Little Princes (9 page)

I put the kind of potato to one side and picked up the other object on the plate, which looked like a ball of dried dung covered in sesame seeds. This, according to the children, was a “treat.” Nepali treats are to be feared. I learned that the previous year when I purchased, at the urging of the children, a drink box called Drinking Jelly. (Drinking Jelly is not a treat, for the curious among you. Drinking Jelly tastes like you are drinking jelly.) The sesame dung was a step down on the horrendous scale. It was sticky on the outside and tasted as what I imagine sugar-free soy chocolate might taste like if it had fallen in tar, fossilized, and been dug up millions of years later by hungry scientists.

After our morning visit to the temple, we returned to the house to find Bagwati, our cooking
didi,
standing on the front porch, wielding a jar of cooking oil. Something about this made me nervous. I kept several feet back as the children marched past me. I asked her what she was planning on doing with the cooking oil.

“Cooking oil, Brother!” she said, pouring some in her hands.

“Yes, oil . . . I know, I was wondering why you have it—” I didn’t finish my sentence. She had snagged Raju like a bear snatching a salmon, and was pulling off his T-shirt in one practiced motion. Suddenly she was rubbing him all over with cooking oil, all over his skin and scrubbing it in his hair like it was conditioner. The other children, squeaky clean from washing in the temple, were merrily stripping down to their skivvies and dousing each other with the oil from the jar, rubbing it on one another’s backs and arms.

Nishal ran toward me, glistening like an oil slick, hands cupped with oil. I saw him too late. I tried to run but slipped on a stray flip-flop. Nishal grabbed my arm and slathered me with oil.

“Nishal!”

“For festival, Brother!”

When one is not able to shower every day, one has, at best, mixed feelings about getting smothered in cooking oil. But a festival was a festival.

I
fell back into village life. I became closer with the children. The older boys stayed up later than they had the previous year, and they wanted to hear about life in America, and to share their memories from their home region of Humla. They asked me about things they had learned in school: airplanes, Michael Jordan, American football, the fastest cars, Australia, whales, World War II, electricity, and so on. They never believed me about the Moon, that men had walked on it, or about the size of the ocean. One afternoon I took them up to the roof terrace, from where you could see for several miles.

“Now imagine water as far as you can see, and as deep as the tops of the Himalaya, there in the distance,” I told the boys.

In unison: “Waaaaow!” For days afterward, they asked me to confirm it.

“Water would go from Godawari to Kathmandu, yes, Brother?” Anish would ask.

“No, it farther, yes, Brother?” Santosh would say. “You say many many farther!”

“Here to Kathmandu is only ten kilometers, right, Anish?”

“I don’t know, Brother.”

“It is, trust me. So the ocean, the biggest one, is called the Pacific, and it would be like going to Kathmandu and back here one thousand times.”

“Waaaaaow!”

I loved the children at Little Princes. I hadn’t realized how very much I had missed them for the last twelve months until that day.

I watched Farid with the children. He had spent almost twelve months with them, alone for much of that time, though Sandra had visited twice during that year. With only one volunteer, as opposed to the four they had had the previous year, the children had grown more independent. I watched Nishal chase Hriteek across the roof terrace, then trip and tumble head over heels. Miraculously, he leaped up again and continued the chase. A year ago, Nishal would have sat there crying until a volunteer came to pick him up. Anish, who had often helped with washing pots, above and beyond his nightly chores, now spent more time with Nanu, our washing
didi,
helping her with the laundry, as they beat the clothes against the concrete and wrung them out, one twisting in one direction, the other twisting in the other. Priya, Raju’s seven-year-old sister, was learning to cook together with Bagwati, watching her make daal bhat, helping pour in the spices.

Farid didn’t coddle the children. He treated them as his own brothers and sisters. Like a good brother, he had practiced carrom board enough to beat the older boys. There was not much else to do in the village. Most volunteers would let the children win at whatever they played. Not Farid. He played in earnest and called them out when they broke the rules.

“No, Dawa!” he would cry. “You are a cheating boy! I see you cheating!”

The boys loved playing with Farid. He understood them better than anyone. They also knew Farid hated spiders, really hated them, so every time the boys saw one in the woods, the enormous green ones that live in the trees in Nepal, they would call Farid over to them, pretending they had a secret to tell him.

