Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

  It was a hot day, and I regretted not bringing water. The rainy season had ended suddenly, almost overnight, and had left the dirt roads scarred by dried, caked tracks, imprints left by cars in the mud that would become permanent contours of the roads. I walked along the main path through one of the rice paddies. It ended in a T-junction. Left led toward the hills, right toward a cluster of mud homes. I went right.

  Two hours later, sweating and tired, I was unsure what I was doing. I had no strategy except to hope the little girl would be outside at exactly the right moment, standing in the exact path that I was walking on, exactly on this day on this morning, waiting for me to physically bump into her. I scanned the rice paddies and the paths and the homes and the main road. There was a chance she was here, and still, she was a needle in a haystack. How had I ever thought I could just show up in Thangkot and magically find her? I would need a platoon, knocking on every door and hoping they would give me a full census of their home.

  This was the first time I had searched—really searched—for the children on my own. If I doubted myself before, after the last two hours I felt pathetic, like an outright fraud for even trying. I took the path leading back to the main road and Godawari. I was going to find a way to make a difference for the kids in Nepal. Just not this way.

  Then I saw her.

  The little girl stood on the path, twenty feet ahead of me, staring at me. She wore an oversized boy’s shirt; her hair was long and tangled. In each hand she carried a beat-up two-liter plastic bottle, taken from the trash, used for collecting drinking water at the public tap.

  I didn’t move. Then slowly, I reached into my back pocket. I took out the worn, stained photo of the seven children, unfolded it, and studied it. The girl in the photo had a mischievous smile on her face; the girl in front of me was stone-faced. I walked to her, pausing between steps. Five feet from her, I squatted down. In basic Nepali, I asked her if she remembered me. She did not move, did not change her expression. I turned the photo around so she could see it. I saw her eyes drift across the faces, and stop at her own face, on the far right. I asked her again: Did she remember me?

  She nodded and tears welled up in her eyes. I took the bottles from her and laid them on the ground. I took her hand and led her up to the road. She followed without a word. We walked around and found a shop, a typical simple wood kiosk, with a telephone. I called Gyan Bahadur and told him I had found Amita.

  “You found her, Conor sir? How? Where was she?”

  “Thangkot, just on the path leading into a field,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Yes, that makes sense. Golkka’s wife—one of his wives—lives in Thangkot. Perhaps the girl was staying with her. And the other six? You found them also?”

  “No—only Amita. I didn’t go into the house, I didn’t even know where it was.”

  “Okay, Conor sir. No problem. Somebody from Umbrella will meet you at the tea shop at the intersection. I will come this afternoon with one man from my office. We see if the other children are there as well.”

  “That would be wonderful, Gyan—thank you.”

  “I am very happy for this, Conor sir.”

  An hour later a staff member of Umbrella came—I recognized him as one of the house managers; he recognized me because I was the only white guy for miles. I sent Amita with him in a taxi, and I waited for Gyan for the next two hours. He arrived with a younger man I had seen in his office. He swung himself off his motorcycle and walked quickly over to me and shook my hand, wearing a big smile.

  “You have done very well, Conor sir. Now you take the bus, go back to Godawari. We do not want risk Golkka or his wife seeing you, maybe recognizing you. We go and look ourselves. If the children are there, we will bring them back. Go now. Be happy,” he said, patting my shoulder and calling for his assistant to join him. They walked quickly down the dirt path and into the field.

  Back in Godawari, I received a phone call from Gyan.

  “I spoke to Viva and Jacky sir. Amita is safe with Umbrella, they take good care of her,” he said.

  “And the others? You found them?”

  “No—they were not in this house with the girl. But we do not give up, Conor sir.”

  I had so badly wanted him to say that he had found all seven children. But I also wanted to take that evening and relish our victory. It was the only one I had had. The first thing I did when I got off the phone with Gyan was to e-mail Liz. I told her what had happened. I even attached the photo I had taken of Amita on the path the moment I found her, standing on the road holding the two bottles, stone-faced. I told her that the little girl was now safe and sound at the Umbrella Foundation.

