Little Princes (21 page)

My knees and thighs took enough of a beating on the downhill that the flat ground felt almost relaxing, like I had landed on a moving walkway. I looked back up the mountain. Coming down was difficult; going back up would be worse. Luckily I had almost three weeks before I had to worry about that. Less, if we kept this pace.

A few minutes later, we were at the Karnali. We would have to cross it to continue south, since the only path was on the western side of the river. There was one problem: the Maoists had blown up the bridge.

The Maoists had destroyed almost every bridge in Humla in order to keep the army out. When villagers or bomb-toting Maoists bound for Simikot had needed to cross, they were ferried on makeshift cables. Men stood at each end of a cable strung over the river and pulled people across, collecting a few rupees for their service from each passenger. We were eight men with full packs; the men could expect a decent payday. One by one we climbed into the small metal containers suspended twenty feet up—the steel cage was an upgrade since the conflict, I was told—and traversed the river.

The porters led the way along the small single-track paths that had never seen a wheel, which had been carved out by the feet of villagers and long convoys of sheep and children chasing after stray buffalo. For hours we saw no villages at all. We moved at a terrific pace; even Min Bahadur, normally happily chatting to the other men despite bearing the heaviest load, had gone silent. I could barely keep up with them, and it wasn’t just their superior strength and stamina. The two-hour descent and subsequent three-hour speed-walk had taken a toll on my knees.

Winter afternoons in Humla give way quickly to evening. By six we had reached our destination. It seemed to be the only destination unless we were prepared to sleep outside—the next shelter was many hours away. Rinjin told me the place was called Bokche Ganda, though the only thing I could see was a single lean-to, the kind I used to make as a child in the woods behind my house, except this one was large enough to sleep twenty men and didn’t look like it would come crashing down on me the moment I climbed in with my comic books. I pulled off my boots, watching the men make a fire with maddening effortlessness. In my experience, making a fire required several hours of pained labor, virulent cursing, and about forty dollars’ worth of lighter fluid. I would not survive one day here alone.

The porters served up enormous plates of daal bhat, boiling hot right out of the fire, which we ate while sitting on the cold ground. I crashed immediately after the heavy meal, listening to the men chatter into the night, drinking tea and stoking the fire to keep warm.

Even just a few hours into southern Humla, it was clear how parents here could be cut off from their children in Kathmandu. It took days to get anywhere. Poverty was everywhere; most villagers were fed by the World Food Programme. There was no electricity, and houses were one-room mud huts. There was virtually no medicine: the health posts had been abandoned. If villagers had to move around at night, they lit their way using flaming torches, like they were hunting Frankenstein. I didn’t know these places still existed.

We broke camp at dawn. It was still very cold, even having descended three thousand feet from where the plane dropped us off in Simikot. The surrounding mountains were so high that the sun wouldn’t reach us until after 9:00
A.M.
We had tea and biscuits to warm up before we started moving; the morning daal bhat would be cooked in a few hours when we stopped for a break. We had a full day’s walk ahead of us.

As I sat up in my bed of scattered hay under the lean-to, my back ached. It was stiff from the cold and from sleeping on the ground. Climbing out of my sleeping bag, though, I discovered a far worse problem: a sharp pain in my knee. I took a few excruciating steps and sat down on a rock.

I couldn’t believe it. Half a day into a three-week journey on foot with men who speed over these trails as if on Rollerblades, and I was hobbling and wincing in pain. It wan’t the pain that bothered me, though I was pretty unhappy about it; it was the knowledge that there was no medical attention for miles. If I continued to hike at that pace, I could seriously damage my knee and would have to be carried out. That really, really could not happen.

Fishing around in my medical kit, I pulled out two strong painkillers and swallowed them with tea. I wrapped a bandage tight around my knee to stabilize it, then tried walking again, boosting myself up with my walking poles. Thank God for my walking poles. I had bought them at the last minute on Anna’s advice; now they were suddenly critical to my mobility. Even with the poles, though, I could do little more than hobble.