“I am not falling for that trick with the spider, Santosh. I am not stupid, you know!” He pronounced it stu-
peed
.

“Just come, Farid Brother!”

“If I come there I am going to make you eat that spider—you know that, Santosh? You know that you will have to eat that spider, yes?” The boys would fall over laughing at that. Though I never admitted it to Farid, I would encourage the children at every opportunity to try to get Farid to touch a spider. It was endlessly entertaining.

T
he civil war in Nepal had gotten worse during the year I was away. Just after I left for the first time in early 2005, King Gyanendra had seized absolute power over the country, dissolving the parliament. The move, intended to crush the Maoist rebellion once and for all, was initially popular with the people, proving just how desperate Nepalis were for an end to the fighting. The Nepali royal family was not, after all, known for its stability.

Four years earlier, in an incident that made international headlines, King Gyanendra’s predecessor, King Birendra, was murdered, along with the queen and most of the royal family, by his own son, Crown Prince Dipendra. The prince, apparently displeased with his father’s refusal to approve the prince’s intended future bride, opened fire with an automatic weapon at the dinner table, ultimately killing nine members of the royal family and injuring five before turning the gun on himself. But his suicide attempt failed, and he lapsed into a coma caused by his severe head wound.

Then, in what can only be described as an astonishingly rigid adherence to the succession of power, Prince Dipendra, mass murderer and now in a vegetative state thanks to his failed suicide, was crowned king of Nepal.

The prince died three days later, never waking from his coma. Gyanendra, uncle to Dipendra, third in line for the monarchy, ascended to the throne. Along with divine authority to rule, the new king inherited the civil war.

But the war looked to be ending in the fall of 2005, when the Maoists declared a ceasefire. It happened as I was getting ready to return to Nepal.

“See? Totally safe!” I think were my words, flapping the newspaper triumphantly for my parents.

What I did not point out to them was that King Gyanendra rejected the ceasefire almost immediately. He wanted unconditional surrender, despite the fact that the citizens of Nepal were desperate for an end to the war. The king ordered the Royal Nepalese Army to increase its attacks on the rebels. In response, the Maoists began attacking targets in the Kathmandu Valley, home to the country’s capital, and the village of Godawari, where Little Princes was located.

The war would continue.

W
e felt the effects of the conflict in Godawari, though the bombings never got closer than five miles away. On my trips from the village to Kathmandu, I was now forced to clear a military checkpoint in both directions. The minibus would be stopped, and I and the rest of the passengers were forced to disembark and submit to a search by soldiers. The minibus itself would then also be searched for bombs. The road from Godawari, from the southern point of the Kathmandu Valley, was a potential entry point for the rebels, and bombings had become more frequent. At the intersection where the village road met Kathmandu’s Ring Road, a tank guarded the southern entrance to the capital.

The older boys at Little Princes now sat with the newspaper every morning, reading news of the increased killings around the country. There were more every day; soldiers killing rebels, rebels killing police, rebels killing civilians, rebels destroying homes, and so on. Punishment for breaking the strikes was becoming more severe. We read of taxi drivers caught driving during the bandha who were executed in their cars.

Virtually all western governments urged travelers to defer all nonessential travel to Nepal due to the instability. Farid and I had been expecting a new French volunteer named Cecile to join us in January. We assured her that Godawari was safe, but advised that she had to follow her instincts. Just three days after Farid had written her an e-mail, eighty-five children were abducted from a school in western Nepal. The Maoist rebels simply walked into the school, murdered the teachers, and walked out with seven dozen new conscripts for their army. Farid read this article aloud to me, translating from a French newswire. He concluded and looked back up at me.

“I think Cecile will not come,” he said, shaking his head. “And I cannot blame her.”

Cecile canceled her trip three days later.

Even in the face of increasing carnage inflicted on that beautiful country, Farid and I had felt that the children were safest there in Godawari at the Little Princes orphanage. There were no military or other strategic targets in Godawari, after all, and there had never been an abduction inside the Kathmandu Valley. Besides, nobody even knew Little Princes existed.

Or so we thought.

“H
ow certain are you, Hari? It’s a rumor, or you know it for sure?”

