Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

With their growing numbers and no effective counterforce, the rebel army grew stronger. Villages, then districts, then entire regions fell under Maoist control. In 2002 the Maoists dragged the Royal Nepalese Army into the conflict overnight with the bombing of an army barracks in western Nepal. Soon the Maoists controlled virtually the entire country, save the largest urban centers and the Kathmandu Valley. We were told again and again that it was simply not safe to travel in Maoist-controlled territory. Sandra’s destination, Rara Lake, was in Maoist territory.

  “It will be fine,” she assured me. “I will be careful. But there is more to it than just trekking. I am going to see if I can get some news of the children.”

  This got our attention.

  Mugu borders the region of Humla, where the children came from. Sandra believed that there was a chance she could visit the villages of one or two of the children to see if they had any surviving family members.

  “I should be back in three weeks,” she said. “Farid knows everything about how to run things here; if you have any questions you can ask him.”

  “The children will miss you,” said Chris.

  “The children, as always, will be fine,” she said with a smile.

  One week after Sandra left, I was in the nearby field playing soccer with the older boys when I saw Farid approaching, past the mud huts and down the path that bordered the wheat field until he reached the edge of our makeshift pitch. It was unusual for him to come out to the soccer games. He preferred to hang out with the kids in the house.

  “Santosh—I have to go for a minute,” I called to my teammate.

  “No, Brother! You go, they score!”

  “One minute, Santosh.”

  I went over and sat next to Farid, who was squatting down and picking apart a long straw of wheat. We sat in silence while Farid watched the game.

  “They are improving, I think,” he said by way of greeting.

  “They’ve been practicing. We set up the match between Little Princes and the other orphanage, the one in Matatirtha. They’re really looking forward to it,” I told him.

  We watched the match for a few minutes. I knew he hadn’t come to talk about the children’s soccer skills.

  “I just heard from Sandra,” he said finally, not taking his eyes off Nishal, who was yelling about some foul committed against him. “She will be home tonight.”

  “I thought she was coming back in three weeks?”

  Farid shook his head. “I think something is wrong—she said she would tell us about it tonight.”

  The children were thrilled to have Sandra home. They leaped on her before she could even take off her backpack. It reminded me of what I must have looked like to the other volunteers when I first arrived more than two months earlier, back when that swarm of children had terrified me. Sandra waved to us but spent the afternoon playing with the kids, ignoring our questioning looks.

  It was only after daal bhat that night, after the children went to bed and mugs of tea warmed our hands, that she told us the story of what had happened.

  Sandra and Narda, her guide and a native of Mugu, had set out toward Rara Lake. It was a three-day trek from where the bus had dropped them off, where the road had ended. They walked for two full days, stopping occasionally in villages to get water and make sure they were heading in the right direction.

  On the third day, two men walked toward them from up the trail. Even from a distance, their gait was different from the village farmers they were used to. They walked quickly, with purpose. Narda stood and quickly put on his backpack. He motioned to Sandra to do the same. The men were armed.

  The men stopped several yards from Narda and Sandra and leveled their guns. Sandra understood enough to know that they were being asked where they were going, and why they were there. Narda explained that they were trekking, heading for Rara Lake. They asked about Sandra. Narda called back that she was a French citizen, in the country helping children. The men grew angry at this response, as if Narda had insulted them. They yelled now. They demanded to know how they had known about the meeting. Narda said nothing, but translated in a low voice for Sandra. The men yelled again, repeating themselves. Narda called back, calmly, that they knew nothing of any meeting. They were looking for Rara Lake. They were very sorry if they had interrupted something, and they would be happy to go on their way.

  The men had no intention of letting them leave. Narda and Sandra were taken to a rebel-controlled village, put into a room, and made to wait several hours. Another man came in, a rebel who appeared to be of a higher rank than the other men, and interrogated Sandra. He told Narda that Sandra was tricking Narda, that she was a spy, using him. Narda could leave, the soldier said. He was a local, he could be trusted. Sandra would have to stay, they needed answers from her.

