Garden of Dreams (2 page)

‘We don’t have time.’ He wanted to get back to the guest house sooner, to talk his mother out of leaving him.

‘Wait, please, my own home you cannot miss,’ Badresh said, riding faster ahead. ‘Ten minutes only.’

At least twenty minutes must have passed. As the sun settled overhead, making Eli squint, they came upon a small village of white, cubist houses, miniature as though a race of stunted creatures lived there. They both had to stoop to go inside. It was just two rooms, almost like a stone igloo, nearly all white inside as well, except for some striped pillows, carpets and a few brass bowls. Tiny mirrors were plastered into the walls, chips of reflective glass that brought light into the room. Among the mirrors were equally small black-and-white portraits – Badresh’s family? The house felt like a shrine, not a home, with these puny photos watching over everything, immovable.

‘We eat, we drink, we rest – and then we ride back to Jaisalmer,’ Badresh said, as Eli stared closely at another portrait, a veiled woman with one eye showing. ‘My dead sister,’ Badresh said, as though he didn’t care.

Eli sat on some pillows and an old kilim on the floor while Badresh, kneeling, unwrapped some cheese, lentils, naan and a bit of bhanon aloo, potatoes and mint, he had brought in his saddlebag. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he told Badresh. ‘I want to go back to the hotel.’

Badresh continued fixing a plate of food and poured a glass of lassi from a jar, then set it all before him. ‘Eat.’

Eli sighed and stared at the food. ‘So, where’s your family?’ he asked, defiantly.

His mother was dead, Badresh said, sitting down across from him. His father had gone to Delhi to look for work; they had lost a lot of livestock in the recent droughts and couldn’t survive on the land any more. His brother was away at university in Bangalore, and his dead sister was, well, dead, from tuberculosis.

Eli wondered if this was even Badresh’s house. It seemed more like a stage set, where anyone could wander in and pretend to know this place, these people, for a few hours. He sipped his lassi and vaguely listened to Badresh drone on, telling his stories, until he felt drowsy, like his mother, wanting sleep.

When he awoke some time later, the sun was going down, the shadows lengthening; he was back in his clammy room at the guest house, on his bed with the shit-brown spread. He didn’t remember much of the day: his head was thick and didn’t want to think. All it offered were flashes of sand, sunlight, a camel’s stringy neck and a dark, blurred man dragging him down a darker hallway. Badresh? He tried getting up but his legs went limp, wouldn’t hold him. When he did finally stand, he saw that the door connecting his room to his mother’s was ajar, and he walked through it.

The room was perfectly tidied, his mother’s bed made. There was no sign of her, no scent of her. There was, though, an envelope on the bedside table, and he was sure that it had his name on it. He was sure what it would say. He guessed there was money inside. As he looked out past the flapping muslin curtains into the desert again, he wondered which way was north.

In the jungles of the Terai, that malarial borderland where Nepal leads into India, children were conspicuously disappearing. Anton de Villiers mulled this over as he waited, a giant silhouette against his ornately carved office window off Durbar Square, for a briefing on the latest crisis. The war was over, the King deposed – no need for the Maoist rebels to be conscripting child soldiers. Maoists dominated Parliament now, and the peace accord ordered that children be demobilised, returned to their villages, reintegrated, healed.
But how to heal children who had killed their parents?

Child soldiers, child trafficking – both high on the international agenda, and on De Villiers’ own. He’d been based in Kathmandu for three years, but was still in touch with children’s NGOs in Bosnia and Sri Lanka, former posts, and sent money to an orphanage in Sarajevo for his monthly tithing. As he watched the activity in the square down below, pushing back the antique Newar shutters for a better view, amid the snap-happy tourists, beggars, spice merchants and ochre-faced holy men were few children. But his eye picked out a ragged boy and girl playing cards on the steps of the deserted Hanuman Palace, once the royal seat of power, and beyond them, disappearing down an alley, another boy dwarfed by the bundle of kindling strapped to his head. That was the thing – he could bring governments and rebels together, build trust, promote dialogue, negotiate ceasefires and peace accords, but at the end of the day, poverty remained, intractable, the worst enemy and the hardest to fight.
Poverty is the worst form of violence,
Gandhi had said. How hollow rang the word ‘peace’ when children, like that boy carrying the wood and millions of others, were growing up poor, dying young. When they were fighting in wars. When they were being sold.

‘Mr Anton, sir? Your ten o’clock appointment is arriving.’

