Little Princes (20 page)

Farid knew Nepal well. He knew that nothing was ever certain, not even with a plane ticket in hand and a flight ready to depart. In fact, I had stopped using the word “sure” altogether unless it fell between “if you drink tap water” and “wake up on an operating table.” The only time we could be certain that the plane would take off that morning was the moment the plane actually lifted off the ground, continued on an upward trajectory, and flew away from Kathmandu. Anything short of that was mere speculation.

Few places in the world can teach forbearance like Nepal. Let’s say, for instance, that I asked somebody to buy me some bananas from the shop next door. In fact, let’s say that I asked him to buy me bananas a week ago—then I reminded him hourly over the next few days. On that one billionth time that I reminded him that he promised to buy me bananas, the man would most likely respond with something to the effect of: “It will definitely happen today, my friend. I swear to you on the life of my son—your bananas will be bought today, in the next hour for sure. Erase all doubt from your mind. In fact, it is actually done already, even as we speak it is being concluded, as sure as the sun rose in the east this morning those bananas have been purchased. They belong to you now—the shopkeeper has no rightful claim to them any longer. You can open your mouth now in preparation for consuming this banana, which is here, right now. It is in my hand and on its way to your mouth, so I hope that you are ready to enjoy this fine banana. Your teeth may now begin to close as the banana is now in your mouth. How does it taste? Is it very fine?”

What that man really means is: “What bananas?”

The flight did leave that day, but there was a delay. Because D.B. and I were the only passengers, they converted the interior of the plane into a cargo area, putting down the seats and filling the plane with sacks of rice. Humla was three years into a drought; they needed all the food they could get.

Sitting in a cracked plastic seat in the passenger lounge, I was relieved that none of the children, save Jagrit, knew where I was going. This mission was beginning to feel very real, and there was enough pressure without twenty-four children back in Kathmandu waiting for me to return with news of their parents.

E
ven from a low altitude, weaving between the mountains, one would never guess the world below us was inhabited. There was not a house in sight. The landscape in the dry season was a quilt of rusts and golds, split down the middle by the Karnali River running north to south. Not an inch of flat ground, at least not visible through the airplane’s narrow window. As far as I could see it was just wave after wave of hills and snow-capped mountains extending to the horizon and into Tibet, just a few miles to the north.

D.B. pointed out his village, but I couldn’t spot it. I listened to his description of an invisible cluster of mud huts and thatched roofs—his uncle’s house, the one-room primary school—and followed his finger, pointing to a village that blended into its surroundings. He noticed my blank stare. No matter, he told me, I would see it up close soon enough. But first, we would set down in Simikot, the district headquarters situated ten thousand feet above sea level—and hopefully the one place in Humla with flat ground.

The first thing I identified below us, moments before hitting it, was the landing strip at Simikot. It was dirt. I thought that was only in movies, dirt landing strips—reserved for drug runners or dinosaur-infested islands.

Moreover, there was no airport to speak of. The door of the prop plane opened while we were parked on the runway and local men started unloading the rice. I craned my neck to scan the sky behind us; it seemed like an awfully dangerous place to park a plane. Nobody else seemed bothered, however, so D.B. and I climbed out with our bags. We had brought gear for the men who would be joining us, down jackets and boots so that they would not be walking in flip-flops. Sadly, flip-flops were the typical footwear for porters in Nepal, even at high altitudes.

One of the men saw us getting off and put down his sack of rice to give us a hand. He tentatively took my backpack, glaringly modern in the present surroundings, contemplated it for several seconds, then put it on upside down. He clipped random buckles together tightly and haphazardly until the pack was gripping him like a frightened octopus. He carried it past the runway and up to the only guesthouse in Simikot. The guesthouse was run by a local nonprofit organization. The man in charge of one of the projects, Rinjin, was not much older than me. He greeted D.B. with a hug. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law.