  Narda didn’t leave. They were left locked in the room for two days. Sandra would not admit to being a spy. The commander offered to let her buy her way out for two thousand dollars. It was an absurd sum. Sandra had only perhaps twenty dollars with her. That was unfortunate, they told her, and they left her alone again.

  Narda, who was allowed to come and go, spent his time speaking with the Maoists in the encampment for hours on end, explaining the situation over and over, why they came to this particular area, who Sandra was and what she was doing to help children. He was an annoyance to them, and was ordered to go back to his village. He refused to leave without her.

  After the third day, the rebels gave up. They had searched everything she had. They found no money and no evidence that she was a spy. Resources were scarce in this part of the country; Sandra and Narda had become two more people the rebels would have to feed and shelter. So they took anything they deemed valuable from her bag and sent the pair back into the forest, ill-equipped to continue their trek. They survived the difficult trip back to Kathmandu.

  “It was stupid to go,” she said, taking a final sip of her tea. None of us said a word. “This war, these Maoists—they are real. It is too easy to forget that.”

  She put down her cup and walked up the stairs to her bedroom, looking more tired than I had ever seen her.

  Santosh was sick again. I had never heard him cry before, and it scared me. The sobs of Nishal and Raju and the other young boys were common; their cries were for attention as much as anything else, and needed to be investigated only on the off chance that they were seriously hurt. They never were. But Santosh’s cries came from his bedroom, a place where he had hoped to stay undiscovered. Farid heard it first, and went upstairs to find Santosh in genuine pain. Sandra and I followed a few minutes later. We gave him some medicine from the first aid kit. When thirty minutes had passed with no change, we had a decision to make: Do we take him to the hospital? It was 6:00 P.M., and the last minibus to Kathmandu for the evening would leave soon. After that, there was no way into the city; soldiers began patrolling the Ring Road after nightfall to guard the capital against Maoist incursion. With the permanent curfew, very little could get in or out after the last bus had left Godawari.

  Santosh wasn’t getting any better. We quickly packed a small bag for him, threw in a few warm clothes for ourselves, and caught the last bus to Kathmandu’s Patan Hospital.

  The hospital was eerily quiet at 7:00 P.M. It was much different from my first trip there with Santosh, one month before. With the nationwide curfew, there were few visits after dark. We walked the empty hallways, looking for a doctor.

  I suddenly remembered when, as a small boy, I had contracted pneumonia and was severely ill. My father had to take me to the hospital in the middle of the night. I’d held his hand tightly as I walked through the quiet halls. I remembered how scared I was, and how completely I relied on my father that night to make everything better.

  As nervous as I felt now, in this strange Third World hospital, I realized that this was not the time for me to be afraid. I was the parent now. I saw how scared San
tosh was; he walked slowly and slouched over, wincing in pain. I gently lifted him up and carried him in my arms toward the pediatric ward.

  “You need to lose weight, Santosh. You’re getting very fat,” I whispered to the stick-thin boy in my arms.

  He smiled. “No, Brother—you are weak, like a girl,” he whispered back.

  A few minutes later, we found a doctor coming out of his office. He did a quick examination of Santosh, pressing on the boy’s chest, and determined there was indeed something wrong. He led us to the Constant Observation Room, where I laid Santosh on the last available bed. The other four were taken by mothers and their young children. Lying flat, Santosh’s feet touched the rusting metal at the foot of the bed.

  The doctor returned to take a blood sample. He struggled to find a vein in the poorly lit room, so I took out my flashlight and shone it on Santosh’s arm. A minute later, sample secured, he told us we could relax for the rest of the evening. The tests would be done the following day. Sandra and I would stay overnight with him, because the pediatric ward was hopelessly understaffed and they were unable to care for all the patients.

