Little Princes (30 page)

“I said
sitting
in the living room, you ninnies! Why would I tell you to stand?”

“We don’t know, Brother!”

“For Pete’s sake, sit!” I said. The children collapsed in a heap, laughing hysterically.

I set up my laptop on a little straw stool, turned it on, and clicked on the slideshow I had prepared. It was just under two hundred photos. From the moment the first shot of Humla appeared, taken of the landing strip at Simikot, the children pointed and chatted excitedly. As the montage took me into southern Humla and their villages, they were bouncing up and down, recognizing places from their early childhood, wondering if the people in the photos were people they knew, debating the names of villages.

I paused just before we arrived at the first photo of a parent. I knew that it was of Anish’s mother. I made sure I kept an eye on him as I opened the photo of the woman, reddened eyes and tear-streaked cheeks, her wrinkled, field-toughened hands clutching a photo of Anish. She needed no introduction.

The boys went crazy. They jumped on Anish, shaking his shoulders and patting his head as if he’d just scored the goal to put Nepal into the World Cup finals. Anish, though, was completely still. Slowly, he leaned into the photo on the screen to get a better look, and a smile grew on his face. He noticed me looking at him, and he looked back at the photo. I saw it in his face. He was staring at something that, at last, was his very own, something that he would never have to share with anyone else in the house.

I related the story to Anish and the rest of the children of how I’d met his family, what they had said, and how his father had given me a gift of honey and walnuts, which I had savored after many meals of plain rice and lentils. The kids chirped in with additional commentary in Nepali, none of which I understood. But Anish’s smile had changed from joy to something more like embarrassment. I bent down next to him.

“What is it, Anish? This is very good news for you,” I said, hand on his arm.

“She crying, Brother,” he said in a soft voice. He cupped his hand to my ear. “Other boys will make fun.”

“She missed you,” I whispered back. “And look around—does it look like anybody is making fun of you for your mother crying?”

He looked behind him at the boys, who were chattering away, unaware that we were even speaking. He shook his head. “No, Brother.”

“I’ve got a secret for you, Anish,” I whispered again.

He couldn’t help but be intrigued by that. “What, Conor Brother?”

I paused, looking around dramatically to make sure nobody, except maybe nineteen other children, were within earshot. I whispered, “
Everybody’s
mother cried.”

He broke into a wide grin. “Okay, Brother—show more photos,” he said.

We looked at the photos and I told stories for almost two hours. The children couldn’t get enough. When we were finished I handed out the letters I had from their parents. They took them solemnly, as if receiving a knighthood. Then I took out an extra treat: I had printed out photos of their parents for each of them. When they saw the stack they yelped in delight and crushed around me. As I called out each name, a little arm would reach out of the crowd, accept the photo, and run off to a corner to stare at it.

I had passed out the last photo, the one to Crazy Rohan, when I saw that Raju and his seven-year-old sister, Priya, were still standing there. Priya was holding his hand, pulling him away.

“I am sorry, Conor Brother,” Priya said, still tugging. “I tell him no photo for us, but he no listen.”

It was as if somebody had pulled a plug, draining all the joy from my body. I thought back to the day I had sent Min Bahadur to go look for their parents, and the moment two days later when he revealed that they were, in fact, deceased. I recalled how deeply that had affected me then. Priya, the sweet little girl, had known her parents were dead. But it had opened a wound for her, and especially for Raju. I sat down so that I was looking up at them.

“It’s okay, Priya—you take very, very good care of your brother, you know that? I am very proud of you,” I said.

“Thank you, Brother.”

“Raju—I don’t have a photo for you, but I hope that next time we will have a photo, maybe of one of your uncles or aunts, okay?” I took his hand from Priya, and he wiped the tears out of his eyes with his free hand. He nodded.

Priya said something to Raju, he paused and then nodded again. “Brother, maybe can you show Raju pictures again?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah—of course, I’d love to. You want to see them, too?”

“Yes, please, Brother.”

The three of us went upstairs to the rooftop, taking three small stools with us. I asked Bagwati to make milk tea for us. And I went through the photos again, all two hundred, telling them everything I could remember.