Embarrassed, I broke the news to D.B. and Rinjin. They were kind and concerned about my health, and made sure I was sitting down before they went to talk among themselves. D.B. came back and sat down next to me.

“We can go back to Simikot, Conor. I will take you myself—we can walk as slowly as you need. Walking uphill will be easier than downhill, we can reach Rinjin’s guesthouse by tonight,” he said.

“I’m fine, D.B. I’m slow, I know. I don’t want to slow everybody down, and I know that I will. But I can keep going if the others don’t mind.” I hated to ask that; I felt like a whining little brother. But it was the only way I could continue.

He nodded and went back to tell the others. I saw them looking over at me as they packed up the camp. I couldn’t meet their eyes.

Keeping my leg straight and leaning so heavily on my poles that I was petrified they would snap, I was the first of the group to set off. I was determined to prove that I would not slow us down to a crawl. I gripped my poles, stayed focused on the rocky path, and blinked away the tears of pain welling in my eyes, grateful that nobody was in front of me to see. I said a silent prayer, asking God only for the painkillers to kick in, and swore that if I ever made it back I would name my first child “Walking Poles.”

T
wo days in, Rinjin stopped and pointed south, where the river curved.

“We reach there, we will be very close to Ripa,” he said, patting my arm. I was leading the eight-man team—D.B. insisted on it. It was the only reliable way to keep the group moving at my slowed pace. As we approached a path leading up the side of a cliff, D.B. wanted to make sure I wasn’t left behind.

I walked slowly along trails carved into the cliff walls. To my left was a sheer drop one hundred feet down into the river. In a way, I felt like I already knew Ripa. Bikash was from that village, as was his brother Ishan and several other kids from Little Princes. They spoke about it often. They told me of the steeply sloping terraces leading down to the white water of the Karnali, the cluster of mud huts built almost on top of one another, the nearby woods where the children collected herbs and spices for their families to sell. I wondered if the images they had painted would bear any resemblance to the real thing.

Min Bahadur barked out a single word. My daydream vanished. I had no idea what the word meant. I looked back. All seven men in our team had thrown themselves against the rock, as if they and the granite cliff wall had suddenly become magnetized. I heard Rinjin shouting a translation, but I didn’t wait for it. I pressed myself against the rock as hard as I could. The ground shook. I felt them before I saw them: a herd of perhaps a hundred goats, laden with what looked to be rice-filled saddle bags, came streaming around the corner of the cliff trail. How they kept their footing I had no idea; I only knew that I couldn’t keep mine. I gripped the rock tightly, terrified, and felt the surge of animals race past me in a cloud of dust, chased by a shepherd who ignored us completely.

I was still gripping the rock when Rinjin approached me, telling me it was safe to let go.

“If you see a herd like this, it is important to stay to the inside,” he said, his hand tight on my shoulder, staring at me.

“I got that—stay inside when I see the goats. Thanks.”

“Otherwise, you will end up in the river,” he clarified, pointing down, in case there was any doubt. “The goats, they do not fall. Humli people, we do not fall. But you, you fall.”

“Yep, I saw that. I saw it just now, with the goats.”

“You did very well. It is very good you did not fall. You climbed very high on that wall, like a monkey,” he said, looking up at the cliff wall.

“Yeah, well, I almost peed my pants, so—”

“You have to pee?”

“No, I don’t have to—no. No, I’m good. Let’s keep going. Thanks.”

W
hether any of the children’s families still lived in Ripa, I had no idea. But I was about to find out. The sky was graying as we entered the village up a sharp rise in the path. A cluster of mud huts was perched on a terraced slope, just as Bikash had described. Most of the huts shared walls; they were built practically on top of one another.

It had been an agonizing day, pounding on my inflamed knee for eight straight hours. Ripa, to me, was Shangri-La. It was the Four Seasons. I felt the pain more acutely knowing I was going to stop soon, and I hobbled openly for the first time, relieved we would be staying the night.

