Little Princes (4 page)

I sat down near the edge of the pool, trying to blend into the stone and praying no other children would come up to me. I felt a tap on my shoulder. Anish was standing there. I recognized Anish because his skin was slightly lighter than the others, he was quite tall for an eight-year-old, and he had a distinctively round face with a smile that curved sharply up at the edges, almost cartoonish.

“Brother, you no remember names,” he said. It was an observation rather than a question.

“Yes I do!” My protest was both instinctive and absurd, like a schoolboy in trouble.

Anish sat down next to me, facing the shallow pool where the boys were splashing around. He pointed at one of the boys.

“That is Hriteek. You know because he is always climbing,” he said. Sure enough, Hriteek, whose picture I had crumpled up the day before, was trying to climb the entrance gate. Anish pointed at another boy. “That is Nishal, looking like he will cry right now. With the towel is Raju, he is most small boy here. That is Santosh, the tall boy. . . .”

This lesson continued for the next ten minutes, Anish slowly drying on the flagstones in the hot sun, me beside him in the shade so I wouldn’t burn. When he had named all the boys and the two girls twice, he quizzed me on a few of them, all of whom I got wrong except for when he asked, slightly exasperated, if I knew
his
name.

“Yes! Anish!” I said proudly.

He smiled. “Okay, Brother. You pass,” he said, and went to get his clothes.

Soon everybody was out of the pool. Then it was laundry time for all the clothes that needed washing. The children had stuffed their clothes that needed washing in small plastic bags that they had found discarded around the village. When the plastic bags tore, the children would find tape and repair them. I thought of my local grocery store double-bagging a can of soda and felt another stab of guilt over my wastefulness.

The children carried their clothes across the path to where the water flowed out of the pool and down a two-foot-wide shallow canal to a stream. Working together, they used soap to scrub their pants and shirts. The youngest boys, Raju and Nuraj, didn’t have the arm strength to tackle such a project, so they concentrated on their little socks, laying them on the concrete and scraping them with a small chunk of soap. The orphanage had a woman who washed the boys’ clothes for them (a washing
didi
), but this was another way of teaching the children to take responsibility for themselves, of keeping them in as normal a life as possible considering they had been robbed of their families.

Back at the orphanage, the children hung their clothes to dry, then resumed their yelling and bouncing off each other. They had boundless energy. My own energy level was not nearly so high. But as luck would have it, the most popular game at Little Princes was a board game called carrom
—
or carrom board
,
as the children called it. The children (indeed, all of Nepal) were obsessed with this game. It is played on a square board with holes in the four corners. The object of the game is to flick a blue disc across the board at the black-and-white discs in an attempt to knock the discs into the holes. It’s like a cross between billiards and shuffleboard.

Every child in the house not only wanted to play this game, but they wanted to play it against me. I was first taught the rules by Santosh, who at nine years old was one of the older boys in the house.

“Look, Brother, you hit with your finger, yes, like this. See, I score, so is my turn again. And I hit again . . . and I score again, so my turn again. . . . And I score again, so my turn—”

“I get it, Santosh,” I interrupted.

“You try now, Brother!”

I flicked one of the discs, which ricocheted off the board. Santosh watched it fly past him and slide under the couch. Then he looked back at the board.

“Okay, Brother, you miss, so my turn again. . . . And I score, so my turn again.”

He beat me in six minutes flat; I had put up about as much fight as a loaf of bread. The children were eager to play me, not to see if they could win—they all won—but to time one another to see how quickly they could shut me out. The fact that I was trying as hard as I could to just score a single point was a severe blow to my ego. Nuraj was hardly even paying attention, and that little four-year-old ran the board on me.

I came closest to beating Raju. After initially refusing to play him a third time, citing a broken hand—it was the first excuse that came to mind—I finally played him only after he agreed to let me have the first fifteen shots in a row. I scored twice before Raju’s turn. He promptly scored continuously until all his discs had disappeared down the holes. The children gathered around for that match, jabbering away in Nepali. Anish leaned over to me.