T
he two days I spent at Little Princes were pure peace. It was like digging up a time capsule you had buried long ago and spending a few days living among your childhood toys and drawings and favorite hat and pretending, just for that time, that this was how it had always been and would always be, this simple life that floated safely along. We spoke about Humla constantly. The children helped me fill in some lingering questions. What were the women pounding as they slammed the oarlike stick against the rock, when there was no wheat? They were pounding dried, cooked rice into
churaa
. What were the men boiling in large pots that seemed filled with straw? It was tobacco, or something like it.

On the third morning, as I was helping the children get ready for school and preparing to head back to Kathmandu, I got a call from Farid.

“I have good news, Conor—but you will have to be patient. You will see it when you come home,” he said, and refused to tell me anything else, despite my pleas. “Like the children, Conor! You are too impatient!” he said happily.

I arrived back at Dhaulagiri House. The children, as usual, were playing outside. They knew me now, and they greeted me with cries of “Namaste,
dai
!” from across the field. Farid was swinging the youngest boy in the house, Adil. He had a particular fondness for the boy because of his poor eyesight. We resolved to get him glasses; until that happened, Farid spoke louder to him so that Adil could follow Farid’s French-accented Nepali to be picked up or swung around.

I waited for them to stop spinning. Farid and I were able to talk business in front of the younger Dhaulagiri children. Their English was not as advanced as the children at Little Princes, so we could say anything we wanted to in complete privacy. Farid was still gripping Adil’s wrists but catching his breath before another spin when he told me the news.

“Your trip worked,” he said. “You remember the father of Navin and Madan coming? You remember it was only a few days after you met him in Humla?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“More parents have come. Not parents of our children in Dhaulagiri, but the parents of children in the other Umbrella homes. Many, within just two days of one another, while you were in Godawari. They have come to see their children. Viva asked them how they found us and they showed us piece of paper with your handwriting, the address of our home. They could not take the children home yet, they are too poor, they are not prepared, but the children were so happy, you should have been here to see it. You would have liked it very much, Conor.”

“That’s fantastic!” I practically yelled. I was shocked that the trip had yielded results so quickly. I couldn’t even imagine how excited the kids must have been.

“And you remember finding Kumar’s father, yes?” he asked.

“Yeah—I brought back a letter for Kumar.”

“He called this morning. He called Dhaulagiri, on the house phone with the number you gave him! Kumar was so excited that he fell down the stairs—the front stairs, there—and I was afraid he had maybe killed himself with his excitement, but he jumped up and ran ran ran for the phone. He told me it was three years ago he spoke to his father. Imagine, Conor! Three years in the life of a nine-year-old boy! I took a photo of it to show you—he had a very big smile.”

I couldn’t believe it. Even when I found the parents, I doubted, somehow, that connections could be made. It seemed impossible that we could actually affect any change in this country. Kumar’s father must have walked three days to get to the phone in Simikot. And what an act of faith it must have taken to do that, trusting another person who gave him a phone number and a promise that his child was safe, three years after he had disappeared. Having no children myself, I had completely underestimated the lengths to which a father would go for his son. What a long three days that walk must have been for him, wondering if anybody would be on the other end of the phone. Then hearing this strange man calling his son by name, Kumar, and hearing a mad tumble down the stairs and a voice, older but uncanny, on the other end of the line. . . . I could not imagine how that felt for him.

I stood daydreaming about that moment as Farid spun Adil around outside the house, the boy’s tiny body whirling parallel to the ground before Farid ran out of steam and he bent down to give the boy a comfortable landing. I didn’t want to ask the next question—I was afraid of the answer. But I had to know.

“And Bishnu? Any news yet from Gyan?” I asked.

Farid straightened up slowly, leaving Adil laughing hysterically on the ground, begging for another ride.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “I called Gyan this morning. I am worried, Conor. I am worried that the boy may be gone.”