De Villiers took his place, standing, behind his mahogany desk, his height slightly humbled by the cavernous room, and shuffled his dozens of files into a semblance of order. He rarely cleaned up after himself but
made an effort on occasion. Mostly he equated genius with disorder; neatness, he believed, was the obsession of small minds. There was nothing on his desk except a landslide of paper, a few postcards, a hotel pen and, most days, a half-eaten bar of chocolate hidden underneath it all.

Sunil, his assistant, returned with Sikriti Bhyat from the local Save the Children office, a long-time colleague, and a man introduced as Dipendra Hamal, from STUN – Stop Trafficking Unit, Nepal. De Villiers hastily adjusted his hearing aid.

‘Namaste,’ he said, the appropriate greeting, returned by his visitors. ‘Chai, Sunil,
kripaya
.’

‘Dr de Villiers, we are happy you have time to talk to us about this business,’ said Sikriti, seating herself, plump but dainty, and smoothing her purple sari over her knees. ‘We know you are a busy man. But it is most important that this gets on the agenda of the new government. Dipendra will explain just why.’

De Villiers smiled at Sikriti’s earnestness, which he greatly respected, and at being called ‘Doctor’, a title he didn’t deserve but accepted readily from most Nepalis. She looked, he thought, like an exotic flower one shouldn’t pick. He turned to Mr Hamal from STUN and listened.

‘You must know that women and children, in particular girls, have been trafficked over our border with India for many years now,’ Hamal began, hands clasped in his lap. Like many Nepali men, he was slight, seemingly gentle. But from the fire in those dark eyes, De Villiers sensed tenacity, even aggression, if called for.

‘The numbers are rising, now averaging about ten thousand annually – and that’s just the girls,’ Hamal continued. ‘They are being brought mostly to India – to Mumbai, Delhi, the big cities, and tourist places like Goa – as sex workers, mainly. But children are also being trafficked as labourers in carpet and candy factories, on construction sites and so on – and some are sent to the Gulf as camel jockeys. Some even end up in the circus …’

‘And on top of all that,’ interjected Sikriti, rustling her silks again, ‘we suspect that some of the Maoists’ child soldiers, who are meant to be returning to their villages, are getting detoured into trafficking and not making it back to their families.’ Sikriti stopped suddenly, breathless.

‘Seeing that the new government will soon be drafting its constitution and making new laws, we think it’s an opportune time to lobby for tighter crackdowns.’ Hamal pushed a fat report on to De Villiers’ desk. ‘Here is our position.’

As Sunil returned with the steaming glasses of chai, De Villiers took
it all in – he knew, of course, about the human trafficking happening from Nepal to India, in fact in much of the world. The issue had lurked, menacingly in the shadows, throughout the negotiations to end the war, demilitarise the child soldiers and integrate the rebels into the army. The war had displaced thousands of people, and, with such migration, trafficking thrived. People looking for new homes, a new start, were falling prey to the worst human beings. De Villiers had done his homework, but here was a new urgency demanding action. Child soldiers possibly being diverted into trafficking was news.

‘This
has
to be part of the new legislation strengthening protection of women and children,’ De Villiers said emphatically, searching for this particular ‘hat’. He had to wear so many, be many things to many people. ‘I can speak to my contacts at the Ministry of Women and Children and within the Maoist-Communist party – their liaison for child soldier rehabilitation. This should be a national priority, and the more we hear from civil society, from your NGOs, the harder it will be for government to play deaf.

‘But tell me, Mr Hamal,’ De Villiers continued, ‘has STUN had any success in finding, arresting, the traffickers, in finding the children?’

Hamal took a moment to look up. ‘I wish I could say yes – but in point of fact the answer is no. A few children have escaped, but they are too terrified to testify. And the police are involved, here and in India: bribes keep them from turning the traffickers in. It is all just a sorry, hideous entanglement.’

Damn right
, De Villiers wanted to say, but a man in his position, a mediator, had to bite his tongue. He had to coax words, true words, confessions and expressions of basic human needs, from other people, but had to mute himself most of the time. The reward for being in the middle like this, seemingly neutral but in fact a puppetmaster, was the enduring gaze of others, broken, damaged, often twisted people who looked to you as a saviour, the Great Healer. Trouble was, you couldn’t always deliver. And you couldn’t tell them that.