“Brother,” Anish said in a loud, hoarse whisper that was louder than his normal speaking voice. “Everybody saying they never have seen Raju win this game before, Brother.”

“Thanks for that translation, Anish—that’s very helpful.”

“You are welcome, Conor Brother,” he whisper-yelled.

This loss was still fresh in my mind when Raju and Nuraj asked me to play Farmyard Snap. I felt like this was my chance to redeem myself. I smiled to myself when they challenged me, and told Raju to bring it on.

“What means ‘bring it on,’ Brother?”

“It means we can play.”

“Brother, remember I give you many many hits and I win you in carrom board, Brother? Very funny, yes, Brother?”

“Just get the cards, Raju.”

Farmyard Snap, as you may recognize from the name, is the same game as Patience, Memory, or Concentration. You turn the cards facedown, mix them up, and try to match the pairs. In this case, the pictures on the other side were of barnyard animals. It was a well-worn deck of cards, clearly used by other volunteers to help the children learn the English words for the various animals. English was an excellent skill for them to learn, and furthering the education of the children was one of the main reasons for being here. And as we laid out the cards, I tried to remind myself of that. Truly I did. But all I could think about was how badly I was going to crush these kids in Farmyard Snap.

I won the first game handily. To my slight disappointment, they both just laughed every time I uncovered a match, clapping for me as if they were letting me win. They even cheered for me when I won; Nuraj went out to tell some of the other boys like a proud father. When he returned I challenged them to a rematch to show my victory was no fluke.

“What means ‘rematch,’ Brother?”

“We play again—if you don’t mind me winning.”

“Yayyyyy!” they cried together.

Games two, three, and four didn’t go as planned.

Raju and Nuraj held a quick tête-à-tête following their loss in game one and decided they would play as a single team. I consented. Their game-time chatter sounded innocuous enough. It was unclear if they were even talking about the game at all, as I noted during one particularly animated debate between them, which ended when Nuraj put his entire fist in his mouth and Raju sullenly conceded some point. Still, I couldn’t trust them, and I was soon proven right. The cards were bent from extensive use, and they were able to push their little faces against the floor to see what was on the other side. Since they never actually touched the cards, I wasn’t able to penalize them, nor could I get my huge head low enough to see the other side myself—though I did try, which was a source of much amusement for them. They also pointed out to each other where the other donkey was, or where they remembered seeing the ducks. When it was my turn, they tried to distract me by loudly singing Nepali songs or climbing on my back and tugging on my hair. There was nothing in the Farmyard Snap rules against this per se, but it put me at a disadvantage that I was unable to overcome.

“Remash! Remash!” they chanted after the sixth game.

“I can’t—remember my broken hand?” I reminded them.

“Brother, I no think hand broken,” Nuraj said, poking at my hand.

“Let’s go find the other boys outside,” I suggested.

“Yayyyyy!”

The rest of the boys were playing soccer next to a nearby wheat field, and I sent the two little cheaters off to join them. Then I sneaked back to my bedroom and lay down, hoping for an early-afternoon rest. I leaned over to see my travel clock. It was only 10:30
A.M.
I groaned and collapsed back on the bed.

I
had first arrived at Little Princes when the children had a few days off from school. They returned to school only on Wednesday, four days later. That Wednesday will forever rank as one of the most peaceful days in my entire life. I took a walk through the village for the first time, along the single-track paths that led through the rice paddies and mustard fields, past the women working the fields, the men weaving baskets out of dried grass on their mud-hardened porches, the mothers carrying babies in slings as they washed their clothes at the public water tap. Everywhere I walked, people would stop what they were doing and watch me pass by. There was always time to stop what you were doing in Nepal—nobody punched a clock or tried to impress anybody else by working through lunch. They woke up, they worked until they had to prepare the fire to cook rice for dinner, then everybody came inside and ate before going to sleep. You wouldn’t find a soul outside after dark.

