Little Princes (28 page)

That night I sat in my sleeping bag with my head near the door, staring up and out at the sky. Where there should have been stars, there were none. I prayed, my head bowed and fingers tightly interlocked, that it would not snow, just for one more day.

The early light woke me. I scrambled up, hopping in my sleeping bag, and flung open the door. Clear, crystal, perfect blue sky. I couldn’t recall seeing anything more beautiful in my whole life. I was going home. It was December 22. I had found the families of all twenty-four children.

I
sat in a small airport in Nepalganj, a town in the lowlands of southern Nepal, waiting for my flight to Kathmandu. I had three hours. I sat on the floor, legs outstretched, leaning against my backpack, keeping one hand on the cold marble floor to remind myself that I was on my way back to civilization. I still had only the one book, and I would be damned if I was going to open that up again. So I stared. I watched the people hurrying in to catch flights, I watched the bicycle rickshaw guys outside talking and laughing together until a passenger came out, when they turned into enemy combatants fighting for the fare, then went back to being friends. I watched luggage roll across the smooth surface, never having to be lifted by the man in the suit clutching the handle.

Across from me, on a bench thirty feet away, sat two boys with their father. The older one reminded me of Navin, the eldest of the seven children, the boy who I had sat with in the malnutrition ward of the Kathmandu hospital. It got me thinking about those kids and what I would tell them when I saw them. I looked forward to that, sharing photos and letters with the children from their parents. I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.

The boy’s father caught me looking at his son and smiled. And kept smiling. The guy was absolutely beaming at me. I smiled back, and kept looking at the boys.

The father got up and walked toward me. There was something familiar about him.

Then suddenly, like a brick between the eyes, it hit me—the boy, the one who looked like Navin,
was
Navin.
The
Navin. The boy I had lost and then found. And his brother, next to him, who looked like Madan, was the real Madan. I leaped to my feet. The man walking toward me was their father; I had met him in my first days in Humla. We had sat on a pile of hay and I had shown him a photo of his sons. I had told him they were in our children’s home, in Dhaulagiri House in Kathmandu, behind Swayambhu. And he had told me that he was going to go to Kathmandu. And he was going to find them and bring them home. I didn’t think much of it—I had heard the same thing from several parents.

Well, he had gone, and he had found them, and now he was bringing them home. I got a rush of excitement thinking about him coming to the door and introducing himself to Farid, showing him the address on the piece of paper. And Farid greeting him and calling the boys downstairs. The boys running downstairs and seeing their father, after everything they had gone through, after being taken and abandoned and taken again and rescued and brought to the hospital and into their new home and, finally, wondering where they go from there. I couldn’t stop smiling, imagining Farid’s reaction to all of that.

I walked quickly to greet him, and together we went back to the boys. They hadn’t recognized me immediately either, they hadn’t expected to see me here, and I must have looked like a vagrant after weeks without a shower. They jumped up and wrapped their arms around my waist. I loved that feeling. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the kids back at Dhaulagiri House and at Little Princes. Once you gained their trust they had no inhibition around you. The children used me as furniture, as a jungle gym, as a horse. And also as a surrogate parent, until the real one showed up. That hug by those two boys, with their smiling father standing a few feet away, lifted every last scrap of weariness I felt.

I brought the children and their father into the canteen to buy them a meal, and we sat together for the next two hours, saying little except with our hands, but smiling all the way through. I took a final photo of us together in the airport, then left them. We were all going home, just in opposite directions.

E
verything moved so fast in Kathmandu. It was strange to see cars, bicycles, and electric lights. For the first time since I moved to Nepal, I was the filthiest person walking down the street. I hailed a taxi and went straight from the airport to meet Kelly and Beth, who had arrived on December 18 and waited for me on faith that I would return to hang out with them. I found them at the guesthouse where they were staying until they could move into my apartment with me. They were sitting outside at a table, in the sun, drinking beers, and I managed to surprise the hell out of them. Before we went back to my apartment, we had a beer chilled in a refrigerator and served to us in a glass. It was perhaps the single best beer I’d ever had. Then I excused myself to find a pay phone to call Farid.

Farid was ecstatic to hear from me. He had big news: Dhaulagiri House had gone from six children to twenty-six. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Farid and the Umbrella Foundation had rescued twenty-nine children held for years by a child trafficker. Farid told the children about me; he said they were excited to meet me. Dhaulagiri House was a reality. We had actually started something.

I was about to say good-bye and return to my beer when Farid remembered one other thing. “Ah yes, one more good news, Conor—I cannot believe I forgot to say it already!”

