Barbara Adams and I were friends for more than 30 years until her death in Kathmandu in April 2016, two days shy of her 85th birthday. She was 13 years my senior; I called her Barbara Didi. Wags called her the Kanchi Maharani (the Junior Princess) and much later, in her “Maoist period,” the Kanchi Lal Maharani (the Red Junior Princess). She had lived in Nepal since 1961, six years before my own arrival in what was then the world’s only the Hindu Kingdom. Although our worlds eventually became tangled up together, our original paths to Nepal and through Nepal hardly ever crossed and could not have been more different.
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) from 1967-70, a Junior Technical Assistant, posted near Janakpur and later in Nuwakot, laboring in His Majesty King Mahendra’s Agriculture Department. I’d heard tales about the glamorous American woman who’d come to Nepal and become the lover, or mistress (sophisticates referred to her as “the consort”) of Prince Basundhara, the youngest brother of King Mahendra, then Nepal’s absolute monarch. Word was that this American and her prince lived in a palace, hosted glamorous parties for diplomats, spies and royalty and knew everybody who was anybody. Her name, I would later learn, was Barbara Adams and her “palace” was actually a new house in Tahachal designed by the Swiss architect Robert Weise. But no matter, we might as well have lived on different planets.
As a PCV, I was intent on ‘gettin’ down with the people,’ so I ate only by hand, wore rubber chappals (purchased from the Bata store on New Road, the only place in the kingdom that sold shoes big enough to fit me) and affected a bizarre combination of western and Nepali village dress – flared khaki shorts or pajamas and khadi kurtas. I seldom visited Kathmandu. When I did come to the capitol, I would hang out in Maruhiti Tol, or at the old Peace Restaurant on Lazimpath, Nepal’s first Chinese restaurant. In those pre-terrorized days, when all you needed to get into the American Embassy was to flash your US passport, the closest I ever got to an elite party was the annual 4th of July picnic at the American Ambassador’s Residence in Kamaladi. I would eat hot dogs and potato chips and drink Buds there along with other PCVs and miscellaneous American citizens before being cast out again into the streets of Kathmandu.
Barbara Didi’s world of glittering parties, diplomatic soirées, palace intrigue, tiger hunts and pig sticking and my gaunle world of the 1960s did intersect just once in 1967. I was in Kathmandu for a workshop and one foggy winter morning I saw her riding a fine white horse down the dirt road that leads south from the gates of Narayanhiti Palace. ‘Wow,’ I thought to myself, ‘Ain’t she somethin’?!’ However it wasn’t until about 1983 that Barbara Didi and I met in person and became friends. Kathmandu no longer seems to have foggy winter mornings and that dirt road, now paved and lined with luxury shops, is known as Durbar Marg.
Our friendship had its ups and downs. We had quite different backgrounds and temperaments. But at the end of the day, we managed to keep it going, perhaps because our politics overlapped – at least in principle – but more importantly because of our shared love for Nepal. Also because over the years our very lives became intertwined, like braided rivers, in two magical worlds: Nepal and New York, specifically the North Fork of Long Island, a picturesque seaside community three hours east of New York City.
Due to some strange alignment of the planets, it so happens that the North Fork was not only Barbara Didi’s American home, but also my sasurali, my wife Barbara Butterworth’s family home and also that of Pam Ross and Charles Gay, another couple of long time residents of Kathmandu. My wife Barbara’s and Pam’s families were among the original English settlers in the New World, arriving on the North Fork in the 1640s.
In that year Barbara Adams’s great-grandfather and several New York artist friends with whom he had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris “discovered” the North Fork. They built houses and studios and spent the summers there picnicking, sailing and, most notably, painting. Collectively, they became known as the Peconic Bay School, essentially American impressionists and post-impressionist painters whose work is now much prized. Barbara Didi spent her childhood summers there and in the 1970s she inherited a little cottage that had been part of her great-grandfather’s property. It was an art-filled, witty, utterly ramshackle place that stood on a wooded lot on a bluff above Peconic Bay. During her last decades she held court there for a month or two each summer.
