Little Princes (24 page)

I
woke up before the others. Lying in the dark, unable to fall back to sleep, I thought about Jagrit, about what I would find at the end of the day, about the postman’s reaction. I tried to imagine what the trail would be like that day, whether it would rain, what the condition of my knee would be. These thoughts, unhampered by any stimuli save the sound of men breathing, had free rein and kept me awake. I got up and went for a walk in the predawn light down to the bridge and stood in the center, watching the wide river race beneath me like God’s treadmill.

After an hour, a fire sprang to life back at our camp. I climbed back up the slope to help prepare the tea.

Later, on the path, I could feel a difference in my knee. I measured it by the length of time I could go in the morning before it caught fire, before the long thick nail was hammered in, just below the kneecap. That morning it was fifty-five minutes, a new record. But the going was tough that day. I had been drinking steadily, and I was out of water. The path had taken us up, away from the river. Rinjin handed me his own bottle.

“You can use your pills in this,” he said. He was referring to the chlorine tablets I carried with me. I had never drunk unpurified water in Nepal, and I was not about to start when I was a week’s walk from a hospital, no matter how pure the Karnali looked. Yet I was in no position to refuse his offer. Humli men were strong, they could go without water. But the more dehydrated I got, the more I slowed us down. I took the water and dropped in the tablets. They would work in twenty minutes. I cheers’ed Rinjin with the canteen.

“Thanks.”

“It is nothing.”

It was far from nothing. We had been walking for six hours, including an hour’s rest during lunch, rice cooked over an open fire on the side of the trail. I was exhausted. And things were about to get worse: D.B. was waiting for me up the trail. I caught up with him and sat down on a rock.

“How is your knee, Conor?”

“Much better than before. Still moving slowly, but better,” I said.

He nodded, looking down at my knee. Then he met my eyes. “Rinjin told me about the postman, and about Jagrit. This is the same boy you told me about? The bright one from Umbrella?”

“Yes, same boy.”

He paused. “I would very much like to find the family of this boy. But there is a chance that the postman is not completely . . . accurate. In Humla, we often confuse relations. We call cousins brothers, for example. This postman is not lying, but he may be confused between the father and brother,” said D.B.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We even asked him about the mother, he said it was definitely the right person.”

D.B. smiled, and nodded again. “Yes, you are probably right,” he said. “Anyway, we are not far now.”

But the way he said it, sympathetically, told a different story. D.B. doubted the parents were alive, and he knew this region and the culture. He was uncomfortable telling me; he would not have said anything unless his doubts were well-founded. In a matter of minutes my spirits plummeted. I had allowed myself to get excited about finding Jagrit’s parents alive, about returning to Kathmandu with this extraordinary news. What if his family really was dead? What if I couldn’t even find his uncle? I continued to sit on the rock. The team didn’t move, but waited respectfully up the path, where D.B. had rejoined them.

As I sat there, I allowed my mind to wander to Liz. In that moment, I remembered a short e-mail she had written to me a couple of weeks before I’d left for Humla. Appropos of nothing, she had written this:

This morning, on the crowded train to New York, a man in the row in front of me sneezed. The woman in the row behind me said “God bless you.” He could not have heard her, since I barely heard her, and the train was packed. But the fact that she said it gave me a sense of the innate goodness of man.

I remembered reading that e-mail and thinking I wanted to be near somebody like that. I wanted to be near somebody who could hear somebody sneeze and somebody else say “Bless you” and be able to conclude that human nature is, at its core, good. I wanted that kind of optimism in my life all the time. I wanted it to rub off on me. I wanted to see the world like that. I needed it right here, right now, sitting on this rock.

I got up and walked up to the men.

“Ready?” I said. They got up and loaded their packs, and we continued up the trail toward the village of Jaira.