Farid and I were sitting on the roof. The sun had only just risen over the hills—most of Godawari was still in the shade, covered by a frosty dew. Hari, our house manager, had come over early, saying he needed to speak to us urgently.

He ran his finger nervously around the rim of his metal tea cup. “It is only what I hear, Conor Brother. Maybe it is rumor. But it is possible that the Maoists have found us here. I am sorry, I cannot say for certain,” he said.

Hari’s message was serious. The children at Little Princes were potential Maoist recruits. He had met the brother of Golkka, the child trafficker, who had recently come from Humla. The brother said that the Maoists had learned of his scheme to take children from Humla, and that the rebels were furious. Each family was expected to give one child to the rebel army to join the fight against the king. They had found Golkka’s brother and given him a message to pass on to anybody protecting Humli children in Kathmandu: the children were to be returned to Humla. Immediately.

The rumor was even more alarming. Hari had heard that the Maoists knew of Little Princes. They knew where it was and how many children were there. And the Maoists wanted them.

Farid and I did not look at each other. We could hear the children downstairs, getting ready for school.

“What do you think?” I asked Farid, breaking the silence.

“I do not know,” Farid said. He looked at Hari. “What is your opinion, Hari? Is there something we should do? You think it is true? They know where we are?”

Hari hesitated, clearing his throat a couple of times before speaking. “Farid Brother, I think you and Conor Brother maybe think about leaving Nepal. It is not very safe here. If Maoists come, you can do nothing anyway—they have guns, they take the children. Maybe better you are with your own families. We can take care of children here, me, Bagwati, Nanu—we have done it before, it is okay, no problem for us,” he said. He did not make eye contact with us.

“No, Hari. Thank you, I understand why you’re saying that, but we will stay here as long as we can,” I said, looking to Farid, who was nodding his head. “But what do
you
think, Hari—your own opinion. There is no right or wrong. Do you think they would come for the children?”

Hari waited a long time before answering. He usually tried to give the answers he thought we wanted to hear. I saw him wrestling with this instinct now. “Conor Brother, I tell you my opinion. It is only my opinion, I do not know,” he said slowly. “In my opinion, we are safe here. Maoists will never take risk here in Kathmandu Valley—too much risk for them, too much easy opportunity outside Kathmandu.”

Farid turned to me. “I believe this also, Conor. I think the children are safe here.”

I trusted their instincts. “Okay, then,” I said, getting up. “Let’s get the kids ready for school—they’re running a bit late, no?”

W
ith the increasing frequency of the bandhas, the children often stayed home from school. Farid and I rarely left the orphanage. That meant a lot of time on the roof. Godawari was at a slightly higher altitude than the capital, but even in February it was still warm during the day, provided you stayed in direct sunlight. The winter in Kathmandu, lasting from December to February, brought temperatures ranging from forty to fifty degrees Fahrenheit during the day. After that it got progressively warmer until August, when temperatures reached into the seventies before gradually cooling. With virtually no artificial heating or air-conditioning indoors, one was sensitive to even slight changes in temperature.

The flat roofs that topped every home in Nepal served an important purpose for precisely that reason. Families spent more time on their roofs than inside their homes, at least during the day. Clothes were laid flat to dry on roofs; wheat was stacked and stored there. Little Princes was no different, except that a low wall ran the perimeter of the roof terrace to prevent falls. With the exception of the rainy season, which blasted Nepal from early June to late September, the children practically lived on the roof.

The broad roof of the orphanage provided us with an ideal lookout post. We could keep an eye on the children with us, see down into the garden, and even over to the nearby field where the children played soccer, dodging and weaving between grazing cows. We leaned against the railing and drank milk tea and spoke, mostly, about Nepal, undistracted by Nuraj and Raju using us as a kind of jungle gym. When we weren’t talking about Nepal, we were talking about food. Farid missed French food like a prisoner misses sunlight, though he had never in his life been anything but skinny. He could hold forth on the different types of
saucisson,
dried sausage, for literally an entire hour—the best regions for it, the best ingredients, the kind of bread that should accompany it (
un boule
) and the one meal he would have if he could have anything at that precise moment (
saucission,
boule,
and as many French fries as would fit in the room).