Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

  “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.

  Chris, Jenny, Sandra, Farid, and I split the children into groups by age, and we each took a room. The children would rotate through our rooms and we would give them a thirty-minute class in a particular subject. Sandra would teach them basic French, Chris and Jenny would help them with reading, and Farid was going to help them not only with their writing skills but with their computer skills as well, using the ancient laptop in the office, one with a huge tracking ball that you rolled around to move the cursor.

  I had no idea what to teach them. But everybody else had chosen something and they were looking at me expectantly, and I heard myself blurting out that I would teach them science. Immediately after I said it, I regretted it. Science! My God, if there is something I know less about than science, I wouldn’t be able to name it.

  Thankfully, my first group was the youngest boys: Raju and Nuraj. That, at least, was easy. We played Farmyard Snap again. The first card they flipped over was a goat, and I got them to repeat the word. In the village there was real relevance in learning the English word for goat.

  “We no learn science, Conor Brother?” asked Raju.

  “Goats are science, Raju.”

  I saw Nuraj turn to him to ask for a translation, and Raju translated for him that goats were science. Nuraj nodded, and we got back to the game.

  Those thirty minutes passed far too quickly, and then a far bigger challenge presented itself. The bigger kids came in. This was trouble—they knew what science was. I once tried to help Bikash, the eldest boy, with his biology homework; he had asked me to explain the male and female parts of a flower.

  “Flowers don’t have male and female parts, Brother—that’s just animals,” I informed him.

  He looked confused. “Oh . . . but Conor Br
other, it says in my textbook that they have . . .” and he opened his textbook to a photo showing the anatomy of a flower, with male and female parts clearly labeled by authors who likely understood a thing or two about the subject.

  The boys came in saying “Bonjour, mon frère!” which they had learned from Sandra. Dawa, without preamble, read out loud the story he’d written in Farid’s class.

  “There was tiger in jungle and he eat Nishal’s goat. Finish.” He looked up at me expectantly. “You like, Brother?”

  “Yes I do, Dawa. Thank you for sharing that,” I said. I waited, hoping somebody else might have something to kill some more time. Nobody had any more stories—apparently they had collaborated on the story about the tiger eating Nishal’s goat.

  Unsure what to do, I asked them to sit down in a semicircle. I rearranged them thoughtfully, buying myself time as I thought frantically about something scientific I could tell them about. What did I know? I could tell them that rocket ships went to the Moon, provided they had no follow-up questions. That would take up about sixty seconds.

  “Okay, boys, so, you know how—” I began slowly, drawing out my words. Then, miraculously, I was interrupted by Santosh.

  “I teach, Brother!” he said, leaping to his feet.

  “Yes! You teach, Santosh!” I shouted, my arms shooting skyward in jubilation. “What would you like to teach?”

  “I teach water, Brother!”

  “Yes! Yes! Water! This is excellent, Santosh! Water is science! You are doing very well! Go!”

  I did not care what Santosh did at that point. He could have eaten paper and I would have cried “Behold! Science!” All that mattered was that all eyes were focused on him, not me, and that the clock was ticking.

  Santosh was incredibly bright. I had seen him invent toys for the other kids to play using only the bamboo shoots in the garden. When I needed to fix something in the house that was broken, I would ask Santosh how to do it. Even knowing that, I was blown away when he started talking. He taught the group about the water cycle, from start to finish, about the importance of evaporation and what causes dew, and how pollution affects the cycle. I was listening along with everybody else, thinking Really? I had no idea!

  The thirty minutes sped by, and I dismissed the class to general applause. The next group came in, the middle kids, the seven- and eight-year-olds.

  I waited for Santosh and the others to leave. Then I closed the door and again arranged the children in a semicircle.

  “Okay, everybody, today we’re going to learn about the water cycle!”

  The children cheered, and I silently thanked Santosh.

  The children were often surprisingly independent. Bedtime, however, was not one of those times. In one bedroom, the six youngest boys slept together in one king-sized bed on a thin straw mattress, just like the one I used. Getting each of the six children into bed presented its own challenge. Raju would recount his entire day in painstaking detail, oblivious to your efforts to get him to raise his arms so you could get his T-shirt off. Nuraj would stand completely still, head and eyelids drooping, and allow you to undress him and outfit him in a full teddy-bear suit. After struggling to get his legs and arms into the appropriate holes and triumphantly zipping it up from ankle to neck, his eyes would pop open like an android snapping to life and he’d yell “Toilet!!” and he’d start thrashing around like Houdini in a straitjacket while you picked him up and raced him to the bathroom.