Three hours later, D.B. pointed out Jaira. It was an hour, maybe less, along a traverse, downhill slightly from where we stood. We stepped off the path for a herd of goats barreling toward us from behind. I would hardly have even noticed them if the shepherd hadn’t slowed down just as he passed me, coming to a full stop for perhaps one full second to stare at me before jogging after his goats. They raced on toward the village.

Forty-five minutes later, we arrived. I sat down. Rinjin and Min Bahadur would find the parents. They could do it more efficiently than I could as they spoke the language and maybe even knew some people in the village. Besides, it gave me a chance to rest. By now I was used to people gathering to stare at the white man propping his leg up, unwrapping a bandage from his knee, touching it gingerly. There was no alone time in Humla, not for me. Going by past experience, I would have at least an hour before Rinjin appeared with the first parent. I rested my head against my backpack and closed my eyes.

The shepherd stood above me. I recognized him from the trail—he wore a thick, dark red scarf around his neck. Rinjin and D.B. were speaking several feet away. They saw me stir and walked toward me, still talking.

“Hi there,” I said to the shepherd, dusting myself off as I stood up. I had taken to greeting people in English—out of laziness, partly, but also because it discouraged them from trying to start a conversation. Sometimes it even thinned out the group. The shepherd didn’t move.

Rinjin came up to me. “Sit, Conor. We will stay here,” he said.

“I’m okay,” I assured him. “I can walk, I just needed a rest. Did you find anything on the father?”

Rinjin looked confused for a moment. Then, leaning into my ear, whispered. “The shepherd
is
Jagrit’s father, Conor.”

S
ince meeting the postman, I had imagined this moment. Now, face-to-face with him, I was positive this was the father. Rinjin had confirmed it, and the resemblance was uncanny. This was the moment I had been waiting for. Yet I suddenly found myself having no idea what to ask Jagrit’s father. For his part, he just looked back and forth between Rinjin and me, genuinely confused as to who we were and why I needed to speak to him. I talked to him about where he was from, his wife’s name, and so on to establish that we were talking to the right person. It was him, there was no doubt. I asked him if he had a son.

“Yes—his name is Khagendra, he lives with me,” he told me.

I waited. He did not say anything else. Rinjin, who often conducted much of the interview himself by now, knowing my questions by heart, purposefully waited for my next question.

“Ask him if he has any other sons, besides Khagendra,” I said. Rinjin translated the question.

The father said nothing. He stared at me, as if trying to work out why I was asking that particular question. Rinjin repeated the question.

The man nodded.

“Ask him if this other son’s name is Jagrit—or something that sounds like Jagrit. Hold on—that might not even be his real name. How can we possibly know—”

Rinjin cut me off, putting his hand on my forearm. “Just let me ask him.” He translated the question.

Again the man said nothing. I watched him press his lips together so tightly it looked like they would never open again. Then he nodded again.

I took out the photo of Jagrit and handed it to Rinjin, who handed it to the father.

The man stared hard at the photo, holding it up to his eyes for what felt like several minutes. Then his hands, still clutching the photo, dropped slowly to his lap. Tears fell, absorbed by dusty trousers. Rinjin leaned in, as if to comfort him, but never touched him. I felt like an intruder in an incredibly personal moment. I wanted to give him time, let him go see his wife, take a few days to take this news in, to come to believe it in his heart and understand how his life might change, how his son’s life might change.

But our time was limited. It was always limited. I was meeting parents and doing the equivalent of throwing a bucket of cold water in their faces with the news of their long-lost children, then asking them tough questions and recording their answers, all within the course of an hour or two. I watched them come alive when I told them their children were safe. I watched them die a little as they relived the loss of their child to a child trafficker. It was intimate and overwhelming and I felt, over and over, unqualified to be doing this job. But there was nobody else to do it.

Jagrit last saw his parents when he was five years old. The boy in the photo was fourteen.

I never had any intention of showing this man the document I was now pulling out of my pack. I hesitated for a moment, then handed it to him. The father took it from me and stared at it blankly. He was illiterate. Rinjin gently took it back and read it aloud to him. I waited for him to finish. The shepherd’s head hung down as if a weight had been slung around his neck. A man he had met just an hour earlier had just read him his own death certificate.

