Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

  “So he just twangs the cotton, and that makes it all fluffy again?” Liz wrote. “What’s the physics behind that?”

  “I have no clue. Maybe it has to do with the revitalizing property of the metallic vibrations?” I offered.

  “Yeah . . . I’m not a physicist or anything, but that doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “No, me neither. But it sounded smart, right?”

  “A little, I guess,” she wrote. “You should have said you were quoting it from an article, like from Scientific American. That would have sounded smart.”

  “Right. Next time.”

  Dhaulagiri House (we named it after one of the highest mountains in the Himalaya) was finally ready. Farid and I made up the beds ourselves, eliciting giggles from the local women helping us. When the last sheets had been laid, Farid and I went outside and then walked back in, to get the full effect of the house. I walked slowly from room to room. It was beautiful. Farid had put a tremendous amount of work into it, having done most of the calculating of what we needed and most of the shopping. When it was done, there was something magical about it, as if we had managed to close our eyes and wish hard enough for a home for twenty-five children. And suddenly here it was, under our feet, surrounding us, pristine, unmarked by a single footprint or smudge on the wall. This would change soon enough. But at that moment, it was still fresh, like the perfect gift still in its original packaging. And we had created it.

  Farid and I walked back outside. Farid had a wide grin on his face.

  “Conor, would you mind if I went to get them?” he said. He had been looking forward to this moment for many months. The moment was here, and I felt it belonged to Farid.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  Farid went around to the neighboring children’s homes and gathered up Kumar, Amita, Dirgha, Navin, Madan, and Samir. He brought them back to the front gate of the house where I was waiting for them. I lined them up, shoulder to shoulder, and Farid and I stood in front of them.

  “You have been inside this house?” Farid asked them.

  They shook their heads vigorously. “No, Brother—no, promise, Brother!” I realized, as did Farid by the look on his face, that the six children were afraid they had done something wrong. In their short life experience, that meant getting beaten.

  Farid walked to the wooden front door, exquisitely carved with the story of the Buddha. He swung the door open and turned back to the children.

  “This is yours. This is your new home,” he said.

  They didn’t move. They must have thought it a game, or a test, or something else that they couldn’t yet work out. Navin, back to being the man in charge after his stay in the hospital, finally pushed past the others and walked inside. The other five slowly followed him. Nobody touched anything. They peeked into the living room. They congregated near the front door, a couple of them smiling nervously. Samir, six years old, tugged on my pants and asked, in Nepali, whose house this was. The other children stared at me. Everybody was smiling now, waiting for the punch line of this little adventure.

  “Brother, Farid already told you. This is your house.”

  “Our house?”

  “Your house.”

  A pause.

  “Our house?”

  “Yes, your house.”

  “We sleep here?”

  “Your beds are upstairs.”

  Another pause.

  “We can see?” Kumar asked, hesitantly, worried about looking foolish.

  “Yes, you can go see,” I said.

  Nobody wanted to be the first, but the second Navin put one foot on the first step, Kumar ran past him, up three steps, bolder. Suddenly they were racing, falling over each other to get upstairs first. Even Dirgha, his usual stubborn self, held back only for a few seconds before sprinting after them. It was gratifying to see him run like that, fully recovered from his battle in the malnutrition ward.

  Farid and I wandered back outside. We could hear shrieks and squeals of delight. The children popped their heads out of windows and reappeared on balconies and called from the roof, asking if this was really their house. We called back that yes, it was really their house.

  Then a blur of the six children streamed past us, running out the front door and into the Umbrella house next door where they had lived for the past few weeks. Less than five minutes later they stormed back into their new house, carrying one armful of clothing each—their only possessions—and sprinting back up the stairs.

  We followed to find them setting up in the front bedroom, where the beds were made up. “You sleep here, this bed, Brother?” asked Samir, pointing to the seventh, empty bed.

  Kumar answered. “No—for Bishnu, yes, Brother?”

  I was surprised. I hadn’t spoken to them about Bishnu. I wasn’t even sure they remembered him. He had disappeared nine months earlier; that was an eternity for children their age.

  “Yes, it’s for Bishnu,” I told them. Farid came in and said it was time for sleep. They climbed into their selected beds and we turned off the lights and went back downstairs.

  The apartment I went to see had three bedrooms and a brand-new smell to it, as distinctive as a new car. Walking down the long corridor, my footsteps echoed off the long slabs of marble. It was absurd. Not that the rent was so bad—I could afford it—but it was just so big. A Nepali family would squeeze about nine generations into that place. As was typical, there was no heating system, very limited hot water, no fridge, no oven, no microwave, and the shower was just a showerhead in the middle of the bathroom that drained out the floor.

  The owner followed me down the hall. I dramatically paused halfway down the corridor to catch my breath. He laughed.

  “Yes, very big, sir. Very good for sir’s whole family. And very much marble,” he said proudly, pointing at some marble.

  “It’s actually too big—I’m not married. But thank you for showing me,” I told him.

  He stopped in his tracks. “No wife?’

  “No, no wife.”

  “You have girlfriend?”

  “No, no girlfriend.”

  “You are a gay man?”