I have been summering with my wife Barbara on the North Fork since 1982 and we now live there full-time. Our home, Pam and Charles’s home and Barbara Adams’s cottage are sprinkled along the same shoreline of Peconic Bay and it was there in 1983 that Barbara Didi and I finally met in person, more than a decade after that foggy morn when I saw her on her cantering along Durbar Marg. Our friendship deepened after my wife Barbara and I returned to Nepal in 1986. We entertained each other frequently in Kathmandu and during the summers in New York. My Barbara and I would often invite Barbara Didi to go sailing with us, and Pam and Charles would often join us. Afterwards, we would go to Barbara Didi’s cottage, sip gin and tonics on the bluff overlooking the bay and end up at our house for dinner. We rarely ate at her place, since Barbara Didi could barely boil water, much less cook anything palatable.
In notes for an unpublished memoir, Barbara Didi recounts her arrival in Kathmandu in February of 1961, ostensibly to write a story for an Italian magazine on Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Nepal. For whatever reason, the Queen Elizabeth story was never written, but another kind of royalty awaited Barbara Adams in Kathmandu. Not long after her arrival, she was invited to the Yak & Yeti one night by: . . . two Texas millionaires . . . both self-proclaimed big-game hunters. It was at the Royal Hotel’s famous Yak and Yeti bar . . . that . . . picturesque, cozy, uniquely Nepali drinking lounge, that I first met Prince Basundhara Bir Bikram Shah Dev, otherwise known as Kancha Sarkar, or the Third Prince . . . After dinner with my Texas millionaires, we all trekked down the marble corridor to a wonderful, softly lit room . . .
This Yak & Yeti Chimney Bar, inside the old Royal Hotel on Kantipath, is to be distinguished from today’s five star hotel of the same name, which was built only in the 1980s. The Royal Hotel was converted in 1951 from Bahadur Bhawan, a former Rana palace. From the 1950s until the late 1960s, when the Hotel de L’Annapurna and shortly afterwards the Soaltee were completed, the Royal was Nepal’s sole international standard hotel. Its Yak & Yeti Chimney Bar was the watering hole for Nepali aristocrats, the diplomatic corps, spies and the few well-heeled travelers who made it to Nepal in the days before the advent of industrialized, mass tourism.
The Royal was owned by Prince Basundhara and managed by the legendary Boris Lisanevich, a White Russian émigré and onetime Ballet Russe dancer who had run the famous 300 Club in Calcutta, a nightspot favored by the subcontinental princely class. There, Boris had befriended King Mahendra’s father, King Tribhuvan. With the restoration of monarchical rule and Tribhuvan’s return to the throne in 1951, Boris came along to Kathmandu as Mahendra’s chef de protocol. The Royal Hotel is long gone, but the building still stands and now houses Nepal’s Election Commission.
Barbara’s memoir notes continue: I sat by the fire with my companions . . . Suddenly someone plunked himself down in the empty chair across from me, and started to talk about something about which I could never have known or discussed. Seeing my startled look, he said: “Oh I’m sorry! I thought you were someone else!” It seems that while he had gotten up and gone to the men’s room, the woman in the chair opposite had left. He somehow didn’t realize, in that candle and firelight lit room, that I was not the same Memsahib, and went on talking as though I were she!! . . . Anyway the conversation bloomed and turned to tiger hunting, which I remember as being both disturbing and exotic . . . Tiger hunting was almost the national sport in which the Royals and the Ranas enthusiastically indulged . . . Awareness of [the] need to protect “endangered species” had not yet entered public consciousness and talk of tiger hunting began to seem perfectly natural. Participating in one came a few years afterwards!
Following after-dinner drinks at the bar, Barbara and her millionaire big game hunter companions were all invited for more drinks and conversation at the Prince’s home in Kalimati. At evening’s end she was: . . . deposited at the unprepossessing Imperial hotel and I somehow found my way through the sweet smelling darkness to my room, where I lay awake, my head full of images, fragments of conversation, and above all questions about the perceived loneliness of a Prince who appeared to have everything!
No doubt Barbara believed that this ‘lonely’ prince with his classic pickup line about mistaken identity “who appeared to have everything,” lacked only a good woman who could truly understand and love him as a man, not merely a prince! (Perhaps . . . she must have thought, she might be that woman!) In the event, one thing soon led to another and within months, after a clandestine trip to Hong Kong, Barbara and her prince returned to Kathmandu as a couple.