“What’s that?”

“I am walking to a taxi right now, to meet your friend, the American girl. She called me just before you—she has arrived a day early, and now she is on her way to Thamel from the airport. I arranged to meet her at Swayambhu, near your house, in an hour. I should bring her to your apartment, no?”

My heart vaulted out of my throat and splashed onto the floor. I said a quick yes and a quicker good-bye and rushed back to the table to my friends.

“Guys—we gotta go,” I said, not even sitting down. I grabbed my beer and chugged it. The wonderful thing about friends you’ve known for fifteen years is that these things rarely require an explanation. Kelly and Beth chugged their beers and ran after me into the streets of Thamel and straight into the open back door of a taxi.

I only had a little time before Liz arrived. I spent three quarters of it taking the longest shower of my life—I was caked in dirt and grime—and I shaved. I looked in a mirror for the first time in almost a month. I had dropped about ten pounds. I had no nice clothes in Nepal, so I found the only fleece that wasn’t filthy from my trip and put that on, smoothing it out in the mirror.

Just before 7:00
P.M.
, Liz Flanagan arrived at my door. She was beautiful, just as I had imagined. She smelled so lovely, her hair and her skin so fresh, so unlike the dust and grime of my last few weeks. She was here, in Kathmandu, at my door. All I could think in that moment was how very close I had come to not getting here, to missing this moment. This was the woman to whom I had told so much, who had lived through so much with me from nine thousand miles away. Even though we were meeting for the first time, we knew each other intimately. Liz waited a beat for me to say something, then smiled and took a step toward me and held out her hand. Without thinking I took her and hugged her tightly before she could even introduce herself.

Part V

LIZ

December 2006–September 2007

Six

T
he polite thing would have been to ask my guests what they would like for dinner. I could not, however, take the chance that Kelly, Beth, and Liz would opt for traditional Nepalese food. I needed red meat. I needed beer. I needed French fries stretching to the horizon. We could have traditional food at the next meal. My friends took one look at me and agreed. On the way to the steakhouse in the center of Thamel, I chatted to my buddy Kelly while his wife, Beth, hung back and got to know Liz. I was thrilled that we were all there together; it took the expectations off what would have otherwise been a pressure-cooker of a first date: man walks twenty-seven hours in two days to get out of the mountains to meet girl who has just flown nine thousand miles for a visit.

Liz had booked a guesthouse room in Thamel, the backpacker district. She was only going to be in town for two days, and I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. I wanted to invite her to stay with us, in my apartment, but I was afraid of coming off as lecherous. When I finally summoned the courage, I asked her in what was intended to be a breezy manner, but which sounded more like a strained songbird. I added, in a mile-long run-on sentence, that there were three bedrooms, one for her, her very own bedroom with a door and everything, and it would be easier to meet up than if she was in Thamel. She hesitated for a moment, just enough time for Kelly and Beth, heroes that they are, to leap in and insist that she stay with us.

Everyone waited patiently for me to coax the last shreds of food onto my fork, then we shared a taxi back to my apartment. They all had questions about my trip, and I had questions for Liz. I wanted her to keep talking, to hear her voice. But after only an hour, exhaustion caught up with me, and I actually started to nod off in midsentence.

I said good night to everyone and walked to my bedroom. I had been looking forward to sleeping between sheets for the first time in a month, but I didn’t even make it that far. Devoid of energy, I fell on top of my bed, fully clothed, and slipped into a dead sleep.

I had underestimated the trauma of the trek to get out of Humla. Only fourteen hours had passed since I’d woken up to that clear blue sky. Since returning safely to Kathmandu, I had felt only joy—that I had made it out, that I had met my friends, that I had finally met Liz, that I was eating real food and taking real showers. Now, alone and shutting down, my mind began to turn, processing the last four weeks and especially the last few days. Nightmares ambushed me from dark corners. I was consumed by them, waking every few minutes in a sweat. Those moments of being awake brought with them floods of relief as I found myself in my bedroom, safe.

I don’t know how much of the night passed like that. I do remember, though, being woken up by my own shouting. Fear dissipated again into relief, which quickly turned into paralyzing embarrassment when I saw that the light in the living room outside my door was still on. Liz was awake, probably reading. I wished with all my heart that I could have caught my panicked shout in a butterfly net, gently eased it back and let it out my bedroom window.

The door opened carefully, and Liz slipped in. I closed my eyes, mortified. She came toward me, completely unselfconsciously, and put a hand on my hand.

“You okay?” she whispered.