I was now last in the line of eight men, though Rinjin stayed just a few feet ahead of me. Walking through the narrow spaces between the huts, I was suddenly enclosed by villagers. They had seen us coming—or me coming, anyway. My pasty arms were pale enough to be seen for miles—they must have looked like light sabers next to the complexion of my colleagues. The villagers gave me a wide berth. Most gawked at me from their roofs. They shouted the occasional question at D.B., the leader of our pack, and the questions were clearly about me. I felt like a caged baboon being wheeled through some nineteenth-century town on its way to the circus tent.

Absorbing the stares of the villagers, I had no inhibition about staring right back at them. The women wore large, gold-plated nose rings and earrings and dozens of beaded necklaces. Some of them were gripping oar-length poles, poised to pound them against smooth, round stones, the middle of which were carved into a bowl, though I couldn’t see what was inside—wheat, I imagined, to make flour. Other women were lugging wicker baskets on their backs stacked high with firewood. As is customary in Nepalese villages, the men seemed to be doing little but squatting on the ground, drinking tea, and watching the women work. Certainly they were not looking out for the babies; that job was left to the daughters, who were carrying the little ones on their backs, wrapped in handmade blankets of rough cloth.

D.B. stopped. He squatted down next to a man sitting in front of his door and spoke to him. The villager said nothing but listened to D.B.’s monologue for several minutes. He put down his tea, and without a word he got up and motioned for us to follow him. The village was small, and soon we were in front of an almost identical mud hut, the only difference being that it was whitewashed. It had a low door, next to which was a log with steps hewn into it, leading up to the roof, where there was a stack of hay and a woman weaving baskets. A man squatted in front of the door wearing a dirty white turban, smoking a pipe that he cupped in his hand.

The turban was the giveaway: this was a medicine man, a village elder. D.B., Rinjin, and I sat with him while D.B. explained our mission. We told him we had little information about the children, only a few names of parents. We believed there were families in Ripa, but we couldn’t be certain. The information I took from the children was sketchy at best. I had little in the way of accompanying documentation. Sometimes the child remembered the name of their village, sometimes not. They were often too young to know their parents’ names.

The elder asked to see the photos of the children. He studied them, listening to the names associated with the clean faces, well-groomed hair, and secondhand western clothing. They bore little resemblance to the children hovering nearby, donned in little more than rags, craning their necks to see what we were looking at. The man invited us to stay with his family. He would make a fire and his wife would cook our food for us. That was typical in Humla: as poor as they were, as much devastation as they had seen, they didn’t think twice about opening their home to strangers.

We ate daal bhat inside the man’s two-room hut, lit only by the small fire in the middle of the floor, which blackened the walls and ceiling. I was breathing smoke and air. The light reminded me of campfires and ghost stories from when I was young. In the corner, on a low bed, was an elderly man, naked except for a blanket, lying on his side and staring at the fire. I was the last to finish, despite concentrating on getting food down my throat as quickly as possible. I don’t know how they did it, eating it when the daal was still literally boiling on the tin plate. We stepped outside and washed our own dishes in a bucket. Rinjin, D.B., and the porters all gathered around the fire, joined by several villagers who had remained outside, waiting for an opportunity to finally figure out what we were doing there.

I was led to the shed by the son of the family. The shed was just another room attached to the house, but smaller. He entered first, motioning for me to shine my head torch inside. He cleared the shed of the crude wooden tools—farming instruments of some kind—and opened his hand toward the door, inviting me in. I went in. My backpack was already near the door, my sleeping bag unrolled by one of the men. It would be a tight squeeze with all of us in here, but I would worry about that later. I lay down, making a pillow of my smoky fleece, and fell asleep almost instantly.

I
woke to the sound of heavy rain and the scrambling of two of our porters, who had been sleeping outside. Moments later they piled into the shed. It was uncomfortably crowded before—now it felt like an ill-conceived attempt at a world record. We huddled closer to squeeze them in. Feeling guilty that the foot of my sleeping bag now seemed to be inside somebody’s mouth, I extricated myself from my bag, pulled on some rain gear, and stepped outside. It was still dark. But by the moonlight I could make out the tops of the hills nearby, just five hundred feet up from the village.