So life went along . . . lots of picnics, lots of parties, lots of meeting new people and lots of nervousness when actually confronted with, or having to plan on meeting, members of the Royal family . . . Although Barbara and Basundhara may have been, as she puts it, “treated like a married couple” by their friends, they never formally tied the knot. Basundhara had already been married at least twice (possibly thrice), before he happened upon Barbara at the Yak & Yeti. Not surprisingly affairs among the aristocracy were common. In her notes, Barbara writes: The improbable alliances and misalliances were so frequent, so visible . . . I frequently speculated on what the reaction would be among Nepalis if someone should write a Nepali version of the much talked about Peyton Place, then a hit in America. Could it be called Kathman do or don’t! or naughty in Naxal? etc. etc.
The British writer and barrister Neville Sarony lived in Kathmandu during this period and knew both Barbara and Basundhara well. In “Counsel in the Clouds,” his marvelous new memoir, he describes tensions between Barbara and Basundhara even in the late 1960s. Nonetheless, she and the prince remained together for at least a decade, when he left her for another woman. He died in 1977. Whatever the truth was about their relationship and its end, Barbara prominently displayed photographs of Prince Basundhara in her homes in Kathmandu and on Long Island until the day she died.
A few years before she died, Barbara Didi told me about that white horse. She was an Arabian mare called Nasira, a gift from Ayub Khan, then the President of Pakistan, to King Mahendra. Fortunately for Barbara, however, the king’s astrologers, citing some inauspicious markings on the beast, advised him not to keep the animal. So Mahendra passed Nasira on to Prince Basundhara, who in turn gifted her to Barbara. It was an entirely appropriate gift, because Barbara Didi was an accomplished equestrienne. Barbara’s favored vehicles included not only the mare Nasira, but also a sporty white Sunbeam Alpine two-seater, another gift to her from Basundhara, that she would drive through the city with her long hair flying in the wind.
The Shah kings of Nepal were revered by some as incarnations of Lord Vishnu, and it is fitting that Barbara, associated with the royal family, had her own set of “baahans” or vehicles, similar to the way gods have their divine vehicles. However, Barbara’s final baahan was a mundane 21-year-old Suzuki jeep, which I later sold after her death. Barbara Butterworth, my wife, and I were both Peace Corps Volunteers in Nepal in the 1960s, but we only met in California in 1982. By 1984, we were married and had earned doctoral degrees in law and education, eager to return to Nepal together. We settled in Kathmandu, where Barbara worked as a USAID advisor to the Ministry of Education, and I served as a consultant.
Our home in Bishalnagar was not far from Barbara Didi’s opulent home in Hattisar, a true palace. Barbara came from a family of American Democrats, and despite her democratic upbringing, she found herself living a life of luxury with Basundhara, causing her occasional guilt. In the late 1980s, Nepal was experiencing political upheaval, and Barbara’s politics evolved from quasi-royalist to liberal-progressive, advocating for multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy. Her journalistic endeavors and support for the democratic movement led to clashes with the palace, particularly with Queen Aishwarya.
In 1988, Barbara Didi crossed a line that led to her house arrest and deportation. During this time, she sought refuge at our house, and despite efforts to have her arrest quashed, she was ultimately deported in style with the assistance of an American ambassador. Barbara was later allowed back into Nepal after the restoration of constitutional monarchy in 1990 but faced another deportation in 1998 due to her sympathetic stance towards the Maoists. In 2009, she achieved her dream of becoming a naturalized Nepali citizen and passed away in 2016.
After returning to Nepal in 1998, my wife and I remained close to Barbara Didi, seeing her often in Kathmandu and New York. A few years before her death, I discovered that Barbara had named me as the executor of her will without consulting me. Despite my initial frustration, her sudden illness and recovery from a heart attack and the devastating 2015 earthquake allowed her to make the most of her remaining time in Nepal.
When Barbara Didi passed away, I traveled to Kathmandu and helped fulfill her wishes to distribute the proceeds of her estate to her long-time servants and two foundations working in Nepal. With the help of friends and staff, I settled her affairs in Nepal, repatriating all the proceeds back to Nepal as per her wish. Although our paths in Nepal have come to an end, Barbara Didi’s memory and impact will forever remain in the hearts of those she touched.