  The only sources of heat were three portable heaters, and the nurses had commandeered all three on the other side of the glass in the Constant Observation Room. Santosh was covered only by a thin blanket, so we dressed him in all the clothes we had brought for him, including his gloves and a jacket, and Sandra managed to find one more blanket. I put on two fleeces and still I was shivering.

  When Santosh was finally asleep, we pulled two wooden stools up to the bed, one on each side, and laid our heads on opposite sides of the foot of the bed. The relative height of the stool to the bed plus the bitter cold conspired to make sleeping a near impossibility. When a baby began wailing a few minutes later, Sandra raised her head, clearly exhausted.

  “Listen,” she whispered. “You try to find some blankets and a free bed somewhere. I will get into bed with Santosh.”

  “You must be joking—that bed barely fits him.”

  “I’ve slept in much worse, believe me.”

  After her story of being taken by the Maoists, it was easy to believe.

  I knocked on the window to ask the nurse about extra blankets. After a few tired denials that such blankets existed, I asked if I might, then, borrow just one of their heaters to bring into the room to help keep Santosh warm. She rolled her eyes, stepped over the row of three heaters, and motioned for me to follow her to a storeroom.

  “All we have is here,” she said. “Take what you want. Do not tell doctor I let you here.”

  The storeroom was almost bare. I took the only useful items I could find—a plastic hospital pillow and two tablecloths—and walked back to our bed. Sandra, sure enough, had managed to contort herself in beside Santosh.

  “Okay, I’m off,” I whispered.

  “Good—where?”

  “Uhh, not exactly sure—down the hall, I guess?”

  I didn’t tell her I had not yet found an extra bed. The nurse had given her reluctant permission to sleep in any spare bed I could find, provided I was up early and that nobody in the room noticed me. That was as good a deal as I was going to get that night. I wandered down the hall of the pediatric ward, my footsteps echoing. Every room was the same: overcrowded, unclean, without sinks or trash cans or any indication that it was being monitored by anybody but the patients inside.

  In a wing far, far away, I poked my head into a brightly lit room. There was a bed that had been recently vacated, judging by the fact that the sheets were unmade. Inside, several tired-looking Nepali women were breast-feeding babies. I stepped back out and looked at the sign on the door. I couldn’t read the Sanskrit, but the English translation below it gave me pause, even in my exhausted state. It read: MATERNITY WARD. I steeled myself, then strode in.

  The women’s eyes followed me as I made my way through the ward. Babies stopped nursing. The air was thick as water; time slowed down. I considered what these poor mothers who had just endured the trauma of childbirth must have been thinking, a young pale man marching in at 2:00 A.M. carrying two tablecloths and a hospital pillow, heading toward the only free bed in the room. But I was horribly cold and had no other options.

  Then, a stroke of luck: there was a sheet on the bed. It was bunched up and appeared to have been used, but it would provide one more layer against the cold. I took it by the corners and whipped it to straighten it out, as if I was laying a picnic blanket. As it settled back down, I saw the vast wet blood stain in the middle of the sheet. I gasped and flung the sheet away from me.

  I took a long moment to compose myself, then I put my backpack down, lay on the bed, draped the two tablecloths over me, and curled up to sleep in that bright, cold room. The room erupted in chatter. I had never been so grateful not to understand Nepali.

  I would leave Nepal two days later. My three months were almost up, and I had a plane ticket to Thailand. I said good-bye to Santosh the following morning. Farid had taken over and would stay with him. I would learn later that they never found out what had been wrong with him, but they had kept Santosh in the hospital for two more weeks as a precaution. Farid had lived there with him while Sandra returned to the orphanage to look after the children.

  That evening, I went into the boys’ bedroom to say good night to them for the last time. They had stopped bouncing around. They sat propped up, attentive, two to a bed, in the oversized second- and thirdhand T-shirts that served as their pajamas.

  “When you come back, Conor Brother?” asked Anish, a question that seemed to vacuum all other sound out of the room. They wanted to hear my reply.

