through the massed humanity. Then in a narrowing alley I was pushed back as 10,000 people surged out of the night and chaos erupted. The cortege swept on, I fell into its wake, and the wails turned to something else.

In the rear of the cortege mourners were turning away from Pashupati, heading back into the city. Tens of thousands, some with iron rods clenched in their upright fists, shouted "Dace chore!"-Get out of the country!-as they made their way back into Kathmandu. The king was sent on alone to the temple, but the people returned to Kathmandu shouting about the future. One man said the roaring crowd spoke to Prime Minister Koirala. To me it seemed it might be ten years of democracy itself being spurned. Maybe the guilt of having tried to overthrow their own slain father. Or maybe it was a glimpse of the future, beyond failed democracy, toward the growing strength of the Maoists, that fueled the rumbling of the people's voice. But there in the wake of the slain king some fissure opened up, and I watched as it spread into the past and into the future. No one could foresee where this funeral cortege, headed into the dark streets of Kathmandu, had come from, or even where it would go. But wherever it was headed, it surged toward a new Nepal.

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