Little Princes (3 page)

Before daal bhat was served, Sandra asked the children to stand and introduce themselves, beginning with the youngest boy, Raju. He was far more shy now than when he had been clinging to my face. The other boys whispered loud encouragements to him to get up, and his tiny neighbor, Nuraj, dug an elbow into his ribs. Finally he popped up, clapped his hands together as if in prayer, the traditional greeting in Nepal, said “Namaste-my-name-is-Raju” and collapsed back into a seated position flashing a proud grin to the others. The rest of the kids followed suit, until it had come full circle back to me.

I stood up and imitated what they had done and sat back down. They erupted in chatter.

“I do not think they understood your name,” Sandra whispered to me.

“Oh, sorry—it’s Conor,” I said, speaking slowly. I could hear a volley of versions of my name lobbed back and forth across the room as the children corrected one another.

“Kundar?”

“
Hoina
! Krondor
ho
! Yes, Brother? Your name Krondor, yes?”

“No, no, it’s
Conor
,” I clarified, louder this time.

“Krondor!” they shouted in unison.

“Conor!” I repeated, shouting it.

“Krondor!”

One of the older boys spoke up helpfully: “Yes, Brother, you are saying Krondor!”

Trust me—I wasn’t saying “Krondor.” The children were staring earnestly at my lips and trying to repeat it exactly.

“No, boys—everybody—it’s
Conor
!” This time I shouted it with a growl, hoping to change the intonation to a least get them off Krondor, which made me sound like a Vulcan.

There was a surprised pause. Then the children went nuts. “
Conor
!!” they growled, imitating the comical bicep flex I had performed (instinctively, I’m sorry to say) when I shouted my name.

“Exactly!” I said, pleased with myself.

Sandra looked around and nodded in approval. “I think you will get along with these children very well,” she predicted. “Okay, children, you may begin,” she said, and the children attacked their food as if they hadn’t eaten in days. They spent the rest of dinner with mouths full of rice and lentils, looking at each other and growling “
Conor
!!!” flashing their muscles like tiny professional wrestlers.

There was no way to keep up the blistering pace set by the kids when they ate. They had literally licked their plates clean when I was maybe half finished. I would have to concentrate in the future. No talking, no thinking, just eating. There was far too much food on my plate, albeit mostly rice. The worst part about it was that I couldn’t give the rest of mine away, since once you touched your food with your hands it was considered
juto,
or unclean, to others. The very idea of throwing away food here was unthinkable, especially with eighteen children watching you, waiting for you to finish. I force-fed myself every last grain as fast as I could, guiltily replaying scenes from my life of dumping half-f plates of food into the trash.

When I had finished, Sandra made a few announcements in English. The children understood English quite well after spending time with volunteers, and the little ones who didn’t understand as well had it translated by the older children sitting near them.

The big announcement of that particular evening was the introduction of three new garbage cans that had been placed out front, one marked “Plastic and Glass,” one “Paper,” and one “Other.” Sandra explained their fairly straightforward functions. She was rewarded with eighteen blank stares. Trash in Nepal, like all Third World countries, is a constant problem. Littering is the norm, and environmental protection falls very low on the government’s priority list, well below the challenges of keeping the citizens alive with food and basic health care. Farid took a stab at explaining the concept of protecting Mother Earth, but the children still struggled to understand why anybody would categorize garbage.

“Maybe we should demonstrate it?” I suggested.

Sandra smiled. “That is a great idea. Go ahead, Conor.”

This was a big moment. I had never interacted with children before in this way; I had no nieces, no nephews, no close friends with children, no baby cousins. I steeled myself for this interaction. Fact: I knew I could talk to people. Fact: Children were little people. Little, scary people. I took solace in the fact that if this demonstration went horribly wrong, I could probably outrun them.

“Okay, kids!” I declared, psyching myself up. I rubbed my hands together to let them know that fun was on the way. “Time for a demonstration!”

I picked up a piece of paper leaning against my stool and crumpled it up. I walked over to Hriteek, one of the five-year-old boys, and handed it to him.

