Little Princes

  Before leaving, I had to compile all the information I could from the Little Princes. I had lots of photos of them already, plus critical biographical information, such as the names of their villages (as far as they could remember) and the names of their parents. Unfortunately, many of the children were taken when they were too young to know their parents by any name except mom and dad. In conversations, I gently prodded them for any details they could remember about their villages or their families, anything that could help me track down their families in that vast remote region. I also collected this information from the six children we had rescued.

  I kept my leaving a secret from everybody except Farid and Anna. But there was one boy I couldn’t resist telling: Jagrit. I trusted him. More important, I knew that if I probed him for information on Humla and his family, he would probably uncover my plan.

  Jagrit was giddy when I told him.

  “You bring back apples from Humla for me, sir?”

  After all this time, he still called me “sir.” It drove me nuts, and he knew it. He tried to change it, to say “brother” like the other children. He had gotten to the point to remember to say “Sorry, brother” when I corrected him, then minutes later he would revert to “sir.” I wondered if I should start calling him “sir,” too.

  I had learned a lot about Jagrit in the previous two months. He had been taken from his family when he was five years old. Unlike most of the others, Jagrit was a true orphan; his parents had died within a year of each other when he was a boy. His file was unique in that it contained death certificates for his parents. Viva had found him, along with two dozen others, in a destitute, illegal children’s home near the trash-infested river that ran through Kathmandu. He now lived in the Umbrella home next door to our own Dhaulagiri House.

  “No, Jagrit, I’m not bringing you back any apples.”

  “Why no?” He had a way of shouting everything he said.

  “Too heavy—I’ll bring you back one. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  He considered this. “You go to my village?”

  I told Jagrit that I was going to Humla, but I did not exactly tell him why I was going, and he did not exactly ask. I would be looking for the parents of children under our care, but his would not be among them.

  “Which village is your village?” I asked him.

  “Jaira, sir. Jaira,” he shouted.

  I knew Jagrit was from Jaira, but he liked to tell me. He said it with pride, as if the fainter the memory became, the more fiercely he guarded it.

  Later, studying the map of Humla and planning our route, Jaira was the first place I looked for. I desperately wanted to find somebody for him, a family member, somebody that knew him, or knew of him, or knew of his parents—anything to bring back and show him that he was not alone in this world.

  “Yes, I’m going to your village as well, Jagrit.”

  “You bring me back apples from my village, sir. They are very, very tasty.”

  “No chance.”

  “You are lazy boy!”

  “One apple,” I told him. “If you’re lucky.”

  I knew this was a risky trip, I just didn’t know how risky. Nobody knew. Not Anna, not even D.B., my Humli travel companion. We had planned on leaving earlier in the month, but the official peace agreement between the Maoists and the government had not yet been signed. Without that official truce, I would not be able to go, I couldn’t take the risk. In the meantime, winter was fast approaching. Once the snows arrived, all travel into and out of Humla would come to an abrupt halt until springtime. All through November I watched the news and the weather with growing desperation.

  But on November 22, 2006, I didn’t even have to open the newspaper. The headlines were thick and large, aware of their place in history: “Peace Treaty Signed.” I checked the weather: The snow had not yet arrived in Humla. A window of opportunity had been flung wide open. There was no telling how long the truce would hold. D.B. called me minutes after I had opened the paper.

  “Are you ready, Conor?” he said. No explanation was necessary. I was ready. We set our departure for a few days later.

  That night, Farid and I stared at the map of Humla. I had never seen a map like it. I was used to maps with roads crisscrossing, with names of cities and towns and villages, their populations indicated by the size of the font. This map had almost nothing on it. Not a single road. All travel would be done on foot. An occasional dot, a village, appeared next to the river, separated from its neighbor by wide, empty spaces where topographical lines squiggled around, almost on top of one another, indicating that there was virtually no flat ground in the entire region.

  Together we tried to estimate how long it would take to travel the distances, over the passes that Anna had spoken of, but without seeing the terrain, it was almost impossible to guess how difficult it would be. The closest approximation I had were the treks we had done, up to Everest Base Camp and along the Annapurna circuit, both challenging, but both lined with tourist infrastructure to allow for frequent breaks. Humla would have none of that. Plus, there was the added worry that the snow would arrive when I was deep in the region, which would shut down the airport. The runway could only be cleared by hand, a near impossible task with constant snowfall.

  There were no phones outside the district headquarters of Simikot, the village with the airstrip, so there was no way to communicate once I reached Humla. There would be no way to tell Farid if something went wrong. We didn’t define “wrong”—we didn’t need to. It could be injury, kidnapping, or worse. We decided to set, for lack of a better term, a panic date. Taking a conservative estimate of how long we thought it would take me to move through the region, we came up with December 18 as the date I was likely to return, give or take a day. I would make every effort to get back by then, as it was also the date that my friends Kelly and Beth were coming to visit me. The panic date was set for December 22. If I was not back by then, Farid would assume something had gone wrong, and he would send a team to look for me.

  The night before I was going to leave, I wrote to Charlie Agulla, my old roommate from the University of Virginia. I told him I wasn’t sure what this trip would be like. Most likely it would be safe, I said, if not terribly successful. Most important, I told him about the panic date. I told him that if I hadn’t gotten in touch with him by then, he should call my family, whom he had known for years, and let them know the situation.