‘Let me read this,’ De Villiers said, picking up the report and fingering his sandy moustache. He’d lost the beard, to fit in more with the clean-shaven Nepalis, but kept the moustache, a bit of gravitas. ‘I will pass it on to the relevant parties once I’ve done so, and we’ll talk again. I assure you I share your sense of crisis.’

The three of them stood and signed namaste, farewell this time. ‘And by the way, Doctor,’ said Sikriti, smiling broadly now, ‘do not forget your appointment to come with us tomorrow to observe a successful
rehabilitation case – most heartening. Our driver will fetch you at one p.m., if that is suitable?’

De Villiers gave his assent and shepherded them to the door, towering over them. He watched them walk down the long, dark corridor, feeling the usual pang as he watched Sikriti recede, and returned again to his desk. He eyed the report: ‘A COUNTRY’S SHAME: What is Happening to Our Children?’ A report for almost any country, he thought – including mine.

South Africa, Suid-Afrika, the beloved country, die vaderland, die hartseerland. Home to forty-eight million people of many colours, he thought, but not my home now.
There’s no place for me there any more,
he’d said, ten years after liberation – a white Afrikaner male, bottom of the barrel, lowest of the low. He’d fought on the ‘right side’ of the struggle – nearly lost his life doing so, did lose some of his hearing in a bomb blast, perennially observed by the security forces, scorned by his people who branded him a traitor, a kaffir boetie. He’d brokered peace in town-ships and town halls, written messages of conciliation in his newspaper columns. He’d helped empower blacks long before BEE or similar initiatives. He’d like to think he made a difference, but more often he thought it all had happened on its own, a great surge, an uprising, the inevitability of history. The pendulum swing of justice – which now, sadly, had swung back again. Not all the way, but the dream embodied in Mandela, in those first halcyon days of the new republic, was gone. Many whites were displaced, many blacks disappointed. His young friend Mzi, a promising reporter from Crossroads, the infamous township outside Cape Town, had hanged himself the year before. He couldn’t make a life for himself, his wife and one-year-old son.

And if you measured the health of a society by the state of its youth, of its children, then South Africa was a very sick place indeed. De Villiers knew that what he read in the online newspapers was often distorted, but still: tales of babies in dustbins, men having sex with infants, children on the streets, children addicted to tik or some other drug, children raising other children in a nation of parents decimated by HIV/AIDS. Children being abducted and sold for muti, or trafficked for some other nefarious purpose. At least in Nepal the issue was on the table.

But as he looked out the window again, and saw the crest of the Himalayas like white foam on the sea, he wondered for a second what he was doing there. Miles from South Africa, in a place that for centuries had been a
Hindu kingdom, ruled by a succession of filthy rich monarchs. The latest, Gyanendra, had been forced off his peacock throne by a people’s uprising and the new government of the fledgling republic. Just last month he and his wife had been driven in their black Mercedes, behind tinted glass, out of the palace for the last time, delivered to a secret compound in the hills outside the city. The Maoists – after waging guerrilla warfare for ten years – now claimed the majority in Parliament, tasked with leading the way towards drafting the country’s first constitution.

As history unfolded dizzily around him, where did he fit in? It was early days still, but he focused on the sharpest thorns in the country’s side: integrating the former rebels into the army and bringing home the child soldiers, ‘normalising’ their lives. He thought of himself as a catalyst, an alchemist, perhaps. Before his faith began to lapse he would have said God’s hand was on him, but now he wasn’t sure. It struck him, though, that he was often being used by forces far greater than himself – and not just those in the UN who paid him.

Staring past the palace and the square, past the city’s tenements and rooftop aerials to the snow-capped mountains beyond, he considered his life there. From his rooms at the top of the Kantipur Temple House hotel, to the offices and reception rooms of politicians and NGOs, to palaces and the Maoists’ camps, and back to this desk, he’d left some sort of trail over the years. But what of his life was really here? A few postcards stacked on the corner of his desk, meant for friends and family but still unwritten: the vermilion statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, visible from his window; the classic shot of Everest’s icy profile; Boudhanath Stupa’s piercing blue eyes. A few gifts from people: it was rude not to accept them. But aside from his pen, his laptop and several CDs in a drawer – Puccini violin concertos and a mix of Joshua Bell – there was little trace of a personal life. Only one family photo on the mantel – of his long-haired, golden-haired son Eli, taken several years ago, smiling, staring into the eyes of his mother, the photographer.

Then De Villiers remembered something electrifying: his son was arriving the next day.