“Okay, Hriteek, now I want you to take this and throw it in the proper garbage can!” I spoke loudly, theatrically.

Hriteek took the paper in his little hand and held it for a few seconds, looking at the three green bins lined up with their labels visible. Then he started to cry. I hadn’t expected that. But I knew that kids sometimes cried—I had seen it on TV. This was no time to quit.

“C’mon, buddy,” I urged him. “It’s not tough—throw the trash in the right bin,” I said, nodding toward the “Paper” bin.

No luck. Finally I took it from him, giving him an understanding pat on the shoulder, and walked over to throw it in the proper bin.

“Brother!” called out Anish, one of the older kids sitting opposite us. “Brother—wait, no throw, he make for you! Picture!”

I uncrumpled the paper to discover a crude but colorful picture of a large pointy mountain and a man—me, judging by the white crayon he used for skin tone—holding hands with a cow. On the bottom it was signed in large red letters:
HRITEEK
.
Uh-oh
.

“Hriteek! Yes! Great picture! Not trash, Hriteek! Not trash!” I said quickly. He cried louder.

Sandra leaned over to me. “It’s no problem, Conor,” she said, and took Hriteek’s hand. “Hriteek, you do not need to cry. Conor Brother is still learning. He doesn’t understand much yet. You will have to teach him.” This brought a laugh from the children, and Hriteek, despite himself, started giggling.

“Sorry, Hriteek!” I said over Sandra’s shoulder. “My bad, Hriteek! Your picture was very beautiful, I’m keeping it!” I smoothed it out against my chest as Hriteek eyed me suspiciously.

“Okay, everybody,” Sandra said, clapping her hands. “Bedtime!”

The children leaped up, brought their plates to the kitchen, cleaned up, and marched up to bed. Anish, the eight-year-old who had informed me of my traumatic error, lingered in the kitchen to help wash the pots at the outdoor tap. By the time he finished helping clean up, the rest of the children had already gone up to their rooms. He lifted his arms to me to be carried upstairs. “We are very happy you are here, Conor Brother!” he said happily.

“I am very happy to be here, too,” I replied, stretching the truth to its breaking point. I was relieved, at least, to have the first day over with. I lifted Anish and carried him up the stairs.

That night, huddled in my sleeping bag wearing three layers of clothing plus a hat, I slept more soundly than I had in a long time. I was more exhausted than I’d been after trekking to the foot of Everest, and I’d only spent two hours with the children.

I
woke the next day to the general mayhem of children sprinting through the house, half-crazed with happiness. I dove deeper into my sleeping bag and wondered what in human biology caused children around the world to take such pleasure in running as fast as they could moments after they had woken up. Unable to fall back to sleep, I nosed just far enough out of my bag to peek through the thin curtains. The sun had not yet risen above the tall hills behind the orphanage. The only source of heat in the village was direct sunlight, so I waited. At exactly 7:38
A.M
. the sun flashed into the window. I got up and wandered downstairs.

Farid was sipping milk tea outside in the sun, his breath steaming in the morning chill. As I sat down next to him, a woman entered the gate, straining under the weight of an enormous pot, filled to the brim with what looked to be milk.

“Namaste,
didi
!” he called to her, lifting his tea in greeting. “She is our neighbor,” he explained. He had a thick French accent that took me a minute to get used to. “She brings milk every day from her cow for the children to put in their tea.”

“What did you call her? Dee-dee?”

“
Didi.
It means—do you speak French?”

“A little. Not very well I’m afraid,” I apologized.

“It is okay—I must improve my English, I know it is very bad,” he said. “So I saying? Ah yes—
didi
. It means ‘older sister,’ it is a polite way to greet a woman, as we might say
madame
or
mademoiselle
. The children call you ‘brother,’ yes?”

“Yeah.”

“In Nepali, they call older men
dai
—it means ‘older brother,’ but it is a sign of respect, like
didi
. We taught them the English word
brother,
so they use that.” He took a sip of his tea. “You know, it is quite useful, saying
brother
. It means you do not have to remember everybody’s name.”