T
hat evening my phone rang, displaying a number I didn’t recognize. I was reluctant to pick it up; it had been a very long day. But I had learned that you never knew when an important call might come through. I answered it and heard, on the other end, through a sea of static, Liz’s voice. It was January 2, almost a week since we had last spoken.

“Oh, hi!” I said, realizing that I had already set off in a nervous lap around the room.

“Hey, I’m in Mumbai—I miss you guys!” she said. “How’s everything going?”

You guys?
What did that mean, “you guys”? Did it mean the kids, or me, or me and the kids? This was fifth grade all over again, trying to guess if the pretty girl with whom I was infatuated liked me, too. Not that I was going to say anything to her, of course. My courage didn’t extend that far. After a minute or two I calmed down. I had so much to tell her, and she was eager to hear it all. I had her on the phone for twenty minutes before remembering to ask her about her own trip.

“It’s great—we’ve been having a blast . . . but I really miss being with you and the kids, and I was thinking, the rest of my friends are going to southern India tomorrow, and I don’t really need to go with them—”

“Come here!” I practically shouted over the phone. “The kids would love to see you, they ask about you all the time!” It was true. The girls asked every single day, without fail, if Liz was coming back.

“Would that be okay? I wouldn’t want to be a burden, but I would totally be willing to help with anything—”

“Don’t be ridiculous—I would love it! We would love it, everybody.”

“Okay . . . well, great! So, tomorrow, then? It’s supereasy to get these flights right now—”

“Tomorrow would be great!”

She went and grabbed a piece of paper with flight information, and rattled off a couple of flight options, finally choosing the most convenient one for the following afternoon. Before she signed off, she said, “You know, I have to tell you—my friends that I’m traveling with here, they think I’m crazy to be going back to Nepal.”

I knew what she meant. If I had told my buddies, with whom I had traveled halfway across the globe for a three-week vacation, that I was detouring off to meet up with a girl (orphans, I mean—meet up with orphans!), they would have given me endless hell about it. I didn’t know if it was the same for Liz, but I had to assume it was not an easy decision for her.

“Well, listen, I don’t think you’re crazy. I’m really, really happy you’re coming,” I told her.

“Good. Me, too.”

L
iz and I spent seven more days together. It felt perfect. Life was beautifully simple: get up, go hang out with the children, see some touristy stuff in Kathmandu, have a typical Nepalese lunch at some small café, pick up the children from school just around the corner, help them with their homework, spend the evening hanging out with them. On the second night we were there, Farid and I traded accommodations. From time to time, he needed a break. Neither of us took any time off, not even weekends, and Farid had the added responsibility of living at the house. He loved it, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. But about once a week, he would stay at my apartment, maybe watch a bootleg DVD on my laptop, and get a peaceful night of sleep. I would take his place at Dhaulagiri, putting the kids to bed and sleeping in his tiny room downstairs. I loved those days, mostly because I would wake up to the sound of kids running around early each morning. It reminded me of living at Little Princes.

We made the switch during Liz’s visit, and she joined me in the house. She stayed on the top floor in the girls’ room, which drove them almost mad with joy, while I stayed downstairs in Farid’s room. I liked Farid’s room. I had once offered him a room in my massive apartment, free of charge, but he preferred to live with the children. In his room, I detected something else as well.

Farid had spent almost two years in Nepal caring for children, and I had watched with fascination as he turned more and more to Buddhism. His small room had prayer flags and incense and a guitar, but was otherwise almost completely free of material possessions. He was focused on following a principle tenant of Buddhism to control one’s desire for things. Staying in his room was like stepping into his life for a night.

That evening in Dhaulagiri, Liz and I were treated to a blackout. It was a common occurrence during the dry season in Nepal; electricity was mostly water-powered, and electricity cuts lasted anywhere from four to ten hours a day. Liz and I went through the pitch black house with a flashlight to find children holding tight to various beds or chairs like survivors of the
Titanic
clinging to debris, waiting to be rescued. With little to do but gather around a single candle in the living room, the children sang songs, calls and responses, with the boys singing one verse and the girls responding with the next. The candle barely lit the faces of the children; anyone in the slightest shadow almost disappeared.