Little Princes (13 page)

Three

S
tepping off the plane in Newark, New Jersey, the first familiar face I saw was my mother’s. As always, she was standing in the front row of the crowd, leaning into the railing, scanning the faces of the tired travelers emerging through the sliding doors. I saw her before she saw me; her face serious, her hands gripping the railing, eyes checking the screen to confirm that the flight from Delhi was—yes, there it was—on time. She recognized me instantly, never mind that my clothes hung off my skinny frame, that my hair had been hacked short, that I had not shaved in a month. Her eyes lit up and I knew what she would shout “Yes! Woo hoo!” startling the small Indian woman next to her. After all these years, her reaction still embarrassed me. But maybe this time it embarrassed me a little less than before.

We drove home to Jersey City, past the New York skyline. My mom first asked about the children, all of whom she knew by name from my e-mails home. Nepal was in the news, she told me. To prove it, she turned on National Public Radio. Sure enough, within fifteen minutes there was an update about Nepal. I soon realized that my mother knew far more than I did about the political situation in the country. She had absorbed every bit of information she could find. For ten minutes she gave me a rundown of everything that had happened, of the Maoist attacks and the Royal Nepalese Army’s counterattacks, of journalists being thrown in prison and citizens being beaten down by both sides.

She stopped in front of our house in Jersey City, turned off the car, and we sat quietly for a moment.

“Anyway. I’m just glad you’re home,” she said.

My mother left the next day to go back to Florida, where she had moved permanently. She was going to put the Jersey City house on the market, but she would wait until I had found an apartment of my own.

Two days later, my friends started calling. Every night a different group of friends, friends I hadn’t seen in more than a year, took me out to celebrate my homecoming. For the first time in ten years, I had come home to stay, to find a job, to settle down. We talked about what neighborhood of New York City I should live in and which women they thought I should meet. There was much talk around candidates for blind dates. They insisted on picking up the tabs in bars and restaurants across the city. “Please—you’ve been off saving orphans,” they would say. “This is the
least
we can do.”

I know I should have politely refused their generous offers. But the food . . . the food was just so beautiful. It was wonderful. It was delicious. I should have been filming commercials for TGI Friday’s, the way my face flushed with ecstasy with every bite of a potato skin. I ate anything that didn’t have rice. I relished drinking water straight from the tap, guzzling it without fear of parasites. Beer tasted heavenly. I ate my first piece of chocolate in four months.

And everything, everywhere, seemed squeaky clean. Everyone in the city was dressed in clothes that positively gleamed, in collared shirts, gorgeously pressed and starched. Nobody wore the same clothes even two days in a row, let alone two months in a row. No fleece for miles around—no flip-flops, either. Everywhere the sweet symphony of English, of new cars humming, of air-conditioning sweeping through rooms, of toilets flushing. Perhaps the strangest feeling of all was seeing children, so many of them with glowing white skin, that unfortunate translucent paleness that I shared. After months of rich, brown skin of a thousand shades, it looked like these children had been bleached.

During the days, I was putting together my résumé. It was hopelessly out-of-date. I had decided I would get back into public policy. It seemed like the right transition, and I knew I could get a job fairly easily, which was important after being without a salary for so long. New York was expensive, and I was broke. On my résumé I listed the work I had done for the EastWest Institute in Prague and Brussels. I hoped the year of travel wouldn’t count against me. And under the final section, the one titled
Other Interests,
I wrote “Little Princes Children’s Home, Nepal: Volunteer.”

That was it. The entire experience, living for months with eighteen children, each one unique and crazy and swimming in my memory, boiled down to a single line that would likely never be read. And maybe that was how it should be, I thought. It was time to move on—to a real job, to dating, to starting a life near my family and friends.

But I struggled with the moving-on part. I had already written four e-mails to the Little Princes e-mail address. I knew that Farid or Hari would read them to the children. I wrote to Hari to ask him to go check on the seven children when they landed at the Umbrella Foundation—when the political situation calmed down, of course—to tell them that we were thinking of them. I wanted to send them the photos I had taken of them. I found myself wanting to maintain that connection, not to be a volunteer who disappeared back into his everyday life once he had left Nepal.

