On February 5, after lying in state for almost four months, Norodom Sihanouk -- the king who abdicated twice, led his country into the horror of the Khmer Rouge and then out of that darkness -- was cremated on an ornate funeral pyre inside a 15-storey-high crematorium, while 100 guns fired a salute and 90 Buddhist monks, one for each year of his long life, chanted shlokas around his flower-bedecked coffin.