Her voice was absent of any judgment, free of the tinge of embarrassment you hear in somebody’s voice when they are clearly embarrassed for you. She was concerned for me, and that was all. I was relieved. I took her hand in mind, intertwining our fingers. Neither of us moved.

“Yeah, I’m okay, thanks,” I whispered back. She slowly slipped her hand out of mine, walked back out, and gently closed the door behind her. That night I had one more dream, far different from those nightmares. I dreamed that Liz and I were in Humla on a warm, breezy day. I poured a handful of hard, dry rice into her hand, and she poured it back into mine, and together we carried that rice slowly up the mountain.

I
woke up the next day, a Saturday, to find everybody already up and dressed. For the first time, I had slept through the bells of the Buddhist monastery next door. Farid was sitting at my computer in the corner of the living room, where my desk served as our office. He was talking to Liz, Kelly, and Beth.

He saw me come out, dazed, and he rubbed his hands together with excitement.

“Conor, you have a very big day today,” he said, getting up. “I have told the children that you are coming to meet them, they are very impatient for it. Some are still very shy. And Dirgha and Amita have been asking me for many days when you were coming home. I told them we would be there one hour ago, but you did not wake up. So, they will be patient. It’s okay, it’s good for them to learn to wait for things, don’t you think?”

Kelly made breakfast for everybody. After many months of hanging out with children, not to mention porters and guides and parents who didn’t even speak much Nepali (Humli is a separate dialect) let alone my own language, it felt wonderfully odd to have a conversation in choppy, poorly enunciated English, accelerated by slang and splattered with inside jokes. I was still getting used to hearing Liz instead of reading her words, of hearing her responses to my questions seconds after they had left my mouth instead of hours later on a screen. Soon it was as if she had known us for years.

The five of us followed the small winding dirt path, enclosed on both sides by six-foot-high brick walls. Monkeys ran along the walls, leaping over our heads from one wall to the other. A few minutes later we emerged at the field in front of Dhaulagiri House. We left our shoes at the front door—a fundamental rule in any Nepalese house—and wandered inside.

Immediately I noticed there was something strange: the house was completely quiet.

“You sure there are thirty children in this house?” I asked Farid. The Little Princes home was usually quaking with shouts and general excitement.

Farid laughed. “Twenty-six. You’ll see,” he said.

The front hallway was empty. So were the dining area and the kitchen. In the living room, however, were about twenty children, ranging in age from maybe five to about eight, gathered together on the floor, leaning over beat-up notebooks and flimsy textbooks that resembled discarded coloring books. They were studying.

I put my hands together and said in a loud whisper: “Namaste,
babu
!”

Startled, they leaped up, the older ones helping the less coordinated little ones. They clasped the palms of their hands together and cried “Namaste,
dai
!” in an uncoordinated cascade. They saw Liz and cried “Namaste,
didi
!” and repeated the greetings two more times for Kelly and Beth.

Farid beamed. “It’s very good, no? These are the younger children—the older ones are upstairs, also studying.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It is our children’s home, Conor,” he said, both hands on my shoulders.

“It’s amazing,” I repeated. Dhaulagiri was filled with children, children who had spent years with a child trafficker until only two days earlier. Liz sat down next to one of the little girls, and I plopped down next to a young boy. He was writing the letter
b
in lowercase cursive over and over. He stopped and held his paper up for me to see.

“Very good, Brother,” I said. Liz was complimenting the girl on her work; she had just written the word
house
for what looked like the hundredth time. The girl’s face lit up, and she wrapped her free arm around Liz’s leg, binding herself to Liz before continuing her homework.

T
he rescue of the children now living in Dhaulagiri, Farid told me, had not gone as planned. The plan had been for Gyan, together with Jacky and Farid and a policeman, to pick up the children from a notorious child trafficker. The trafficker had kept them for the last four years, showing them to foreigners and receiving donations on their behalf, which he then pocketed.

But the business had reached an end. Gyan had finally received legal authorization to take the children. The man promised the authorities that he would make sure the children were safely packed and ready to go when the police arrived. His concern, he assured Gyan, was the well-being of the children. He did not want them to be traumatized by the transition, he said. He had raised them as he would his own.

But when Gyan, Jacky, and Farid arrived, the children were not outside. They were not even aware they were going anywhere. The child trafficker made it seem as if our people had infiltrated his house and were trying to steal the children. He blockaded the children inside; outside he screamed to the neighbors that Gyan, Jacky, and Farid were abducting Nepali children to sell to foreigners. Neighbors came to his defense. Suddenly TV cameras were surrounding the scene. It was the beginning of a standoff that would last deep into the night. The trafficker periodically screamed at the cameras that the children were being sold, that Gyan, Jacky, and Farid were likely to kill them once they had taken them to America and Britain. He swore they would have to kill him first to get to them.

