Little Princes (22 page)

Something was wrong. The crests of the hills should have blended into the night sky, even in the moonlight, but they stood out like a cheap oil painting. I continued to stare at them and let my eyes adjust. Houses came into focus; the river appeared. Still, I stared at the hills. A moment later, I realized what was wrong, and my heart sank. The tops of the hills were covered in snow.

That was very bad news. It meant that Simikot—and more important, the airport runway—was snowed in. I had been warned, but I had held out hope that we would get lucky, that the weather would hold off. Now it looked like I would be trapped there for the rest of the winter, unless I walked out. It would take ten days just to reach a road.

These thoughts passed through my mind as I stared at the snow-covered hilltops hovering like a pale blue cloud against the night sky. Hope drained out of me and scattered away like dandelion seeds. I squeezed back into the shed, climbed into my sleeping bag, and prayed I would find just one parent to make this all worthwhile.

S
omebody was shaking my sleeping bag. I cracked open my eyes. Rinjin was standing over me, his unmistakable figure backlit against the dull light visible through the open door.

“Come outside. Somebody is here to see you,” he said, and walked back out the door.

I stood up slowly, clenching my teeth against the pain in my knee. Piling on several layers, I stepped out into the dawn. Ten feet away, surrounded by half the village, sat a man and woman. The man was tall and thin, his eyes sunk slightly into his cheeks; or maybe it was just the appearance from holding his head down. But the mother, a plaid scarf tied around her hair, was looking directly at me. She had teardrop-shaped eyes, and her cheekbones came out like smooth shelves. Rinjin walked over to me to introduce them.

But there was no need. I knew exactly who they were. These were Anish’s parents.

“The elders called them here. They heard we have news of their son,” Rinjin said. He looked at me expectantly. “Do we?”

I didn’t answer. I walked back into the shed and took my small daypack, the pack I kept near me at all times. I set it down outside and pulled out the blue folder I had prepared the week before, when I was at Little Princes, listening to the children, including Anish, yelling right outside the office door.

Flipping through the photos, I could see that all eyes were on me, trying to see through the folder, to see what this stranger had with him. I found the right page. I slipped it out of the folder. Stapled to the page was a photo of this woman’s son. I removed it and handed it to her.

It was instant recognition. She cried out, and the group crowded in to see. She touched it to her head, as one does with a sacred object, and broke down sobbing, two hands on the photo, thumbs pressing into it as if she was trying to enter the picture herself, to touch the boy with the oil-slicked hair parted down the middle, flashing his wide grin. The father gently took the photo from her and held it inches from his face. Then he too began to cry.

The assembled crowd erupted with chatter. I dug into my pack for my notebook and sat down beside the parents. Rinjin sat next to me, and we began our first interview. I needed to understand what happened those years ago when they lost their son. Who came to take him? How much did the family pay? What were they promised in return? Did they have any idea where their son was now?

Each question instigated a short dialogue between Rinjin and the father. At first I thought Rinjin was clarifying the question, but that wasn’t it. The questions were straightforward.

“What is he asking, Rinjin?”

Rinjin gave a frustrated sigh. “It is nothing. We can speak about it afterward. Please, continue,” he said.

I continued. The interview took almost an hour and a half, just to elicit responses to what I considered simple questions. The answers were vague, reluctant. I asked Rinjin for follow-up on almost every answer the father gave. When I felt like I had all the information I would get, I asked Rinjin to translate a message for the father. It was a single message, but I instructed my guide not to sugarcoat it. Rinjin smiled grimly at the expression, getting its meaning. I spoke to both the father and mother, though the mother never looked me in the eye. I said this: They had put their son’s life in danger. What they did, sending Anish away with Golkka, was reckless. It was a miracle Anish was alive at all, let alone safe in a children’s home. If they did this again with another child, that child would almost certainly be lost forever.

