Little Princes (25 page)

T
he first time I ever had food poisoning, I was in a hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida. I woke up with it after an evening at a seafood buffet, and stumbled to the bathroom. My flight to New York was departing in less than three hours; I didn’t leave the bathroom for the next fourteen. I lay curled up on a nest of towels, my face resting against the cool tub, sucking water from the tap, wondering how I was going to survive. The cleaning lady stopped in, thinking I had vacated the room, and I just had the strength to croak out most of “Come back later!” before my stomach seized up again so it came out as “Come back—
blaeeegh
!” Vomiting, for me, is a loud affair. Decibelwise, I might compare it to the inside of a sports bar in Boston the moment the Patriots score a Super Bowl–winning touchdown with three seconds on the clock after coming from six hundred points down. The cleaning lady couldn’t get out fast enough.

That was a spotless Marriott in the United States. Now I was in Humla, and it was only a matter of time before I got sick. Sure enough, I was struck down two weeks into the journey. I was usually able to sleep through the night, exhausted from the day. But one night my eyes popped open from a dead sleep. I needed to get outside. Like, ten seconds ago. It was pitch black in the hut and there was a family sleeping beside me, so I controlled my overwhelming urge to bust out through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man, and instead shuffled gingerly toward the door. Not gingerly enough, as I found out when I accidentally kicked a sleeping chicken across the room, causing a holy panic in the claustrophobic space. I felt my way out the door, then it was just a matter of how far away from the house I could get. Not terribly far, as it turned out.

Already weakened from days of walking and dehydration, the food poisoning felt like it had the power to kill me. It was difficult to hold down any food at all, which was dangerous because I was expending an enormous number of calories each day. My team learned to watch for signs that I was about to stumble or even collapse. We couldn’t afford to stop; we were already behind schedule because of my knee. And with the snow, we would have to start thinking about other ways out of Humla. I tried to keep my mind off the fact that if further complications developed there was no help, no hospital, and no easy way out.

With my new illness, I was experiencing a level of discomfort I didn’t know existed outside of passing kidney stones. Food poisoning causes the body to evacuate everything it can, as rapidly and inconveniently as possible. To make matters much, much worse, in Humla, there were no toilets. And when I say no toilets, I do not merely mean a lack of comfortable indoor plumbing—I mean no toilets. I asked “Where is the toilet?” on my first day in southern Humla, and was told: “No.” I don’t think I had ever gotten that response before. It shouldn’t really be a yes-or-no question, after all.

T
hree days later I was on the mend, able to eat daal bhat for the first time. I even encouraged the others to walk ahead, though Rinjin insisted on staying behind me. We had been walking for two hours when I came over a crest to find D.B. and the rest of the men sitting on rocks, looking down the valley. He smiled when he saw me, and came back up the path to meet me.

“You see the mountain there? The last one, very tall?” he pointed down the Karnali River, to a mountain about the size of the one we had descended the first day when we had landed in Simikot. I nodded.

“At the top is Shreenagar,” he said.

Shreenagar. It was the last village; the last two families were up there. But two days earlier, Shreenagar had become something else as well. It had become a way out of Humla. The World Food Programme (WFP), the UN-sponsored agency active in the region, was making rice drops at the top of that mountain by helicopter. With a helicopter, I could catch a ride out. I could get to Balaju or Nepalganj or wherever they were going. It didn’t matter. Wherever they were going would have a road or an airport. I had been in Humla for almost three weeks. I had done what I had set out to do. It was time to go home. One more day to the mountain, a three-hour hike straight up, and I would be at the helipad.

We took our time, stopping for lunch with some men fishing in the Karnali. My stomach turned at the idea of eating fish, but for the other men, fish was a rare treat. We decided not to start the climb until the next morning, when the sun would hit our side of the mountain and warm us as we hiked. By the time we began the ascent up the switchback trail, I was feeling stronger than I had felt in days.

Dhananjaya was the man responsible for this region for the World Food Programme. He saw us coming up the trail and came down to meet me. I told him about our mission, and about my knee. He confirmed that Simikot was still snowed in—WFP was able to land there by helicopter, but no planes were coming in our out.

