In an insurgency-ravaged country, deaths are statistics. Loss of one life ceases to be a human tragedy, just another notch in the axe. After every brutality, the violence is denounced, apologies are made and activists condemn the killings. Media reports the numbers with dispassionate objectivity. But life goes on. Until the next massacre.

For a nation numbed by recent slaughters in Chitwan, Kabhre and Kailali the suicide of Dinesh Chandra Pyakhurel went almost unnoticed. The self-annihilation of a water-supply engineer and top bureaucrat represented the state of society itself.

Regime instability fuels frustration among civil servants. After February First, governance has been arbitrary, amendments of laws through ordinances are commonplace. The constitution itself has been repeatedly re-interpreted to suit the interests of people in power. In the ensuing uncertainty, the moral-legal compass directing the behaviour of individuals has become non-functional. An authoritarian regime lurches towards anarchy without central control. The sight of this speeding monster is frightening to innocent bystanders but it must be even more apocalyptic for insiders.

Since the royal takeover, people unwilling to jump on the directionless train have got out of its way. Some journalists have lapsed into silence, other professionals have just given up and left. Several bureaucrats have taken voluntary retirement. Dinesh chose to take his own life. His manner of withdrawal from life itself stands for all those who have refused to ride this train to nowhere.

Surveillance, interrogation and repression are the tools used by authoritarians to cling to power, to force the opposition into submission. They employ propaganda as force-multiplier. The publicity machinery of 'constructive monarchy' has been running a concerted campaign to defame everyone with democratic persuasion. People with the strength of principles have taken the criticism in their stride but pragmatists have made peace with power and turncoats, as always, survive.

Value-neutral professionals can neither stand the storm nor bow easily. So they are the first to fall when rules are thrown out of the window. Dinesh was a professional of the Panchayat era but had adapted to post-Panchayat competition with great felicity. He was one of the very few engineers to rise to the level of secretary to the government. But when the royal regime treated him shabbily, throwing him into a 'reserve pool' with neither authority nor responsibility, he lost the will to live. His death is a symbol of the country's own dead-end.

Dinesh was also a victim of witch-hunts characteristic of authoritarianism. The RCCC is neither constitutional nor unconstitutional-it is extra-constitutional just like the regime that spawned it. You can't reason with instruments of bias because all you'll get is indifference, if not contempt. You can't even bargain with it-a trading relationship implies equality. But an extra-constitutional authority doesn't understand anything other than either complete domination or total submission. You can't hope to coexist with it peaceably because your very existence represents either a threat to the regime or an opportunity for exploitation. It forces you to either prostrate or perish.

Faced with the prospect of being harassed endlessly, death must have looked like an alluring alternative to Dinesh. Throughout his life, the engineer worked on the assumption that two-and-two makes four. Dinesh found the arithmetic of life in the past two months too dissonant to bear.

In the heat of weighty matters like the boycott of municipal elections by political parties, the controversy over appointment of the new chief justice, the army's procurement of weapons from the global bajar, few have time to reflect over the death of an engineer. But in one way or another, all of us are guilty.

It is our passivity and apathy that killed Dinesh Chandra Pyakhurel. We have suffered so much neglect for so long that we have lost the ability to mourn. Tears do not flow easily these days, that perhaps is the most frightening realisation. A storm is quietly brewing within. When it bursts, no embankment will contain it.