  I was expecting that. We had been strongly advised by the CERV staff to be vague and conservative in our answers to this inevitable question. Few volunteers ever returned to Nepal; it was too far away and required too much time. Volunteering in an orphanage was a one-off, an experience that you would never forget and never repeat. The staff at CERV had learned it was better not to give the children false hope that volunteers would return, as it tended to deteriorate the trust given by the children to the next group of volunteers. The children were looked after by a constantly rotating set of parents, and they were becoming accustomed to it. The system was terribly flawed, but there were few alternatives.

  “I’m not sure, Anish, but I’ll definitely try to get back!” I said, upbeat. This provoked no response from the boys.

  “When, Brother?” Anish asked after an awkward silence.

  “Well, definitely not for at least a year,” I told him. “Remember I told you guys that I’m going on that big trip? I showed you on the globe?”

  “So after that, maybe, Brother?”

  “Maybe!” I said. They had heard this before. Some of the boys looked away, others lay down in their beds. Anish alone remained sitting on the edge of his bed. He asked the question again in a different way, then again. He asked more specifically what I planned to do at the end of the year, and whether I needed to return home, and whether I liked Godawari. I finally cut him off. “I’m not really sure, Anish. But I’ll see you in the morning, okay, boys?”

  “Okay, Brother,” came the chorus. Anish lay down. I switched off the light.

  In my room, I pulled my backpack out from under my bed, and took a pile of T-shirts off a shelf, laying them flat in my bag. And I broke down. The emotion caught me off guard. I hadn’t cried in years, and I was really sobbing. I was happy in Godawari. But there’s nothing here, I told myself through jerking breaths. You eat rice every day. You never go out. You never meet any women. You have not seen a movie or TV in months. You have to take care of eighteen children. You are constantly dirty and always cold.

  I imagined my mom at the airport, saying good-bye to me each time I returned to Prague after spending Christmas in America. She would cry into my shoulder, sobbing like I was right now. I had always wondered where that sadness came from; leaving had
never seemed like a big deal to me. And now here it was, that same desperate sadness, filling this very room.

  If walking into the responsibility of caring for eighteen children was difficult, walking out on that responsibility was almost impossible. The children had become a constant presence, little spinning tops that splattered joy on everyone they bumped into. I would miss that, of course. But the deeper sadness, the deluge of emotion, came from admitting that I was walking out on them. The children, as always, will be fine, Sandra had said. She could have said the same thing to my mom at the airport. I knew she was right. But I could not leave this house unsure whether or not I would ever return. I just wasn’t going to do it. Despite myself, I had become a parent to these kids—not because I was qualified, but because I had showed up.

  I went back into the big boys’ room. They were talking quietly in the dark.

  “Conor Brother!” I recognized Anish’s hoarse whisper. Dark shapes popped up in bed and whispered my name.

  “Boys—I’ll come back in one year, okay?” I whispered.

  “Okay, Brother!”

  “Good night, boys.”

  “Good night, Conor Brother!”

  I left Little Princes with a traditional Nepali leaving ceremony. Farid had come back from the hospital for a few hours to see me off with the other volunteers. The children, one by one, placed a red tikka on my forehead, gave me flowers, and bade me a safe journey. As each of the eighteen children approached, each asked if it was true that I was coming back next year. I confirmed it again and again. Some of the volunteers looked skeptical. Farid only smiled.

  I meant it. I would be back for them.

  Part II

  AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK

  January 2005-January 2006

  Two

  I arrived in Bangkok on a warm night in mid-January 2005. My flight was almost empty of tourists. Just three weeks earlier, the tsunami watched around the world had shredded the west coast of Thailand, wiping hotels off picturesque beaches at the height of tourist season. I would be meeting up with Glenn Spicker, a close friend from my years living in Prague. (His nickname, Little Glenn, came from the fact he is only about five foot eight, though he packs more energy per square inch than a white dwarf star.) When the news broke about the tsunami’s devastation, we contemplated canceling our trip, but decided that the best thing we could do for the country would be to visit and spend money there.