Rinjin didn’t sugarcoat it. The mother wept; the father stared into space. I didn’t like telling them that. I wanted to be a hero, to rejoice with them, to make this the scene in the movie where the music swelled and the parents gave me a tearful hug. But I worried. In a way, my coming here validated everything Golkka had done. He promised them their child would be safe, get a great education, stay healthy. And Anish was safe, educated, and healthy. I had to make them understand that he was all these things in spite of what they had done, not because of it. Above all else, we had to prevent this from happening again, and that required hearing a hard truth.

They stood up to leave, thanking me profusely, thanking Rinjin, thanking our porters. I returned the gesture, hands clasped together. And I asked Rinjin to take a short walk with me, to get away from the small crowd, just for a few minutes.

“What happened back there? Was he not understanding the questions, or did he not want to answer?” I asked him.

Rinjin shook his head. “Neither. I would translate your question exactly. He would ask me to repeat it. I would. Then he would think for one second and then he would ask me the same thing, every time.”

“Which was what?”

He stopped and turned to me. “He wanted to know what the right answer was. He wanted to know what answer he should give so that you would keep his child alive, keep feeding him, keep sending him to school.”

We didn’t speak for a while. We stared together down toward the white water at the turn in the river, past the children running in the distance, leaping off the dormant farmed terraces where wheat would be planted in the spring. I felt terrible. Worse than terrible, I felt caught. I would maybe never have my own children, but I suddenly understood exactly what this father had seen when I walked into the village. He saw his son’s benefactor, the person who would decide Anish’s fate. He must have thought I was interviewing him on behalf of his son, determining his child’s worth based on his answers. Four years after Anish’s disappearance, his heart must have pounded with every question, terrified of getting one wrong and wondering what the consequences might be.

I would have to be more careful. My interviews would begin with reassurance, not interrogation. I would still be honest at the end—that was for the safety of the children. But I had lacked humility in front of parents who had sacrificed so much to save their son. I vowed not to make that mistake again.

D.B. and I spoke with families throughout the day. I took breaks to play with the children. They stood at a distance, respectful but dying to interact. When I came over they all shouted a sentence that they had clearly been working on together, a group project.

“Please one photo draw!” they cried, pointing at my camera. So I wasn’t the first westerner in the village. I set them in little groups—first the girls, then the boys, then the young ones, and so on. Each time their smiles and roughhousing ceased immediately and they stood bolt upright, the Official Royal Portraits. As soon as I took a photo they collapsed again, and lobbied for photos with this boy, or these three children. They never asked to see the screen, which meant the last westerners through here had not had a digital camera. I wondered when that was. I was happy to continue to take photos, without the flash to conserve my battery. Now that I saw them more clearly, they were so similar to the children I knew in Kathmandu. They
were
the same children, really. Chance, age, gender, and probably other factors I would never understand kept them here while their brothers and sisters were taken.

By evening, we were finished. The elder’s wife made us tea, and I sipped it alone, away from D.B., Rinjin, and the others warming themselves by the fire. I wanted to process everything I had seen and heard that day. I had spoken with the families of Hriteek, Bikash, and Anish from Little Princes, and Navin and Madan, the two elder boys of the seven children. Only in Humla did I learn they were brothers. But for now, I was trying to reconcile this village, this life, with the children I knew at Little Princes.

Anish’s father was coming back. I saw him approaching down the trail. I was ashamed to catch his eye after our interview that morning. I had been honest, but I had also been unfairly harsh, practically lecturing him and his wife, as if I had every right in the world. I didn’t walk to the fire—he could speak to Rinjin and Rinjin could pass the message on to me. I pretended not to see him, staring down into my steaming tea.

But he didn’t go to Rinjin. He walked directly to me. He stopped a few feet away from me, waiting for me to look up. When I did, he greeted me with a bow of his head, and handed me a small plastic bag. He bowed his head again, then smiled for many seconds, as if he wanted to say something but knew I would not understand him. Without a word, he turned and walked back the way he had come.