  This was the obvious conclusion in Nepal, I supposed.

  “Gay? No, I’m not gay—I’m just not interested in a relationship. I am very busy taking care of these children, as I mentioned earlier. I don’t have so much free time, I’m afraid.”

  “You had girlfriend recently?”

  Was this conversation really happening? “No, not really, no, not since . . . uh . . .” I thought about that, and found myself counting not weeks or months, but years. “I’m not sure. I think 2003? 2004, maybe?”

  “2003? The year 2003?” he asked, incredulous.

  I remembered that Nepal was on a different calendar than we were. It was something like 2066 here. “No, American 2003. Maybe three years ago.”

  He nodded and squinted at me. “You must find a wife and start making children very soon. You can live here. I give you good price,” he said. “You need this apartment.”

  I laughed at that, and kept on walking through the apartment. I reached the back bedroom. It was wonderfully bright, with windows on two walls. I opened one of them and leaned out, taking in the fields. It was strange to see such fields right in the middle of Kathmandu. It would all be overrun soon enough. I was about to tell him no thanks again. I had told the children I would be over at Dhaulagiri by now.

  Then I saw it, across the field. Less than one hundred yards away, the back of a tall, yellow house. It was Dhaulagiri. I hadn’t noticed that this apartment was so close, because it was not connected by any direct route to this building; getting there required a roundabout route via high-walled paths. But there it was, so close that I could see two of the children—Samir and Dirgha, it looked like—playing on the rooftop terrace.

  I turned back to the owner. />
  “You’re right,” I told him. “I do need this apartment.”

  I spent my first night in the apartment five days later. It was freezing. Despite the cozy feel of several acres of marble, I could see my breath. Since I was used to living in cramped quarters and, in fact, felt more comfortable that way, I set up camp in one room, with a small desk, an Internet cable connecting my computer directly to a telephone wire outside of my window, and a mattress on the floor with the thickest blanket they would make for me. On the bright side—and this was a very bright side indeed—I had indoor plumbing.

  Best of all, my balcony overlooked one of the largest and most important Buddhist stupas in all of Nepal: Swayambhu, draped in colorful Buddhist prayer flags. The stupa, or Buddhist shrine, looked a bit like a white upside-down funnel. It was known in most guidebooks as the Monkey Temple, named by the hippies who had come in the 1960s for the hundreds of monkeys running around the neighborhood. I would watch them as they leaped across rooftops and I would chase them away when I saw them hanging off my Internet cable line. They often brought it down with them, cutting off my connection to the outside world.

  Like any good tourist, I had visited the Monkey Temple during my first trip to Nepal. I had never seen so many of the little beasts in my life. They were small and light tan in color. The smaller ones were like large, nimble cats; the larger ones, though, were the size of toddlers—toddlers who could run up the side of a house and chew through wire. They were enthralling.

  Sharing a neighborhood with them, however, was a different story. I quickly developed a love-hate-hate-really-hate relationship with the monkeys. I loved watching them. They were so human, yet moved with impossible grace and agility. Other days, though, I would go out on my balcony to have a peaceful lunch away from my computer; I would step away for an instant to get a drink and come back to find that same agile, graceful monkey tightrope walking across a telephone wire with an egg salad sandwich in one hand and a fistful of potato chips in the other. I told Viva, who had fifteen years of monkey stories, about the sandwich-stealing monkey, and how I had felt like challenging it to a fistfight. “Listen, no joke, Conor—you fight a monkey, you better mean it,” and related a cautionary tale that would make anyone think twice before fighting a monkey.

  The neighborhood was, however, usually very peaceful, at least when the monkeys were not engaged in lunch piracy or hand-to-hand combat. Tibetan Buddhists, a common Diaspora in Nepal, were inclined to live as close to the stupa as possible, which meant I lived next door to a monastery. The deep bells rang just after dawn every day. In America, it would have driven me to the brink of insanity; here, it was my alarm clock.

  When I was feeling particularly motivated, I would join a river of maroon robes, the low-chanting Buddhist monks, as they circled the massive stupa clockwise every morning at sunrise, spinning the hundreds of prayer wheels, the shape of large soda cans, mounted on the exterior walls of the temple. They may have originally been red, but the paint had been worn away with the touch of thousands of hands, hands that touched the Sanskrit topography on the metal wheels. It took a good twenty-five minutes to complete the circle. Branching out from the stupa there were few roads, only narrow paths weaving between the houses, patrolled by the monkeys and stray dogs and men carrying rusty scales attached to old bicycles, offering to trade an equal weight of potatoes for scrap metal. It was not far from the backpacker district of Thamel, but it felt a world away.

  I described all of this in great detail for Liz. I wanted her to be able to picture exactly where I was.

  “That’s so great that you found a place so close to the kids!” she wrote.

  “I know—that’s why I took it.”

  “It does kind of sound like a mausoleum, though,” she pointed out. “Like you should be sharing it with a dead dictator or something.”

  “I’ve got two extra bedrooms. I could throw him in one of those. Maybe hold daily viewings, charge a few rupees,” I suggested.

  “I’d pay that.”