D.B. and I began putting together our teams. We wanted eight men in total, including ourselves. He would lead one team of four and I the other. That way, if we needed to split up at any point to find specific children’s families we would each be well-equipped. This meant, for me, that the first order of business was finding a guide. D.B. had suggested on the plane that Rinjin would be a good candidate. The moment I met him, I agreed; he was perfect. His English was excellent, and he had earned the trust of the villagers in southern Humla through his work on local hydroelectric projects, trying to bring electricity to the region for the first time. I needed him. The problem was, he was busy with a full-time job, and I would need him for three weeks.

I had tea with Rinjin, warming ourselves next to the fire after our evening daal bhat. We talked late into the night. Rinjin understood the importance of what we were doing. He asked me in many different ways why I was doing this for children in Nepal. Why not somewhere else? Why not helping in my own country? I had no good answer for him, except to simply say that in Nepal, nobody else was taking care of them. What other reason was there?

As we said good night, Rinjin took my hand and told me that if I, an American, was willing to take this risk for the children of Humla, then he was duty-bound and honored to take it with me. I thanked him. And I secretly loved how he had said it; I could not imagine an American outside of the marines talking about being duty-bound and honored in the service of his country.

I had my guide/translator. Moreover, Rinjin recommended an excellent porter and said he would arrange for him to join us. But I still needed one more to round out my four-man team. Rinjin told me the best person for the job was a young man named Min Bahadur, a member of the help staff at the local UNICEF outpost in Simikot. As I was already planning on meeting with UNICEF the next day, I would discuss it with him then.

Puspika, the head of the three-person UNICEF office, knew of Golkka. They had been trying to stop him for two years. She warned me to travel in a large group. She said she hoped I had not told too many people where I was going; even in Kathmandu, Golkka had a way of learning about these things. The roots of his network ran deep in southern Humla, she told me, and they would not be happy to learn that we were educating families about the dangers of sending their children away with Golkka’s men in hopes of a better life for them.

During our conversation, a tall, lanky young man in his late twenties came in and served us tea with a happy grin. Puspika thanked him. When he left, I noticed she had a smile on her face; the man’s grin was contagious. I realized that this was the man Rinjin had been speaking about. Puspika confirmed it a moment later.

“You know, that man who just served us, his name is Min Bahadur,” she said. “He has been working with us for eight years. There is nobody I trust more, and nobody who knows the region better. If you can wait three days, our office will close for the holiday and he can join you.”

I thanked her, but explained that we had to leave the next day. The snow was coming soon. She nodded, understanding.

“I will ask him for you, then. I will leave the decision up to him,” she said, standing up. I thanked her for her time and thoughtfulness, and left to meet D.B. I found him at the local market, a wooden shack selling only rice and lentils, with no vegetables except for a few potatoes. Southern Humla was so poor that we would carry our own rice and lentils, knowing it would be difficult for villagers to spare anything. Our porters would bear the load.

In my own bag, which I kept close to me at all times, I was carrying something equally valuable: a blue waterproof folder containing photos and short bios of twenty-four children. It was the only information I had to go on, and I had read it through so many times I had practically memorized it.

The next morning we were ready to head south. As we sipped our tea outside, clutching the steel mugs to warm our hands against the chill of the morning, I watched as a smile spread across Rinjin’s face. I turned around to see what he was looking at. Walking up the path was Min Bahadur, cloaked in a heavy jacket and flashing his contagious grin. He was coming with us.

When we finished our tea, D.B. spoke to Rinjin in Nepali for a few minutes, then turned to me.

“We have one more stop to make—you remember?” he said.

“I remember.”

It would have been difficult to forget. Before we could travel into southern Humla, before we could even leave the borders of Simikot, we needed the permission of the Maoist leader.

The peace agreement in Nepal had been signed the week before I arrived in Humla, but the Maoists had already established their presence in Simikot, setting up in a small wooden house next to the marginally better-constructed army headquarters. It was a surreal sight, the red hammer and sickle flying just a few yards away from the Nepalese flag. The rebels now worked literally next door to the very buildings they had spent years bombing under the cover of night.

