Little Princes (10 page)

Farid spoke little about himself and his life in France before Nepal. But I knew that he was a foster child. I knew that he did not know his own father, an Algerian who had returned to his own country. I knew that he hoped, one day, to find him. He spoke of these things only in passing, as if he was protecting himself from thinking on it too deeply, from putting too much significance in the fact that he, a young man who had been given up as a child, had spent the last year of his life taking care of eighteen orphans on the other side of the world. So we stood on the roof, watching the village and describing, in dizzying detail, our favorite meals.

F
rom a distance, there was nothing unique about the woman walking toward the orphanage.

Farid and I were on the roof. We all were; it was a Saturday afternoon, the floors inside were freshly mopped and would take an hour to dry properly. The children had used chalk to draw a hopscotch board and were lined up, each clutching a small stone. I saw her first, approaching from the path leading from the single paved road that connected Godawari to the rest of the world. That was strange. There was a bandha that day—no minibuses had been on the road. Wherever she had come from, she had walked.

She came closer. There was something else strange about her. Women in the village often walked with their heads down, because either they were carrying a heavy load or they were intent on getting home. Not this woman. She walked slowly, her eyes fixed on the orphanage. I worried that she would trip on the uneven trail. As she got closer, I realized she was staring at the children. Stranger still, I saw that the children had stopped their game and were staring right back at her.

She stopped outside the gate of the orphanage, not knocking, just standing calmly, waiting.

Farid was in the middle of describing a dish his mother made for his birthday one year, when he realized I was staring past him. He turned to see what I was looking at.

“Who is that wom—” he started, and stopped. He stared at her, then said, “Conor, I think I know who this woman is.”

I saw what he saw. Unmistakably, in her distinctively angular features, her wide face, her Tibetan eyes, was a face that we had somehow seen before. On one of the Little Princes.

This woman was Nuraj’s mother.

Nuraj was frozen to the railing, hands gripping it tightly. Krish, his brother, had pushed through the other boys and put his arm around his little brother, but said nothing. Farid said nothing to the boys, but ran to the stairs leading down. I followed him, stopping only to pull Santosh aside.

“Santosh, I want you and Bikash to keep the boys on the roof—you understand?”

“I understand, Conor Brother,” he said. I hurried downstairs after Farid.

Farid was already outside when I reached him. He had opened the gate and was facing the woman. She did not enter, but only murmured “Namaste,” putting the palms of her hands together. We returned the greeting, and continued to stare at the woman. Farid asked her, in Nepali, if she was here to see the children.

Her head wobbled back and forth on her head. In the United States it was a gesture that signified uncertainty. In Nepal, it was an emphatic
yes
. I could not understand what she was saying to Farid, but two words needed no translation: “Nuraj” and “Krish.”

We invited the woman inside and offered her tea; it was custom in Nepal to offer tea to any guest who crossed your threshold. I went to look for Hari, and found him in our small office downstairs, going over our weekly food budget.

“Hari—we need you in the other room to translate for us. A woman just arrived—the mother of Nuraj and Krish. She’s here,” I said.

Hari put down his pencil. “I do not think so, Conor Brother—their mother is dead.”

“I know, but . . . you have to see this woman.”

He pushed back his chair and followed me into the living room. Farid sat on a small stool, the mother sat on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her.

Hari was right. This woman should be dead. We had been told as much by the children themselves. But there was no mistaking this woman. I saw it on Hari’s face as well when he greeted her; this was the boys’ mother. Hari pulled up a stool next to her and spoke quietly to her for a few minutes. Then he looked back at us.

“Farid Brother, Conor Brother, this is the mother of Nuraj,” he said simply. “I can translate for you if you tell me what you would like to know.

“Everything, Hari,” said Farid, leaning toward the mother. She would not meet his eyes. “We want to know everything.”

That’s how we learned the full story of the children at Little Princes.

Two years earlier, Nuraj’s mother, like so many mothers during Nepal’s civil war, feared for the lives of her children. Humla, all but cut off from the world, was fertile ground for the brutal Maoist takeover. Far from the reach of any police force or law, the Maoist rebels exiled the locally elected officials, promising a better life for the community under their rule. The impoverished villagers were left with little choice. Certainly they had no means of fighting back. Many even held out hope that the Maoists would keep their promise. The monarch was the root of their misery, they were told by the rebels, not the drought or isolation or severe underdevelopment. Everything would change now.

But the Maoists had an army to build. They had to stay strong to protect the village from the royal oppressor, they said. They destroyed the bridges, making it all but impossible for the Royal Nepalese Army, recently mobilized against the rebel threat, to enter the villages of southern Humla. The Maoists preached the tenets of communism. They put in place a law that said families had to provide food to the rebel army. Subsistence farmers gave freely at first, hoping their contribution from their scant reserves would suffice. But the army grew quickly, and with it the demand for food. Men were unable to feed their families, as everything was going to the Maoists. They asked the rebel leaders to leave them with enough for their children. Still the Maoists demanded more, but now at gunpoint. When they were refused, persuasion turned to threats that turned to beatings.

And then just food was not enough. The Maoist rebels wanted more power, a bigger army. They asked for volunteers. Some joined out of belief for the cause, but many more joined out of fear and desperation. The rebels had already taken their food; it would be better to be on the strong side and at least be able to feed their families. When the pool of volunteers dried up, the Maoists made another law: each family would give one child to the rebel army. Maoist soldiers conscripted children as young as five years old to become fighters, cooks, porters, or messengers depending on the child’s age and ability. There was nowhere to hide. Children were taken from their mothers, disappearing into the rebellion.