I watched him go up the path. I caught Rinjin looking at me, then turn back to the fire. Then I opened the bag. It was walnuts, covered with honey, bits of the hive still on it. It was a gift, the only thing he had to give. A lump formed in my throat and stayed there until I fell asleep that night.

R
ohan’s mother sat with us in the village of Tumcha. Rinjin was telling her the story of how Sandra found her son, how the boy ended up at Little Princes. He knew it well enough by then that I could afford to be distracted and look around. Tumcha was different—sunnier. Ripa, where we stayed for two full days before setting off early this same morning, sat below a mountain. By three in the afternoon, the village was in shadow. Tumcha, though, was built into a more gently sloping hill. It was 4:00
P.M.
now, and the sun still reflected so brightly off the haystacks that I couldn’t look at them.

Rinjin handed her the photo of her six-year-old son. Most parents broke down when they saw their child. Not Rohan’s mom. Her reaction was the exact opposite, and somehow I was not surprised. Her eyes lit up and she laughed out loud. Her laugh carried chords of Rohan’s laugh, the hilarious, borderline-maniacal laugh that earned him the nickname Crazy Rohan. Whenever I got bored at Little Princes, I would look for Rohan and ask him to tell me a story. He would spin an impressive tale on the spot, inspired by whatever object or person was closest. If Nuraj was playing cards nearby, the story would be about how Rohan and Nuraj one day had to fight fourteen evil men who were trying to hurt Hriteek, who was currently playing catch with himself on the other side of the room, and they would ride their motorcycle and fight them, simultaneously. The stories always featured Rohan on a motorcycle. The best part was that he laughed all the way through the telling. Also, every story—without exception—involved some kind of dance interlude. I would have given anything to see Rohan and his mother together.

I loved meeting the parents of the Little Princes. The similarities between parent and child were remarkable, like stepping into a time machine and seeing the child twenty years in the future. But I also loved the interviews because it meant I didn’t have to walk. Hikes between villages could take as long as ten hours, stopping to rest and have a midday meal, and I was in constant pain. The ligaments in my knee were on fire. I recognized the pain from a bike injury in Sri Lanka the year before. When it happened, I took nine days and did nothing but sit in a chair, looking at tea plantations and reading books—and even then it was barely tolerable to put weight on it. This injury was worse, but there could be no stopping. I rationed my painkillers, saving them for after steep climbs and sharp descents. I stayed close to the others. There were times when the path split, with one rising up the mountain and one running parallel below it, and I did not want to have to backtrack if I went the wrong way. The mere thought of taking an unnecessary step was demoralizing.

At one such fork in the path, I followed Rinjin down. With everything on a slope, there was no “left” and “right” in Humla—directions were given as “up” or “down.” Suddenly pebbles were raining down on me. I looked up to see, twenty feet above me, a tiny girl on the path above us. She was calling down to me while absentmindedly smacking a branch at the hindquarters of an enormous water buffalo, trying to get him to move. The buffalo looked nervous, as though the next step it took on the shale was going to carry it right off the path and create a one-buffalo avalanche. I had a vested interest in this not happening because the behemoth was positioned directly over my head. Panicked, I turned to Rinjin.

“Rinjin, you gotta tell her to stop hitting that buffalo! That thing’s gonna come down on us!” I was practically shrieking.

Rinjin smiled. “She is calling to you—she wants to know your name,” he tells me. “She is very sweet. . . .”

But I was gone, hobbling frantically up the trail, walking poles flailing. Behind me, I heard Rinjin tell the little girl that my name was Conor and that I was a very nice man.

N
ear the village of Mundi, several hours after my embarrassing buffalo-induced panic attack—the porters giggled about it for hours; I could hear them mock-screaming in low voices behind me—we set up camp in a former Maoist headquarters. It was a solid wooden structure by Humla standards: two floors, three rooms, built on a plateau just above the river. The owner of the building told us that one day the rebels came and declared that the house was now theirs. He was not about to argue with armed Maoists. The walls of his building were now covered in Communist propaganda both inside and out. Some of it, curiously, was written in English.