I walked into their building. It was discomfiting, to say the least. The United States government had sided with the king’s government in the conflict. That meant my government had provided them with military aid to fight the rebels. The Maoists had no love for Americans.

But there was no avoiding it: the road to the children’s families led through that door. Southern Humla was Maoist territory and had been for ten years. We were not sure if most of the rebels—former rebels, as of a few days earlier—would uphold the new peace treaty. Or, for that matter, if they were even aware the treaty had been signed.

Like everyone else in the high-altitude village, the Maoist leaders sat outside where they could be warmed by the sun. They sat in a row, four of them, on broken plastic chairs, waiting for us. Even the rickety chairs were a luxury—Humli people sat on woven mats on the ground. Chairs were usually reserved for wealthier individuals and government officials. The Maoists were behaving like the rightful heirs to the royal regime.

The Maoist district secretary sat looking like a man confident that he had earned the respect we were paying him by our visit. He wore a simple gray woolen hat that peaked about six inches above his head, stretching out his already thin features. The three officials at his side wore no jungle fatigues and carried no guns.

We greeted them respectfully and took the two empty chairs next to them.

I did not have a translator, but I understood pieces of the conversation, and I watched D.B.’s body language. He was humble and respectful and introduced me early on, conveniently failing to mention my nationality. They picked up on the omission and asked him directly where I was from. D.B. told them I was Irish. Technically that was true. I had brought my Irish passport and left my American one in Kathmandu.

D.B. told the story of Humla’s children, what was happening to them, how they were being taken from their villages and abandoned in the streets of Kathmandu. The Maoists paid me little attention. That was a good thing. D.B. would almost certainly be allowed into the region; he was a local, after all. Whether I would be granted the same access was unclear.

One can only listen to a discussion in a foreign language for so long before it becomes achingly dull, even, apparently, if one’s entire purpose for being there depended on the outcome of that discussion. This is especially true if you are sitting in the midday sun. Two hours later, my eyelids were sliding closed when the men leaped up and vigorously shook my hand. It scared the bejesus out of me to wake up to a throng of Maoists lunging at me, but I recovered in time to stop myself from instinctively hurling defensive, groggy punches at our hosts, an action that would likely have been something of a setback to D.B.’s diplomatic efforts. I shook hands with the men while D.B. picked his bag up off the ground. I caught his eye.

“That seemed to go okay,” I said in a low voice.

“Better than okay,” D.B. replied quietly, zipping up his bag. “You’ll see.”

He was right. That evening, an envelope was delivered to us by a local boy. D.B. took it from him, waited for him to leave, then carefully withdrew the single page inside. I saw from the light of his flashlight a document with red letterhead that was, surprisingly, written in English. It read “Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).” The rest of the text was in Nepali. D.B. translated it for me. Amazingly, it detailed our exact mission: to find the families of the lost children of Humla. Most important, it instructed all Maoist cadres in the area to assist us in any way.

“Well—that certainly can’t hurt,” I marveled.

“No,” D.B. said, smiling. “It certainly cannot hurt.”

W
e set off the next day. The trail appeared to drop straight down. It reminded me of those short-breathed moments skiing, at the beginning of a run, peering over a sheer drop. I couldn’t see how anybody got down this thing. Min Bahadur was first over, and I saw that he had jumped down onto a switchback that crisscrossed the mountain in broad, sweeping strokes. The Karnali River twisted two thousand feet below.

This was what the Humli would call a hill, but I called a mountain. To the Humli, mountains were the Himalaya, requiring ice axes and crampons—and oxygen tanks for the international climbers. Southern Humla was ringed by these snow-capped monoliths. These were the foothills of the Himalaya; the trail south would follow the Karnali River. Our path, the only path in the entire region, was narrow, wide enough for one person. It was slippery with mud and loose shale, and it rose so sharply in some places that you needed to grip the boulders and pull yourself up. I lost my footing several times on the first descent. Each time, Rinjin grabbed the straps of my pack and caught me. He took his job as guide seriously.