That
was
useful, and prophetic. One of the boys came outside at that moment and plopped himself down on my lap.

“You remember my name, Brother?” he asked with a grin.

“Of course he remembers your name, Nishal!” Farid said. “Go get ready—we’re going to the temple soon for washing.”

I liked Farid immediately.

Going to the temple was, I learned, a Saturday tradition. Weekends in Nepal were one day only and the children savored them. Each Saturday they would begin the morning by cleaning the house together. The bigger boys would drag the carpets outside and the little boys would sweep with brooms made of thin branches tied together with twine. Then another group would finish by mopping the floor, which made the concrete at least wet if not exactly clean. Sandra told me that it was the act of the chores themselves that was valuable. If these children had been with their families, they would be tending to their homes and fields many hours per day.

With the house marginally less dirty, we walked to a nearby Hindu temple, a fifteen-minute stroll through the royal botanical gardens that happened to be just down the path from the orphanage, past the mud homes that made up the village of Godawari.

The temple was housed in a walled courtyard a little larger than a basketball court. Taking up half of that space was a shallow pool about three feet deep, constantly refilled by five spouts carved into the stone wall. Several villagers were already there, all men, leaning over to wash themselves under the spouts. (Washing at public taps, naked except for underwear, was the most common way of bathing. In Bistachhap, I had washed myself wearing only a pair of shorts at the single public tap in full view of the village, while local women waited patiently with a basket of laundry, giggling to one another and pointing at my pale skin.) Once finished, the men would dry off and go through a small gate in the back of the courtyard, where there was a grotto that housed the Hindu shrine. They would reemerge with a red tikka—rice with sticky red dye—on their forehead, then ring a large bell before leaving the temple.

The children obviously loved this place. They stripped down to their underwear, except for the two girls, Yangani and Priya, who watched from the sidelines. The boys dove in, splashing around and trying to dunk one another. One by one they would pop out and run to Farid, who would dole out a dollop of liquid soap to the older boys. The younger ones would wait patiently while Farid scrubbed them down himself. When they had completed that stage successfully, they ran to me, the Keeper of the Shampoo. Raju was the first to reach me. I squeezed a dose of shampoo the size of a quarter into his palm. His eyes grew wide at the apparently enormous pool of shampoo in his hand. I realized my mistake and started to take some back, but he sprinted back to the pool, yelling to his little friend Nuraj.

Farid noticed. “I think maybe a little less, Conor,” he said, thumb and index finger indicating a tiny amount. “I learned this lesson my first time also. You will see.”

Raju had rubbed the shampoo into such a thick lather that he looked like he was wearing a white afro wig. The others went bananas when they saw this, scrambling out of the pool and begging me for shampoo.

“I see what you mean,” I called over to Farid.

Farid shook his head, marveling at Raju. “They are very resourceful, these children,” he called back. “You will find they do very much with very little.”

After twenty minutes or so, the children began to exit the pool. One of the boys—maybe seven years old, with what I thought of as Tibetan facial features—approached me.

“Brother, where you put my towel?” he said, putting his hand on my knee and twisting his torso to scan the courtyard.

To identify the children, I had memorized the outfits of a few of them. They wore the exact same thing every day, as they only had two sets of clothes each. But now, this little brown body in front of me, clad only in his underwear, looked exactly like the other seventeen children.

“Uh . . . are you sure I had your towel, Brother?” I said slowly, buying time, hoping he might accidentally yelp out his own name. The word
brother
was going to save my life here.

The boy spun back to me and his hands went to his head. “Brother, you had one minute before! You say you take before I swim!”

Time for a stab in the dark. “Oh . . . right! Sorry, Nishal, I forgot, I put your towel over—”

“Nishal?! Ahhhh! I no Nishal, Brother!”

“I never said you were, Brother!”

“You say ‘Nishal’!”

“No, no, I said ‘towel.’ ” Didn’t you hear me say ‘towel’?” This blew his mind.

Farid walked up just at that moment. “Come on, Krish—we’ll find your towel,” he said, turning him around by his shoulders and leading him away. He turned back and gave me an empathetic little shake of the head, not to worry.