THE SCHOOLTEACHER walked ahead of me through the terraced hillside above Dullu, in Dailekh district in the west of Nepal, and paused where the path crests a small rise to gesture at a clearing below. We descended together into it. There was one standing wall, sun-bleached, cracked along its upper courses, listing slightly as though exhausted, rising from weeds and what looked, from a distance, like piled rubble. This was all that remained of the Dullu Durbar, a palace built in the 1920s by artisans from Kathmandu on the site of the old Malla royal compound – centuries earlier the winter seat of Khas-Malla kingship.
“It burnt for several days,” the teacher said. “You could see smoke from several villages away. Nobody came. Nobody stopped it.”
He had lived in Dullu his whole life. He was a teenager when, in April 2002, Maoist forces set fire to the palace. The schoolteacher remembered the smell before the light: the particular thickness of woodsmoke from old timber, different from cooking fires or autumn burning. He also remembered, though he told me this more quietly, that not everyone who watched the fire was weeping.
Two decades on, the Dullu Durbar exists primarily as a negative space: a wall, a museum of surviving objects established in the shell of what was burnt, and an absence so complete that most accounts of Nepal’s civil war, which stretched from 1996 to 2006, simply do not mention it. This is an attempt to take that absence seriously, and to ask why the taking-seriously has taken so long.