As I tried to start the job hunt, I was distracted by the news from Nepal as it unfolded live on CNN. People were taking to the streets, not at the orders of the Maoists, though the rebels did all they could to support it, but at the urging of the political parties that had been kicked out of parliament when the king had seized power. Protests were organized by activists and promoted by journalists—the ones not yet thrown in jail.

Nepal had reached a boiling point. King Gyanendra, desperate to maintain his grip on power, had issued a curfew to stop the protests against his autocratic regime. When that failed, he gave the orders for the police to shoot protestors on sight. Eight people were shot dead on the street on the first day of protests.

The Maoist uprising was now a popular uprising, and it grew stronger by the hour. Farid, who had made it back to France, and I kept in close touch by e-mail. We shared any information we had, any rumors, any news from our friends and colleagues in Nepal. We marveled at the images on TV, at the faces of these peaceful, wonderful, loving people, suddenly crazed with passion, with determination, with revolution, with the spirit that drives men and women to stand on front lines and absorb bullets and batterings to win freedom for those who stand behind them.

The king had sealed his fate with the killings. It seemed the entire country had descended on the streets of Kathmandu. On April 24, 2006, the monarchy crumbled. The king, with the citizens of Nepal literally beating at the door to the royal palace, announced the reinstatement of the democratically elected parliament. This announcement, the only announcement he could make, may have saved his life. The faces of the people, the close-ups with a CNN logo hovering in the bottom right corner of the screen, told stories of relief, disbelief, jubilation, and optimism.

I turned off the TV. I felt like I had been watching for days. Nepal still had a long road ahead of it—What of the Maoists? What of the king? Who would rule Nepal?—but for now the country had untied itself from the railway tracks. I thought about those faces on TV. They were fathers and mothers, expressing a joy that came from making a difference, from making the world a better place for their children. I swelled with pride for my foster country. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, our children—the Little Princes and the seven children—had a brighter future ahead of them.

Then the e-mail came that changed everything.

T
he e-mail was from Viva Bell. With the uprising, it had taken their team three weeks to get across town to pick up the children. It had been impossible to move in Kathmandu before that; nothing could ply the roads. Once the king was overthrown, it took them just two days to organize a small van to get the children. Jacky, Viva’s partner, went with two of their staff—two women, who could comfort the children when they were picked up. Jacky found the shack without any problem, the directions were perfect. He opened the gate, greeted Nuraj’s mother and her young son with a smile, and walked inside the shack.

The seven children were gone.

The mother told Jacky that Golkka had gotten word that the children were going to be rescued. Golkka somehow knew my name, and he knew that I had been speaking to the government’s Child Welfare Board about the children and their plight. Golkka knew exactly how to exploit the law to remain out of jail, but he recognized these seven children, their very existence, because of the conditions in which they lived, could be used as evidence against him—evidence he might not be able to refute in a criminal case.

Golkka took no chances. The moment the king was overthrown and the curfews lifted, he struck. He took the children away under the cover of a euphoric capital. He kidnapped them so they could not create problems for him. In the race for the children, he had beaten Umbrella by forty-eight hours. And just like that, they had vanished.

Haunting me were the last words I had said to the children before I left them. I told them that somebody was coming for them, somebody who they could trust. Somebody who would take them to a safe place, where there would be many children and they could go to school and be well fed and sleep in beds and have proper shoes. They didn’t believe it. They had heard this before, from their mothers and fathers in their villages in Humla, right before they were taken and abandoned and left without food or proper shelter. I sat beside them and looked them in the eye and told them I understood. I promised them that this time, it was true.

Three weeks later, somebody did come for them, just as I had promised. But not to take them to a safe place. Amita and Dirgha and little Bishnu and the others—they would all know by now that I had betrayed them. That I was just like the others. The only difference, as I was all too aware, was that this time, nobody knew where they were.