  Evenings were a difficult time for Nishal, who was often sulking, if not outright wailing, about some injustice. Volunteers took turns comforting him, but I soon began taking care of Nishal every night. Sulking and wailing at bedtime was one of my defining traits when I was Nishal’s age. I needed constant attention, and I figured the quickest way to achieve it was by sulking. Now I struggled, as my parents must have, to find the right balance between being loving and being strict. It was strangely healing for me; I had never quite gotten over a sense of guilt for my childhood temper tantrums. My mother must have had the patience of . . . well, of a mom, I guess. Making sure Nishal went to bed, absorbing that energy from him, did wonders for both my patience and peace of mind.

  One by one we would round up the rest of the children and plop them into bed. When they were all lying down, covered with a large blanket with their little heads lined up in a row like a rack of bowling balls, we would give them all little hugs good night and turn off the lights, then head over to the bigger kids’ room.

  There were ten boys in the other room, two kids per double bed. (The two girls, Yangani and Priya, slept downstairs in a room with Bagwati, our live-in cooking didi.) I would come in to find Farid moving from bed to bed, getting one pair to lie down as the pair across the room popped up, a life-sized version of Whac-A-Mole. When the children saw me walk in they would leap up and yell “Conor!!” in the roar I had taught them on the first day, and I would assist Farid with the take-downs. Eventually the pairs of children would huddle together under the blanket for warmth; lights went out at 8:00 P.M. I heard them whisper for a few minutes before sleep took them. The house would fall silent for the first time all day. Then, each night, volunteers would gather in the living room, relax and drink tea, and tell stories about what the kids had done that day.

  I recalled times when I had listened to parents speak about their own children, laughing hysterically about seemingly inconsequential things their child had done. I was beginning to understand that sentiment. We took enormous pleasure in recounting something a particular child had done, at how predictable they were and yet how they could continue to surprise us. It made each day completely different, and, at the same time, exactly the same.

  I was woken up one night in early December by a loud groaning. It was coming from the boys’ room. I put on my head torch, which I kept near my bed, turned on the powerful beam, and ran into the boys’ room. I scanned the ten beds. I heard the groan again. I moved closer, stopping again to listen for the next sound, like a game of Marco Polo. It was coming from Dawa’s bed. I pulled back the covers to find Dawa drenched in sweat.

  “Dawa—what is it? What’s wrong?” I whispered frantically, my face just inches from his.

  “Eyes, Brother!” he pleaded, blinking.

  “Your eyes? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Your light, Conor Brother!”

  I was shining my high beam directly into his face. I turned it off and swept him up. He was shaking. I carried him to a spare bed in the volunteers’ room. As I put him down, more groans came from across the room. A moment later I saw Sandra dart into the room, straight for Santosh’s bed. She scooped up the groaning boy, who was clutching at his stomach, and carried him to another spare bed in the volunteers’ room. There was no way to go to a doctor at that time of night, not out here in the village. We sat up with them and soothed them until they finally fell back to sleep a couple of hours later.

  The next morning Farid and I took both boys to Patan Hospital in Kathmandu, a forty-five-minute bus ride from Godawari. Inside, we navigated the dense crowd. I kept my head up, looking helplessly at the signs in Sanskrit hoping for a clue as to where to go. I found the admissions desk, and told the woman on duty that we had two boys who needed to see a doctor. She called over a colleague who knew a few words of English, and we struggled to understand each other while an impatient line grew behind us.

  The hospital itself was a terrible place. It felt more like an abandoned bus station than a medical facility. Everywhere patients sat or lay down with wounds covered in dirty bandages. We were shuttled between various doctors and made to wait for several hours over the course of the morning. Farid had taken Dawa to another wing to get him checked out, while Santosh and I sat together. Other patients stared openly at us, looking back and forth from me to Santosh, back and forth, until slowly making the connection, and then smiled kindly at me.

  We were directed to yet another ro
om, where we were told to take a number and wait our turn. The number on the screen was six. I looked at the number on my piece of paper. Seventy-nine. Ten minutes later, the number on the screen changed to an eight.

  After having waited five hours just to get a number, I’d had about all I could take. I sat Santosh down in the recently vacated wooden chair. The doctor glanced up at me and did not ask to see my number. He set to work examining Santosh.

  After six hours in the hospital, nobody could find anything wrong with him, and he was released. We found Farid and Dawa waiting outside, holding a small bag of antibiotics for Dawa’s fever, and together we walked back to the bus that would take us the forty-five minutes back to Godawari.

  The more time I spent with the children, the more I got a sense of how I was going to survive these two months. The key to sanity, I discovered, was understanding that the children did not need to be supervised every second of every day. If Hriteek climbed the small tree in the garden and was hanging by his knees, for example, I told myself that he had probably been doing that before I got there, and that he still had all his teeth and limbs. When we went to the botanical gardens, the lovely enormous park next door, the kids climbed all kinds of trees, fished in the stream, and had sword fights with fallen branches. It was like hanging out with eighteen little Huckleberry Finns.