  Liz responded with an e-mail that read, simply, “Woooooo hoooooooo!!!!” Then, a few minutes later, she wrote, “Okay, sorry, had to get that out. That was an amazing photo—what a sweet, sweet little girl she is. I’m so glad she’s safe! What was it like to see her that first time?”

  I told her that the little girl’s appearance was so utterly unlikely that for a split second I thought I was hallucinating, or that God had plunked her down in front of me so that I couldn’t miss her.

  “I think I know what you mean,” Liz wrote back. I knew what she was referring to—Liz was a Christian. She had told me that early on in our conversations, when we were first learning about each other. This was the first reference to it she had made in any of our subsequent e-mails. “I know this is not how you see it, necessarily,” she wrote, “but I want you to know that I truly believe that God wants you to find these children.”

  It had been a long time since I had been friends with a Christian—not since I was a boy, really. I had spent many years living in Prague and Brussels, where my friends and acquaintences often equated American Christianity with crazy fundamentalism. But Liz and I were becoming fast friends, and I was grateful to be reminded about how absurd those fundamentalist stereotypes were. Liz’s faith was simply a part of her—the central part, perhaps, but a part nonetheless. I liked that she neither tried to persuade me of its veracity, nor did she shrink from it. I found myself wanting to learn more about her every time we wrote.

  Just three days later, the phone rang at Little Princes. Dawa, one of the older boys, ran all the way out to the field where I was playing soccer with the kids.

  “Conor Brother—there is call for you. A man says he must speak to you,” he panted.

  “Who is it?”

  “Nepali man, Brother.”

  It was Gyan; he was calling to tell me he had found four of the boys. I was ecstatic. I also was beginning to believe Liz—maybe we really were going to find all the children. I decided that night I would say a prayer of thanks.

  But Gyan hadn’t finished. There was bad news. Two of the boys—Navin, the oldest, and Dirgha, whose photo I had taken and shown to him so long ago—had been starved half to death. They had been rushed to the hospital.

  “I am very, very sorry, Conor sir,” said Gyan in a soft voice, “but the younger boy, Dirgha, will likely not live through the night.”

  The malnutrition ward of the Kathmandu hospital is a terrifying place for children on the verge of death. I arrived in the evening, and the doctor brought me to Dirgha. He was lying on a cot in the hallway. Navin sat at the foot of the bed, staring at the floor. He would not look up at me; or maybe he didn’t have the strength to. The doctor asked me to carry Dirgha, who had not woken up since he arrived at the hospital, to the only free bed in the ward. The boy was as light as a feather. The last time I had seen him, he was stubbornly pretending not to have fun playing catch with Amita and me. Seeing him like this, carrying him, unconscious, listening to the pessimism in the doctor’s voice, was almost unbearable.

  Navin stumbled beside me like a sleepwalker. He was the oldest of the seven, the commander in chief of the little band. Now he could barely walk. We entered a long room with many beds, each of them occupied e
xcept for the one at the end. The fluorescent lights, many of them broken, were flickering on as the sunlight faded from the room. The doctor pointed to the last remaining bed and indicated the two boys would have to share it. Then he left us alone with the other patients.

  Navin started to climb up on the bed when I pulled him back. A bloody syringe lay on the bed. I gingerly picked it up, holding it as far from Dirgha as I could, and looked around for a trash can. There was none. I dropped it on the floor and kicked it far under the bed. Then I laid Dirgha down on the unwashed sheets. Navin climbed in next to him.

  In the room were perhaps twenty beds in all, each one occupied by a single child with either a mother or a father lying next to the son or daughter, talking quietly, soothing their child. I examined my two boys. Dirgha was unconscious. Navin was glassy-eyed and starting to drift off. The boys were dangerously malnourished, in agony, confused. They surely did not remember my name. I was unable to communicate with them beyond basic phrases, unable to offer even the barest comfort. Nepal had taught me that children needed very little to survive. But, in this moment, possibly on the verge of the unthinkable happening, I felt woefully, embarrassingly inadequate: I could do nothing but sit on their bed and rest my hands on their feet.