A week after I arrived, I walked into the children’s bedroom, expecting to help them get ready for school. Because they wore identical blue and gray school uniforms, the young ones needed some extra help in sorting out which pants belonged to whom. They also had trouble with their buttons and clipping on their little ties. The room was empty, so I went straight to the small cardboard box that said
RAJU
on the side of it to get a head start looking for his gray socks. The last two school days he had been unable to locate the pair; he was forced to wear one red sock and one gray sock, an event traumatic enough to leave him in tears. His sister, Priya, all of two years older than him but always dressed before anybody else, was by his side in an instant, holding his head as his tears stained her button-down shirt.

“It is okay, Brother, I talk to him,” she said, gently waving me away.

I had found one gray sock when a boy came flying down the stairs from the rooftop terrace and raced past the door. There was a screech of bare feet against the hard floor, and Anish poked his head into the room.

“What you look for, Brother?” he asked, puzzled.

“Raju’s socks . . . where is everybody?”

“No school today, Brother!” said Anish. “Today is
bandha
!”

“What’s a bandha?”

“No school, Brother! Come, we play on the roof! Come!” he took my hand and leaned his body weight toward the stairs for leverage.

I learned from Farid that a bandha was a Maoist-instigated strike. The Maoist rebels had been locked in a civil war against the monarchy in their bid to establish a People’s Republic of Nepal, to be founded on Communist principles. Bandhas were a common tactic used by the rebels, intended to bring the entire country to a standstill. They were extremely effective. When the Maoists called a bandha, everything was forced to close: schools, shops, and most offices. No buses, taxis, or cars were allowed on the street, so the only way around was on foot or bicycle. Strikes could go on for days, and came with virtually no warning.

Bandhas were known to turn violent if the prohibition was not respected. Buses and cars were overturned and set ablaze in the middle of the streets during the strikes. A few taxis did still operate, despite the risk. In a country as impoverished as Nepal, the extra money they could make during a bandha was too valuable to pass up. These daredevils covered their license plates with paper so as not to be identified and drove as fast as possible, stopping only to pick up and drop off passengers. Those who were caught were often physically assaulted or had their cars smashed by Maoist sympathizers. Our village, Godawari, was thirty minutes from the Ring Road of Kathmandu; thankfully, we saw very little of that violence.

The frequent bandhas led to shortages of food and kerosene. The food shortages were difficult for us, as prices for vegetables could quickly double during these times. For families barely surviving, though, it was far worse. Finding kerosene was impossible at any price, so our twenty-two-year-old cooking
didi,
Bagwati, who lived in the house with us and helped care for the children, would cook the morning and evening daal bhat on an open fire in the garden, helped by the children. Cooking rice and lentils for more than twenty people on an open fire takes several hours.

For the children at Little Princes, the biggest effect of the bandhas was that school was closed. School closings were not the euphoric celebrations they were in America, where children pray for crippling snowstorms. Children in Nepal, while they would certainly rather be playing, actually enjoyed school. I attributed that to the fact that going to school was not the inevitable daily event that it was back in the States.

Even when there was no bandha, classes were frequently canceled at the public schools like the one the children attended. The school looked, from the outside, like an abandoned single-floor building, a long mud hut painted white on the outside with a tin roof and a broken slide outside. Teachers were paid almost nothing by the government, and thus had little incentive to even come to school. Chris, the German volunteer, worked in the public school two days a week, and was often asked to stand in for teachers who didn’t show up. If there were no volunteers and the teacher for the five-year-olds’ class was absent, one of the seven-year-olds was sent in to teach.

With frequent school closings, we had a responsibility to keep up the children’s education at the orphanage. This was probably a good thing. I saw one of Anish’s English homework assignments, where he had answered questions about pictures in a book, and the teacher had marked each question correct with a green checkmark, including one picture that showed a man realizing he had forgotten his umbrella at home. Anish’s sentence read: “Man housed umbrella.” I was pretty sure that was wrong.