Then, one day, as if delivered by God, a man came to the village. The man was the brother of a former district leader, a powerful man in the region before the rebels took over. He could protect the children. He would take them far away from Humla to the last refuge in Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley. He would put them in boarding schools, where they would learn to read and write for the first time in their lives. The children would be fed and cared for. Most importantly, they could never be abducted by the rebel army. This man was Golkka.

Nuraj’s mother and father begged him to take their children. It would be expensive, they understood, but they would pay anything. To raise the money, they sold their home and moved into single-room huts with their neighbors. They sold their land, their livestock. They borrowed from distant relatives. They would be going into debt for the rest of their lives, putting the rest of their family at risk, but it was worth every rupee to save their boys from the Maoist army. In villages throughout Humla, other parents were taking the same drastic steps to save their children.

Nuraj’s mother packed a small bag for her sons with the few possessions they had—a small shirt, some dried rice. She comforted Nuraj and Krish as she sent them away with a stranger. They were going on an adventure, she told them. They would be safe. This man was going to take care of them, so they must be good boys and do what the man said. She would talk to both of them very soon.

A few months passed, and Nuraj’s mother heard no news of her children. She asked the other villagers who had sent their children. None of them had heard from the man. Nuraj’s father took the phone number given to him by the man and walked for several days until he reached Simikot, the largest village in Humla, where there was a phone.

Nuraj’s father listened to the empty ringing on the other end. He hung up, and checked the number again. Yes, he had dialed the right number. The man had even written his name next to the number: Golkka. He dialed again, but it made no difference. Nobody ever answered. He had been given a false number. His child was gone, lost in the chaos of Kathmandu, hundreds of miles away. He hung up the phone, and started the days-long walk back to his village. He would have to tell his wife, the boy’s mother, that their sons were gone.

Farid and I listened to Nuraj’s mother, speechless. The Little Princes Children’s Home was not an orphanage at all. These children had parents who were alive. And by some miracle, one of them had found us.

Nuraj’s mother had come that day from the Ring Road around Kathmandu, where she lived. They had lost almost everything in Humla, thanks to the child trafficker; they had little choice but to seek work in Kathmandu. When she described where she lived, I knew the place exactly; it was only a few minutes walk from the climbing wall that I frequented. It was a terribly impoverished area, a neighborhood that I would pass on the bus and wonder who could survive in such a place. She had moved into a shack there, leased to her by a woman with some neighboring land. She tended the land in exchange for the shelter. Her husband had gone to Nepalganj, Nepal’s second largest city in the south of the country, to find work. She lived alone with her youngest son, a disabled boy of two years old, the younger brother that Nuraj and Krish did not even know they had.

Their mother had learned about the Little Princes when an international aid worker had come to her shack; he had been told of the family by a neighbor who saw the mother living in destitution. The doctor had offered to take the son to the hospital for a check-up. When the aid worker heard her story about her journey from Humla, he told her about an orphanage he had heard about in the village of Godawari. He suggested they might know something about her two missing sons. She left her youngest with a neighbor, and set off walking to Godawari, along the empty roads, cleared out by the bandha. It had taken her all day. She had not asked directions. When she saw the path leading down to the orphanage, she said, she knew it was the right way. When she saw the yellow house in the distance, she knew her sons were there.

She had waited long enough. I went upstairs and brought down Krish and Nuraj. I walked into the room, and Nuraj clutched the arm of his older brother. Krish was only seven, but was a great protector of his little brother. I stood back, expecting a joyous reunion.

The boys, though, stayed at the edge of the room. They would barely even look at their mother. Farid walked to them and squatted down, trying to get them to speak to her. They said nothing, and continued to stare at the floor. The mother walked slowly to them and sat in front of them, on the floor, taking their hands in her hands and speaking softly to them. Still the boys did not react.

After a few moments, the mother got up slowly and approached Hari. She said something that I could not hear. Then she turned to Farid and me, clasping her hands together in prayer-like fashion and saying
dhanyabhad,
thank you, and she walked back out the way she had come in.

“Wait . . . what did she say, Hari? Why is she leaving?”

“She say she understand reaction of her sons. She say she will come back. She say thank you to me and to you and to Farid Brother.”

The two boys never looked up. Farid asked me to take Nuraj back upstairs with the other boys, and then he put his arm around Krish and led him out into the front garden. This would be a sensitive conversation. The children trusted Farid above all others, and Krish was a bright young boy.

I ignored the flurry of interest from the other boys up on the roof. Raju was part of the group, too, but his questions, shouted above the other questions, were not about the strange woman and what had happened, but whether Nuraj wanted to play carrom board. I left Nuraj with him and brought the rest of the kids to the far corner of the roof, leaving them with strict instructions not to bother Nuraj. An hour later, Farid and Krish came back inside, and he sent Krish back to the roof to play with the other boys.

“What was that all about?” I asked him as we went back out to the garden to talk.

“You would not believe it,” Farid said, cursing under his breath in French.

The children had been instructed by Golkka to tell anyone who asked that their parents were dead. It was more effective in getting donations from tourists, and would also help explain to local authorities why one man had so many children under his guardianship.

“If a child made a mistake and told of his parents being alive, Golkka beat him. Can you imagine?” Farid said. “Krish saw his mother coming—his own mother, after this long—and all he could think was that they were in trouble. He warned his brother to pretend not to recognize her. He was scared that if he said anything, we would beat Nuraj.”

It was unbelievable. “So they know her?”

“Of course they know her. She is their mother,” he said. “Conor, I did not tell you, but I have seen this woman before. In this village. I suspected she might be their mother, but I could not believe it. I ran out to find her, but it was too late, she was gone, unable to find her children. She must have come back, to look again.”

“How did you not tell me this before?” I asked, confused.

He shook his head. “It did not seem possible that it was her. I thought I must have imagined the entire thing. Today, I can see that it was. This is their mother.”