  The doctor returned with instructions. I was to give the boys water mixed with dehydration salts every ten minutes when they were awake, and, if they were able to eat, a few biscuits. Waking Dirgha, though, proved difficult. I was only able to do it every few hours or so and only for a few minutes at a time. He refused the water, so I had to force him to drink. He would take a sip and immediately pass out again, his breathing shallow.

  Navin, though, seemed to get a bit stronger as the night went on. Sometime in the middle of the night, he awoke asking for food. I gave him a biscuit. Moments later, he got violently ill in a bucket next to the bed. I went to empty it when I saw that he had expelled a foot-long tapeworm. I dumped it all in the toilet—a hole in the floor—and went looking for a working sink so I could at least clean his face. There were no towels, so I soaked an extra T-shirt I had brought and carefully wiped him clean. He did not protest, but only stared at me as if he would never speak again. When he finally fell asleep, I sat on a short wooden stool and laid my head at the foot of the bed to try to nap.

  We passed another day and night like that. Around midafternoon, I took a break to get food. A kind mother in a bed nearby, who had been watching us with great interest for the past day, indicated with sign language that she would keep an eye on the boys. Walking back, carrying what passed for dinner—some fried food wrapped in newspaper that I had bought on the street—I couldn’t seem to work out how I had ended up here. Not just in Nepal, but in this hospital, with these kids. Nepal was supposed to be just a brief stop on a world tour. Or was it? I could not think of a single thing I would have done differently over the past year, even over the past several years. Each of those things had led me to this moment—to be walking back into a hospital that, in another life, I would have avoided like a structure fire. Returning to a ward that contained not even a single bar of soap, preparing to spend another night with two young boys whose language I did not speak, about to ingest some fantastically unsanitary food for dinner. This was where I belonged. That realization brought me immense comfort.

  On the second day Dirgha woke up. It was early in the morning, and I had fallen asleep at last, sitting on a wooden stool, head resting on the foot of the bed. I woke up only when the sun hit my face through the thin curtains. I felt the heat of it first, then sensed the translucent red of the back of my eyes, and opened them in a cautious squint. Dirgha was sitting upright, his back against the metal headboard of the hospital bed. His arms were skinny and hung loose at his side. He was watching me, stone-faced. But he was awake.

  The worst was over; the boys had survived. I brought them to the Umbrella Foundation by taxi. Viva had told me over the phone that the staff and older children would be waiting to take care of them. Sure enough, I was met at the door of one of the Umbrella children’s homes. This house had a small room that served as a nursing station, with two beds and a medicine cabinet. I was met, not by staff member, but by a singular fourteen-year-old boy named Jagrit.

  Jagrit was one of the more than 170 children at the Umbrella Foundation. I got to know dozens of these children in my time there. I tried not to play favorites, and I failed. I love Jagrit. He is exceptionally bright, and his English is amazing. But mostly he is a smart aleck. I have a weakness for smart alecks.

  The first time I ever visited Umbrella, I wandered into the children’s home where he lived to meet the kids. There were so many of them. I just stood and watched them running around the field outside the house. Jagrit walked up to me.

  “You are friend of Viva and Jacky sir, I think. I can give you a tour if you like, sir!” he said loudly. “What is your name?”

  “That sounds great. But don’t call me ‘sir’—my name is Conor,” I told him.

  “Okay, Conor! I am Jagrit. And I do not charge you anything, sir. But do not worry because this is going to be a very good tour. I am very entertaining,” he informed me.

  Jagrit turned out to be hilarious, smart, and well respected by the younger kids. He asked many questions about America and my family. I asked him where he was from.

  “I am from Humla, sir. I do not think you know Humla, not tourist place like Sagarmatha. Very few children at Umbrella from Humla. But it is very beautiful.”