I read and re-read that e-mail from Viva, sitting in the same bedroom where I had spent much of my childhood. The phone rang twice, friends calling back to tell me which bar we were meeting at that night. I let it ring. When I looked up at the clock again, I saw that I had been sitting there for more than an hour, staring at that e-mail. It was now dark out.

Next to my computer I kept a notebook of my job search. It was meticulously organized, a sign of my excitement. The prospect of rejoining this life in New York was a dream. It was a life where I had friends and money and dates and food I had been craving for the past year. And it would be in America, near my family, where everybody spoke English and where we shared a common history and cultural references.

I took one last look at those pages, of the list of institutes and companies who I thought I might work for, of the pros and cons of each, of the approximate starting salaries of each position. Then I tore those pages out. On a fresh sheet of paper, I wrote down the names of the seven children: Navin, Madan, Samir, Dirgha, Amita, Kumar, Bishnu.

I turned back to my laptop and composed an e-mail to Farid. I explained what had happened, including the entire text of Viva’s e-mail. I ended my message with a single line: “I’m going back to Nepal.”

He responded immediately from France: “I’m coming with you.”

M
y instinct was to buy a plane ticket that day. I could borrow the money for it; I could be in Kathmandu by the end of the week. With the recent violence, flights would be empty. But what would I do when I landed? Finding the children would be a near impossibility in Kathmandu, a city of one million. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had flooded into the city during the civil war. Thousands of children had disappeared. I wouldn’t know where to begin. This would take more planning than I was used to, and that frustrated me. I was not a good planner. I was good at making quick, rash decisions, of hurling myself into difficult situations, making the best of it, then squirming out of them again.

What was I supposed to do first? I took out my notebook and listed the steps. I came up with one, and it wasn’t even the first step: Go to Kathmandu. After that, I was lost. I put down my pen and stewed some more. The more I stewed, the angrier I got. All I had been trying to do in Nepal was get seven children out of harm’s way. To bring them across town to a children’s home. That was it. I wasn’t trying to be Mother Teresa. And still I had failed.

I looked at the photos from Nepal, of the jubilation in the streets after the king’s resignation. That made me even angrier. Why weren’t Nepalis looking for these kids? These were
their
children, not mine. But all they could do was celebrate, as if everything was all better now. Nobody cared about these vanished children. If a five-year-old boy went missing in the United States, it would be front-page news for days. Entire towns would hold vigils. Millions of dollars would be spent to find him. The governor would hold a press conference. In Kathmandu, seven children vanished into thin air and nobody even missed them. Of course they didn’t—they had saps like me bringing them rice and calling everybody I knew to try to put them in a home.

Farid let me ramble until I had exhausted my bluster, then he wrote back. He told me, in his undiplomatic way, that I was being—what was the word in English?—unjust. I was being unjust toward these people. (He later added “irrational” after consulting a dictionary.) He didn’t explain himself; he didn’t need to. My fiery anger was dunked into Farid’s pool of reason and emerged, dripping, as guilt. I had spent all my money traveling around the world. I would never struggle to get medical attention for my children, or to keep them out of the hands of armed men trying to abduct them. I would never watch my friends and neighbors waste away from starvation. I would never pray to God for rain to keep crops alive. But if I ever did experience even a fraction of one of these fears, I was certain, I had to admit, that I would not spend my time worrying about children I had never met. I would be concerned about keeping my own family alive.

I began to think more rationally. Farid and I spent entire days brainstorming. A quick move back to Kathmandu would do us no good; we had no resources. Even if by some miracle we found some of the children, how would we support them? How would we protect them? They could stay at Umbrella temporarily, but I knew in my heart that these seven children were not Umbrella’s responsibility. They were mine. Umbrella had done their part to rescue them and keep them safe. They needed a home, and if we were going after them, then it was also our responsibility to give them a home. I had promised them that before I left. Until we raised enough money to give them some stability, there was little point in returning.