Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

  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.

  The 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.

  We 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.

  “How 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. “Con
or 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?”

  With 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).

  Farid spoke little about himself and his life in France before Nepal. But I knew that he was a foster child. I knew that he did not know his own father, an Algerian who had returned to his own country. I knew that he hoped, one day, to find him. He spoke of these things only in passing, as if he was protecting himself from thinking on it too deeply, from putting too much significance in the fact that he, a young man who had been given up as a child, had spent the last year of his life taking care of eighteen orphans on the other side of the world. So we stood on the roof, watching the village and describing, in dizzying detail, our favorite meals.

  From a distance, there was nothing unique about the woman walking toward the orphanage.

  Farid and I were on the roof. We all were; it was a Saturday afternoon, the floors inside were freshly mopped and would take an hour to dry properly. The children had used chalk to draw a hopscotch board and were lined up, each clutching a small stone. I saw her first, approaching from the path leading from the single paved road that connected Godawari to the rest of the world. That was strange. There was a bandha that day—no minibuses had been on the road. Wherever she had come from, she had walked.

  She came closer. There was something else strange about her. Women in the village often walked with their heads down, because either they were carrying a heavy load or they were intent on getting home. Not this woman. She walked slowly, her eyes fixed on the orphanage. I worried that she would trip on the uneven trail. As she got closer, I realized she was staring at the children. Stranger still, I saw that the children had stopped their game and were staring right back at her.

  She stopped outside the gate of the orphanage, not knocking, just standing calmly, waiting.

  Farid was in the middle of describing a dish his mother made for his birthday one year, when he realized I was staring past him. He turned to see what I was looking at.

  “Who is that wom—” he started, and stopped. He stared at her, then said, “Conor, I think I know who this woman is.”

  I saw what he saw. Unmistakably, in her distinctively angular features, her wide face, her Tibetan eyes, was a face that we had somehow seen before. On one of the Little Princes.

  This woman was Nuraj’s mother.

  Nuraj was frozen to the railing, hands gripping it tightly. Krish, his brother, had pushed through the other boys and put his arm around his little brother, but said nothing. Farid said nothing to the boys, but ran to the stairs leading down. I followed him, stopping only to pull Santosh aside.

  “Santosh, I want you and Bikash to keep the boys on the roof—you understand?”

  “I understand, Conor Brother,” he said. I hurried downstairs after Farid.

  Farid was already outside when I reached him. He had opened the gate and was facing the woman. She did not enter, but only murmured “Namaste,” putting the palms of her hands together. We returned the greeting, and continued to stare at the woman. Farid asked her, in Nepali, if she was here to see the children.

  Her head wobbled back and forth on her head. In the United States it was a gesture that signified uncertainty. In Nepal, it was an emphatic yes. I could not understand what she was saying to Farid, but two words needed no translation: “Nuraj” and “Krish.”

  We invited the woman inside and offered her tea; it was custom in Nepal to offer tea to any guest who crossed your threshold. I went to look for Hari, and found him in our small office downstairs, going over our weekly food budget.

  “Hari—we need you in the other room to translate for us. A woman just arrived—the mother of Nuraj and Krish. She’s here,” I said.

  Hari put down his pencil. “I do not think so, Conor Brother—their mother is dead.”

  “I know, but . . . you have to see this woman.”

  He pushed back his chair and followed me into the living room. Farid sat on a small stool, the mother sat on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her.

  Hari was right. This woman should be dead. We had been told as much by the children themselves. But there was no mistaking this woman. I saw it on Hari’s face as well when he greeted her; this was the boys’ mother. Hari pulled up a stool next to her and spoke quietly to her for a few minutes. Then he looked back at us.

  “Farid Brother, Conor Brother, this is the mother of Nuraj,” he said simply. “I can translate for you if you tell me what you would like to know.

  “Everything, Hari,” said Farid, leaning toward the mother. She would not meet his eyes. “We want to know everything.”

  That’s how we learned the full story of the children at Little Princes.

  Two years earlier, Nuraj’s mother, like so many mothers during Nepal’s civil war, feared for the lives of her children. Humla, all but cut off from the world, was fertile ground for the brutal Maoist takeover. Far from the reach of any police force or law, the Maoist rebels exiled the locally elected officials, promising a better life for the community under their rule. The impoverished villagers were left with little choice. Certainly they had no means of fighting back. Many even held out hope that the Maoists would keep their promise. The monarch was the root of their misery, they were told by the rebels, not the drought or isolation or severe underdevelopment. Everything would change now.

  But the Maoists had an army to build. They had to stay strong to protect the village from the royal oppressor, they said. They destroyed the bridges, making it all but impossible for the Royal Nepalese Army, recently mobilized against the rebel threat, to enter
the villages of southern Humla. The Maoists preached the tenets of communism. They put in place a law that said families had to provide food to the rebel army. Subsistence farmers gave freely at first, hoping their contribution from their scant reserves would suffice. But the army grew quickly, and with it the demand for food. Men were unable to feed their families, as everything was going to the Maoists. They asked the rebel leaders to leave them with enough for their children. Still the Maoists demanded more, but now at gunpoint. When they were refused, persuasion turned to threats that turned to beatings.

  And then just food was not enough. The Maoist rebels wanted more power, a bigger army. They asked for volunteers. Some joined out of belief for the cause, but many more joined out of fear and desperation. The rebels had already taken their food; it would be better to be on the strong side and at least be able to feed their families. When the pool of volunteers dried up, the Maoists made another law: each family would give one child to the rebel army. Maoist soldiers conscripted children as young as five years old to become fighters, cooks, porters, or messengers depending on the child’s age and ability. There was nowhere to hide. Children were taken from their mothers, disappearing into the rebellion.

  Then, one day, as if delivered by God, a man came to the village. The man was the brother of a former district leader, a powerful man in the region before the rebels took over. He could protect the children. He would take them far away from Humla to the last refuge in Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley. He would put them in boarding schools, where they would learn to read and write for the first time in their lives. The children would be fed and cared for. Most importantly, they could never be abducted by the rebel army. This man was Golkka.

  Nuraj’s mother and father begged him to take their children. It would be expensive, they understood, but they would pay anything. To raise the money, they sold their home and moved into single-room huts with their neighbors. They sold their land, their livestock. They borrowed from distant relatives. They would be going into debt for the rest of their lives, putting the rest of their family at risk, but it was worth every rupee to save their boys from the Maoist army. In villages throughout Humla, other parents were taking the same drastic steps to save their children.