It's been barely two weeks since we returned from Kathmandu. We woke up overcast Saturday morning to the heavy circumstances in Nepal. My American friends look at this as a development in a far away historical subtext, perhaps akin somewhat to the way I'd react if say Prince Tippytoes in Tonga had perpetrated a similar situation - more intriguing than tragic, more fantastical than sad. But for the small Nepali community here far away in Greater Boston, the immediacy and enormity of what has happened continue to bring it indescribable pain.
I had met Prince Nirajan for the first time while I was a student at the London School of Economics. He was in his penultimate year at Eton at the time and had come to London along with his two cousin sisters (daughters of now King Gyanendra and Prince Dhirendra, the slain King's youngest brother) to divert briefly from life at Eton. Chiran, a close friend of the prince and my classmate at the LSE, had asked me to come along with him. He seemed to implicitly have been "commissioned" with showing the honorable guests a "fine time."
"Ever considered LSE after school?" I had asked the young Prince. "My "father" wants me to go to Oxford," he said seeming long resigned to the paternal diktat. "Depends on my grades," he added. "I haven't been doing too well in school." As if!
We talked the night away in an Irish bar in the heart of Covent Garden - in matters relating to life, friends, comedy and school. "Where in Nepal do you live?" the Prince asked me. "Kathmandu," I said. "You should come over some time," he said with such nonchalance that I didn't know whether to chuckle at it or be grateful for it. "Yeah right, come over! Should I knock on the palace gates when I come over."
The bouncer at The Hippodrome, a nightclub in the middle of Leicester square drawing large, unsuspecting tourists to its 80s style music and its tacky ambience, stopped the prince who was then barely 18 and asked him for his ID. I felt like interrupting the big bouncer and saying "Don't you know silly man, he is the prince of Nepal." But the Prince seemed to be savoring his anonymity, moving along in through with the crowds, eager to be one in the many.
We didn't speak about politics, governance or the role of monarchy. Instead, we walked along eating hot dogs from a street vendor, reciprocating the salutations of strangers, and promising at the end of it all to stay in touch. As it is with these things, we of course never got around to staying in touch. I never had an occasion over the years to think much about the Prince and the Princesses. Until few days ago.
It is hard to personalise a loss when the whole nation has a claim to the events and circumstances of the last few days that providence has decreed for Nepal. My entire sadness is not that a "friend," is no more but only that if his death had to be, that it would have come in a similarly unassuming, ordinary and non-abrasive way as I had for that one week in London, personally known his life to be.