“You are very lucky, Conor,” he told me. “Tomorrow our last helicopter of the season arrives. I am going home as well, also back to Kathmandu, to my family. We can easily fit you on board. I know the pilot, he will be interested in your story.”

Kathmandu sounded so sleek, so modern sitting in this village. I looked at my watch. It was December 15. Remarkably, after everything that had happened in the past three weeks, I would be home early, in time to meet my college friends coming to visit, and a few days before Liz arrived in Nepal. I couldn’t wait. I had spent so many hours thinking about her. On several occasions in the past three weeks Rinjin had caught me smiling.

“You are thinking about a woman, I think,” he said the first time, laughing and jabbing his index finger in my chest.

“No,” I said instinctively, somehow embarrassed that I had been caught. “I was just thinking about an e-mail from a friend of mine.” Technically, this was true. At that moment, I was thinking about an e-mail. I didn’t mention that it was from Liz. She had written to me in the middle of the night, her time. It was the middle of the afternoon where I was, and I had written back immediately, asking her what she was doing up at that hour.

“Oh, it’s kind of embarrassing actually,” she wrote. “There was this crazy thunderstorm tonight, so Emma, my big lug of a yellow Labrador, jumped into bed with me because she was scared. It took me, like, forty-five minutes to fall asleep again, and just when I did, Emma rolled over in her sleep and fell out of the bed with this really loud thump and I jumped about ten feet in the air. So I’m letting her sleep in the bed now and I’m on the couch so I decided to e-mail you to say hi.”

I loved so much about that e-mail. I loved that she lived alone with a huge Labrador, a dog that leaped into bed with her during thunderstorms. I loved how she told the story of Emma falling out of bed. But most of all, I loved that when she was awake in the middle of the night, she wrote to say hi to me, as if we were best friends, as if we had known each other for years.

I would be meeting Liz in a matter of days. I had trouble focusing on anything else, including preparing for my last interview, an evening interview with the parents of a boy from Little Princes named Ram; my mind was on the helicopter, on getting back to Kathmandu. But Rinjin showed up with not only Ram’s parents but three generations of his family, from a one-year-old baby to a grandmother of indeterminate age. It was a perfect final interview, a lasting image of an entire family surrounding a mother who held one single photograph of an eight-year-old boy from Little Princes, a boy who was anything but an orphan.

Just after dawn the next morning, I said good-bye to my team. Most of them would accompany D.B. to a few other villages to help him complete his work, interviewing the parents of children Anna had asked him to find. All of them, including D.B., would remain in Humla for the winter. This was their home. Rinjin offered to stay with me, but I insisted he begin the long trek back to Simikot.

We took one last group photo, overlooking the mountains in the gray dawn. I said good-bye, filling an envelope with twice the salary I had promised the men and asking D.B. to divide it among them. I watched them set off on their quick descent down the mountain, unburdened by the hobbled, food-poisoned Irish-American. Min Bahadur turned and gave an awkward wave—a western gesture he must have learned from me—before disappearing out of sight.

For the first time, I was alone in the mountains. It was a strange and suddenly very lonely feeling. I became friends with Dhananjaya, the WFP guy. We’d had dinner with him the night before. He told me the drought had gone on for the last three years; the Humli people needed much more assistance in order to survive. But WFP had dropped all the rice they had. It would last through the winter, and the program would continue in three months. Dhananjaya would be back then.

I hiked up to the makeshift helicopter landing area at the crest of the mountain, an area flattened by the hands of the villagers by chipping away the rock. The helipad was a twenty-minute walk up from the village. At the top, I dropped my backpack and leaned against it. I pulled out my well-worn book,
Carter Beats the Devil
. I was on my third time through it since first arriving in Humla; I practically had it memorized. The helicopter would arrive within the hour. I put down my book. There would be endless time to read when I was on the flight home, in the airport, back in Kathmandu.