  I found myself hoping that Liz noticed the similarities in our senses of humor, and that she was laughing at my jokes from nine thousand miles away.

  A month earlier, I had asked her why she had chosen India. Secretly, I hoped she would respond with “No reason! Why, are there any other good countries near India? Because it makes no difference to me at all.” But she didn’t. Instead, she talked about how inspired she was by Mother Teresa, by the nun’s compassion, her faith, her selflessness. She wanted to see where she had lived and worked. It made sense. Unfortunately.

  Liz and I had been writing for seven weeks. She would be flying to India in a month. If I didn’t say something now, I would lose any opportunity to meet her. But I could not bring myself to invite her to Nepal. It felt so forward, somehow. How easy it had been to meet women in bars, women that barely spoke my language. Yet with the one girl I wanted to meet, I was paralyzed with embarrassment to ask her to visit. So I began to drop hints that she should really visit Nepal.

  “You know, I remember when I came from India to Nepal the first time,” I wrote. “Such a short and inexpensive flight from Delhi!” Another time I described the neighborhood, concluding with: “But it’s too difficult to explain over e-mail—you really have to see it for yourself, in person, to appreciate its beauty.” She assured me that, by the way I described it, she felt as if she had already been there. Which, frankly, didn’t help me at all.

  My apartment, the mausoleum, gave me an idea. I found an excuse to e-mail her about it again, and lingered on the fact that there were three separate, distinct bedrooms, each one with a door and a lock, and how great it would be to have guests. I mentioned that two of my college friends, Kelly Caylor, and his wife, Beth, fellow University of Virginia grads just like us, were coming over Christmas break. I talked about how much fun it would be, in theory, of course, ha ha ha, if we all got together. She said that did sound like fun, and then changed the topic.

  When we opened the children’s home, I got the sense that her attitude was changing, that she was thinking more seriously about visiting. Every day I told her more stories of the six little kids in that big house. A week after we had opened the house, I gathered up my courage and wrote to her. I suggested, ever so gently, that, if she had time, only if she had a couple of days free and nothing to do, if she wanted to, she was very welcome to come visit Kathmandu and meet the children. Only if she was bored in India. Or whatever.

  Her response blinked into my inbox. I went out on the balcony. I came back in. I got a glass of water. I walked back to my computer. I clicked on her reply.

  “You know, I would really love that. I would love to meet the little ones, they sound amazing,” she wrote. “And I bet I could get them to pile up on you so that you couldn’t move. That would be fun to watch. . . .”

  I made myself wait fifteen minutes before responding, then wrote something along the lines of, “Yes, they’re amazing! And they love pileups! Come visit!” which I deleted before sending because it sounded too eager. I changed it to: “That would be wonderful—you’ll love them. I’ll look forward to it!” Those two sentences must have taken me another twenty minutes, trying to get the tone just right.

  Liz was coming to visit. For the rest of the afternoon, I couldn’t stop smiling. At least until I realized, in a panic, I had to see the carpenter, the one who made bed frames, immediately. And the sheet-maker. And the blanket-smith. And the pillow-constructor. The other two bedrooms in my apartment were completely bare. Aside from my bed and my computer, I had almost nothing. But I would fix that. I was expecting visitors.

  Part IV

  INTO THE MOUNTAINS

  November 2006-December 2006

  Five

  Farid and I both lived in Kathmandu now. I had my apartment, and Farid had taken a small room—a former pantry, judging by the size—on the ground floor of Dhaulagiri House, where he would be the house
manager, looking after the kids. He wanted to live in the house for at least a few months to keep a close eye on the kids, day and night. I offered him one of the bedrooms in my apartment. I was lonely there. Except for being icy cold at night, it didn’t feel much like the Nepal I was used to back at Little Princes. Farid laughed at my suggestion.

  “I could never live in this place that you live, Conor,” he said. “It is far too big! It is like a cathedral! It is not homey!”

  I agreed with him there. The apartment was wonderful in that it was located close to Dhaulagiri House, but I would never feel comfortable there. I had always loved living at Little Princes Children’s Home, but Dhaulagiri would not have enough room for both Farid and me once the house was filled with children; there were only six there now, but there was room for perhaps twenty or so more. So Farid lived in Dhaulagiri, and I lived next door, spending much of my time at the children’s home.

  We made frequent trips to Godawari to visit the Little Princes. During those visits, Farid and I told them all about Next Generation Nepal. We told them our goals, about trying to rescue children like them in order to give them a home.

  But there was one thing we kept from the children. We did not tell them that for the previous six weeks, I had been quietly preparing for a mission into the mountains of Humla. I was going to try to find their parents, as well as the parents of the six children.

  Farid helped put the finishing touches on my strategy. For safety reasons, I told very few people I was going. Golkka was a powerful figure in Humla. We knew he had threatened physical harm against Anna Howe and others who put his operation in Kathmandu at risk. In the remote northwest part of the country, there was virtually no rule of law, and I would not have the protection of an international organization. He knew who I was. If he knew I was going to Humla, it would not be difficult for him to disrupt my mission, even to attack me openly. He had much to lose by my success.