“Your son believes . . .” I started to say, looking to Rinjin for guidance. “Your son, Jagrit, he believes that you, and his mother, and the rest of his family, are dead. He has always believed that. That document you are holding—your death certificate—we have the same document for your wife. It is an official government document. It was forged by the man who took your son.”

The man said nothing, but looked back up at me. His eyes closed slightly, as if he has received too much information to process.

Rinjin was watching me. “I will ask him what happened,” he said, motioning for me to open my notebook.

The father recounted the whole story. His eyes never met ours, but stared into space. I couldn’t understand the words, but he seemed to travel back in time and watch the entire event unfolding in front of him. He spoke of the government official who told him he had seen potential in Jagrit as a young boy, who promised to put him in a top school in Kathmandu. The official had asked the family to provide a large sum in advance. The father waited to hear news of his son. Weeks became months, and months became years, until one day there was no hope left. It was as if his wife had never given birth to the boy, as if he had never held that bright young child, his firstborn son.

Rinjin and I were riveted. I felt like I had lived the story with him, watching from afar, seeing the father—the shepherd—and his small son, Jagrit, together first, then saying good-bye, not understanding it would be for the last time. When the father finished, I closed my notebook. We sat together for a while, silent. The father stared at the ground. Then he said something to Rinjin without looking up.

Rinjin translated. “He is asking if you will tell Jagrit that they are not dead.”

“He can tell him himself,” I told Rinjin. “He’s going to write him a letter.”

We stood fifty feet away and watched while the father, sitting with the village schoolteacher, the only literate man in the village, dictated a letter to his son. When he was finished he walked over and handed it to me, folded several times into a tight square with Jagrit’s name written on the front in Sanskrit. I didn’t ask what he wrote. Rinjin wanted to know if I had any more questions for him.

“No, it’s okay, he can go,” I told him. It was a two-hour walk back to his house, outside the village, and it was already getting dark. “Wait . . . tell him his son—tell him he is an amazing kid. Everybody loves him. Make sure he understands that.”

Rinjin told him. The shepherd, Jagrit’s father, smiled for the first time. He clasped his hands together in a silent thank-you, and set off up the trail.

T
he extraordinary circumstance under which Jagrit’s father, the dead man, came to life gave me a glimmer of hope for two of our other children: Raju and his sister, Priya. We had always thought them to be true orphans. Back at Little Princes we did anything we could to help the children keep a connection to their families. One of those things was helping them write letters to their parents, even if they might never see them again. All of the children did it, even Raju. It was Priya, his sister wise beyond her seven years, who explained to her brother that they could not write letters, that they had nobody to send them to because their parents were not living. That was a difficult day.

But now there was a ray of hope—a dim ray, perhaps, but a ray. Their parents might still be alive. I almost did not want to think about it, the idea was so overwhelming.

I charged Min Bahadur with getting to Lali, the village of Raju and Priya, across the river and to the northeast. He was the strongest in our team and knew the region better than anyone. He could make it there and back in less than two days. I gave him all the information I could about the two little ones and sent him off, unburdened by packs so he could move quickly.

We watched him leave, then continued our journey south. I tried to put Min Bahadur and his search out of my head, but it was difficult. The walks were long and lonely, and I had hours of time with my thoughts. I imagined a father picking up Raju the way I picked him up, of Priya helping her mother cook for the family, of the two playing together in the fields and lying between their parents at night, warmed by their body heat.

At the end of the second day, Min Bahadur caught up with us in a village called Tulo. He immediately sat next to Rinjin and spoke to him softly. Rinjin listened intently. Then he called me over.

“Their children’s names are Raju and Priya Atal? You are sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure.” I held my breath.

“Min Bahadur found those in the village that knew them,” he said. “Four years ago they got very sick. . . .” Rinjin paused, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. They are dead.”