For almost three weeks I had been so focused on finding families, on wondering what the weather would be like that day, wondering how I would get out of Humla, that I had spent little time just sitting and enjoying the landscape in this remote corner of the world. The view, now, was spectacular, with the river far below and the dramatic snow-covered Himalaya in the distance. I hoped that I would make it back to Humla one day, not for such an intense journey, but instead to visit the children who might one day be able to go back to their own families. Staring out at that panorama, I realized this was a fitting place to say good-bye to Humla, a place that had brought such difficulty and pain, but also such joy in meeting the children’s parents. I leaned back against my bag and watched the sky for the helicopter.

A
n hour passed, then two.

Ten hours later, I was still at the helipad. The helicopter had not come. For the last four hours I had stared at the horizon, too distracted to read. It was a mind-numbingly boring day, blistering hot in the sun and freezing in the shade. I hiked the short distance back down to the village. Dhananjaya, who was waiting in the village, knowing the helicopter would not leave without him, was frustrated and apologetic. He offered to let me stay the night in the house where he was staying. In the storage area beneath the house sat two hundred and fifty tons of rice from the World Food Programme, ready to be delivered to impoverished local villagers. I accepted his offer and crashed early.

Just after dawn the next morning, I returned to the landing area. I was frustrated to be delayed. Now I would arrive on the same day as my friends, unable to meet them at the airport after they had traveled halfway around the world to visit me. I apologized silently to them. It was frustrating, knowing I could not tell them why I was late. I was grateful that I had at least been able to warn them that I might be a day late if I was somehow delayed getting a flight home. But it was still extremely irritating, being so close, and having to wait another few hours to leave. I recognized how trivial it all was in the grand scheme of things; I had spent almost three weeks wandering through this desperate country, meeting villagers who had virtually nothing to their name, who had lived through ten years of war, and here I was moaning about having been held up a single day. I tried to put it in perspective, but I failed. This helicopter better be on its way here, at this moment, I recall thinking. I’m going to close my eyes, count to ten, and I better hear the helicopter coming. I began counting as slowly as I could, waiting whole minutes between each number. I opened my eyes. Nothing. I sighed, and closed my eyes again. Okay, this time I’ll count to twenty, I decided.

The helicopter did not come that day. Nor did it come the next day, or the day after that.

For five days, I waited on the mountain, on the rocky surface, in the sun and in the shade. The helicopter did not come. By the end of the fifth day, I was near despair. It was torturous to sit for hours on end watching the sky, willing a helicopter to appear. There was nothing but mountains, waves of them as far as the horizon. The landing pad started to feel like a raft in the open sea. I was as far away from civilization as I had ever been in my life, and I had no idea how I would get back.

In my days there, I got to know the children of Shreenagar. They would come up to the landing spot and watch the sky with me. The same six children always visited me. By the third day, they were up at the coarse-graveled helipad by 7:00
A.M.
, waiting for me to arrive. We couldn’t communicate, but it was nice to have company. I would pace back and forth, and they would pace twenty feet behind me. I would sit on a rock, and they would find a couple of rocks fifteen feet away and squeeze onto them, the older boys claiming the best perches. A few hours later I would be throwing small stones off the side of the mountain; just a few feet away, they would be throwing stones, aiming at the small, isolated trees and shrubs clinging to the slope among the low, winter-browned grass. When I went for another lap of the flattened area and saw them huddling, I knew they were planning how to approach me. They waited until I drew closer, then the eldest stepped out from the tight circle and into my path.

“You . . . daal bhat—” he began, pointing at me, then his mouth. “Hellycota.” He pointed to the sky—helicopter, he was saying—then back at himself, then at me again. “Running . . . me . . . you,” he said. From the eager pantomiming of the boys behind him, I understood that he meant that I should go down to the village to have daal bhat for lunch, and if the helicopter came, he would come running down to get me.

I looked around at the boys, and they stared at me, waiting for my response. I couldn’t resist; I said “Ke?” which is kind of like “Huh?” because I knew that they would erupt back into this grand charade to help me understand, and frankly, it was the only entertainment I’d had in a couple of very boring days. I made them do it two more times until they caught on that I was messing with them. Then I took them up on their offer. Anything to break the terrible monotony of the day and that empty sky.