The police and Gyan decided the man would never give up the children willingly—he was going to make this as difficult as possible on the police and the children. The police pulled the trafficker aside and went in to rescue the children, who had heard the whole thing going on downstairs, and were terrified that men were coming to kill them. Gyan, Jacky, and Farid had no easy task getting them into the waiting cars to bring them back to Umbrella and Dhaulagiri House.

At Umbrella, the children were released into the arms of dozens of waiting children, led by Jagrit and some of the older boys. They took the hands of the still-frightened little ones and brought them inside. Farid and Jacky stayed away while the Umbrella children spoke to the children, told them that they’d had the same fears, the same experience. But that they were safe now, safer than they could even imagine, that they would be given their own bed and food and that the next day they would go to school. When they were given food and hot tea by the Nepali house mothers, they began to calm down.

Just two days later, Liz and I met these children for the first time. Several were still not talking. Some had shaved heads, the consequence of an overwhelming lice infestation. But many had adjusted quickly.

There were sixteen boys and ten girls in all.

“Bishnu’s bed is still empty,” Farid added, his voice thick with regret. “The last of the original seven children.”

“And no word?”

“Word?”

“No news? About Bishnu?”

“No, no news. I ask Gyan every day. Every day, there is no news,” he said. He shook his head. “It has been almost ten months—you know that, Conor? Ten months.”

“I know.”

We stood quietly outside Dhaulagiri, staring at the home, squinting at the yellow paint reflecting the bright sunshine, listening to the rustle of books and papers coming through the open window.

“Wait . . . it’s Saturday—why are the children inside studying?” I asked.

“I told them to go outside!” Farid said happily. “I tell them, go play! But they are so happy about going to school, Conor! They want to do reading time now, on this beautiful day! It’s crazy, no?”

“It’s amazing,” I said.

“I think you need a new word, Conor. That word is not so interesting. You want me to find a new English word for you? I am a very good teacher, I give you good price for it. Friend price.”

It was nice to be home.

An hour later, the children ran outside. There were now four girls attached to Liz. The other girls were tagging along behind, asking over and over to touch her long blond hair. Finally Liz sat down in the field and the girls went to work braiding her hair and gently playing with her earrings. The kids spoke little English, but as I had learned long ago, language isn’t always necessary when interacting with kids. Liz sat on the hard dirt patch, children hanging off her, strands of her hair being accidentally pulled out from time to time in the braiding process. She looked up and saw me looking at her, and gave a broad smile, and mouthed the word “Yaaayy!” and laughed. We had spoken often of our shortcomings over e-mail with surprising openness. I knew I had much to learn about her. But at that moment, watching her with the children, she was perfect to me.

I noticed that Liz was paying particular attention to one little girl, the smallest one and the only one not trying to climb all over her. The little girl simply watched the others without emotion. Liz took her hand. The girl did not move, but let her hand be taken as she continued to stare at nothing in particular.

“Who is that girl?” I asked Farid, who had just come outside. He looked over to see who I was talking about.

“Ah yes—Leena. She is the youngest. It is very strange, Conor. She is like this all the time. I have not heard her say even one word yet,” he said.

I watched Leena until I was pulled away by the little boys, almost none of whom I had met, to play a game like dodge ball, using a ball formed from rubber bands tied together. I agreed, and, almost simultaneously, was nailed in the back with the ball. Apparently I wasn’t very good at this game.

We were now well into the afternoon. It was nice to be back with the kids. But there was still one child I had not spoken to, a child I really needed to see. It couldn’t wait any longer. I asked Kelly, Beth, and Liz to watch the kids for a while, and I went back to my apartment. Inside, I grabbed my laptop, where I had stored hundreds of photos from my trip to Humla, and walked back to the cluster of Umbrella homes to find Jagrit.

J
agrit was sitting on a whitewashed wall, watching the other kids playing in the field next door at Dhaulagiri.

“Sir, I saw you are back from Humla—I saw you this morning. You were walking with that girl who is very very beautiful. This is your girlfriend, sir? You are very lucky!” he shouted in his normal conversational voice.

“No Jagrit—she’s just a friend.”

“How many apples did you bring me, sir? I do not see a bag—did you leave them at home? I’ll come over and carry them myself—come, we go.” He leaped down and playfully started dragging me toward my apartment.