  I told him that, as a matter of fact, I did know Humla. The kids at Little Princes were from that region, and they had told me all about it.

  “You are joking I think, sir! It is a good joke. I congratulate you.”

  “I’m not joking, Jagrit. I know it,” I said. “It’s in northwest Nepal. The largest village, the district headquarters, is called Simikot.”

  Jagrit was speechless for all of two seconds. “Okay, now I really will not charge you. I was going to charge you many thousands of rupees at the end of the tour, but now I will not.”

  This was a fairly typical exchange with Jagrit. The more time I spent at the Umbrella homes, the better we got to know each other. Usually we found ways to make fun of each other.

  “Today you are very fat, sir,” Jagrit would say when I came to Umbrella after being away for a few days. After a couple of months on a diet of daal bhat, I was pretty sure that I was significantly underweight.

  “Fat? Where are your glasses, Jagrit? Let me guess—you don’t wear them because you are trying to look pretty? For the girls?”

  “I use for reading! I do not need to see you so enormous! I hear you coming before I see you. I hear you ten minute before, walking down street like elephant.”

  When I arrived at Umbrella carrying Dirgha and walking slowly next to Navin, Jagrit was waiting at the front gate of one of the homes. Viva had told him the situation; he had been waiting for me for two hours. He said nothing, but took Navin’s hand and led him to one of the small beds in the nursing station.

  I followed him inside with Dirgha, laying the boy down on the other bed. Jagrit went to get water for the boys, then disappeared and returned with two boys about his age and two younger girls.

  “They watch boys, sir. If they need water or biscuits, they can fetch, no problem,” he said.

  “Okay, great,” I said, and turned to the four children who would be keeping a vigil over our boys. “Thank you—it’s very kind of you,” I said. The children smiled, thrilled at the idea that they were helping a grown-up.

  “Conor sir, you look very tired. You go sleep in my bed—it is the top bunk in the upstairs room,” he said. “It is very cozy bed, you see.”

  “It’s all right, Jagrit—I have a bed next door.”

  “What are the names of these boys?” he asked. I told him. He relayed the information to the other four.

  “Okay, no problem now, sir. You go. We take care,” sai
d Jagrit, and he gave me an affectionate push toward the door.

  I believed him. I went next door, to a tiny room with a bunk bed on the top floor of one of the children’s homes where volunteers could stay. I was asleep in minutes. Two hours later I came down to find Jagrit still there, but with four new children watching the boys. In a stack were dozens of hand-made get-well cards that the Umbrella kids had made for them. That image stayed with me: a beautiful six-year-old girl handing Dirgha a piece of paper with a clumsily painted blue flower hovering above the words “Get Well Soon,” clearly taught to them by Jagrit. That’s Nepal. Children take care of one another.

  Five of the seven children were now safely at the Umbrella children’s homes in Kathmandu. Two were still missing: Kumar, a boy of about nine, and Bishnu, the youngest. But there was more news. Gyan had located Kumar. I couldn’t believe our luck. The information came less than a week after we had rescued the other four boys. I was anxious to pick him up.

  It was too late to take the bus to Kathmandu that evening, but the next morning, I was on a minibus to the capital. I took it directly to Gyan’s office; I wanted to be with him when he got Kumar. I waited for him outside his office until he had finished with the parents standing at his desk, then I squeezed between the waiting parents and children to where I could catch Gyan’s eye. He said something to his assistant, then walked over to me. He took me by the arm and led me out into the dank hallway.

  “There is complication, Conor sir,” he told me. “Kumar is in Kathmandu, we found him in the Kalanky district. But he has been sold. He is servant.”

  “A servant? He’s nine years old—a servant to whom?”

  “That is complication.”

  I was accustomed to Nepalis speaking around issues. It often took extensive probing to reach the heart of the matter, especially if the topic was sensitive. I was not used to it with Gyan, though. He was trying to explain the situation in such a roundabout way that I finally interrupted him.