  Charlie wrote back within minutes: “And what situation would that be, exactly?”

  I was putting him in a difficult spot, I knew that. “Ask them to get in touch with Farid,” I told him.

  The last thing I did that night was write to Liz. We had made plans. She would arrive in Kathmandu on December 23 and stay for two full days. She would return to India on Christmas morning. She had my cell phone number to call when she landed in Kathmandu. I told her how much fun we were going to have, together with my married friends from college, our implied chaperones. But I had to also inform her that there was just the tiniest possibility that I would get held up. If I missed a flight or something, I told her, there was a chance I might not be there exactly when she arrived. Not to worry, though, Farid would have my cell phone and would introduce her to my friends, and I would surely be there the next day. At the latest. I made this out to sound like Plan D, the backup plan to the backup plan to the backup plan.

  By that time, Liz and I had been writing several times per day, back and forth. It was as if we were just across town from each other. I told her not only things that I thought would impress her, but things that I knew wouldn’t, like my original reason for coming to Nepal: to impress people. When we spoke about our past relationships, I told her that I had been terrible to my girlfriend in Prague in the final months of our relationship, hurting her enough to make her break up with me; it was the easy way out. It was something I had trouble getting over, even three years later.


  Liz revealed to me that she had been married in her early twenties. When the marriage ended a few years later, she also stopped attending church. She told me that she couldn’t imagine what kind of church would want someone like her. She was scared and embarrassed—who in their mid-twenties was divorced? she recalled thinking at the time. She felt it would be too hypocritical to sit in worship when she was so broken. “But God used that time of great sadness to reclaim me, to redeem me,” she wrote. “Things that are broken can be made whole.”

  Now, as I wrote to her about my plan to go into Humla, I spoke vaguely, in circles. We often tried to crack each other up. In this e-mail, though, I couldn’t bring myself to joke around. I was determined not to worry her. In the last e-mail I received from her before I flew to Humla, she wrote: “I know that what you’re doing is not completely safe. I am going to try not to worry and I am going to try not to think about it too much. I very much hope that I see you on the twenty-third.”

  “You will,” I wrote. “You think I’m going to miss my one chance to meet you?” and, with heart pounding, I signed it “Love, Conor” for the first time, quickly clicking the SEND button before I could delete it.

  The next morning, just after dawn, I took a beat-up taxi to the Kathmandu airport and met up with D.B. I had not spent much time with him. I knew only that he was committed to helping his country, especially his native Humla, and that he was Buddhist. D.B. had his own list of children whose families he would be seeking on behalf of the ISIS Foundation. Going into Humla together served a critical purpose; by joining our two teams, we created one eight-man group. The larger the group, the better our security against not only the Maoist threat but also the potential danger that Golkka might have trafficking cohorts operating in the region who would not want us to succeed in our mission.

  D.B. and I had our plane tickets. Our bags were packed. There was no departure board at the airport, but a handmade sign told us that our flight was leaving on time. I put in a last call to Farid, an early riser, to check in on the six children. He assured me they were fine. I could hear the envy in his voice. He wanted to be on this trip. For two years, the children at Little Princes had been telling us stories about Humla. They repeated the same stories, simple stories reflecting memory weakened by time, until we could tell them ourselves.

  The story that stayed with me was one told by Bikash. He was taken by the trafficker and was forced to walk many days with several other children. He walked through valleys he had never heard of and past villages whose names were unrecognizable. One day, he noticed the homes he passed were different—larger, and made of a harder, smoother substance than the dried mud he was used to.

  The group came around a mountain pass, and Bikash found himself standing on a path, wider and smoother than any he’d known. He heard a noise, a buzzing sound. He looked into the distance, down the hard, flat trail. From far away he could see a man approaching them, running. But not just running—running faster than Bikash had ever seen a human being move, barreling toward them at preternatural speed. Bikash froze, mesmerized by this world where, he recalled thinking, men ran faster than wolves. With a roar, the man raced past, atop a machine that he didn’t recognize. The man was riding a motorcycle.

  I was brought back to the Kathmandu airport by Farid repeating his question on the phone.

  “Your flight should leave on time?” Farid asked again.

  “I think so—I have my ticket, I was told the flight is leaving on time, and I just saw the pilots.”

  “Okay. If the flight does not go today, we must have buffalo momos for lunch at that Tibetan place. I have a very big desire to eat momos today, Conor.”

  Farid knew Nepal well. He knew that nothing was ever certain, not even with a plane ticket in hand and a flight ready to depart. In fact, I had stopped using the word “sure” altogether unless it fell between “if you drink tap water” and “wake up on an operating table.” The only time we could be certain that the plane would take off that morning was the moment the plane actually lifted off the ground, continued on an upward trajectory, and flew away from Kathmandu. Anything short of that was mere speculation.

  Few places in the world can teach forbearance like Nepal. Let’s say, for instance, that I asked somebody to buy me some bananas from the shop next door. In fact, let’s say that I asked him to buy me bananas a week ago—then I reminded him hourly over the next few days. On that one billionth time that I reminded him that he promised to buy me bananas, the man would most likely respond with something to the effect of: “It will definitely happen today, my friend. I swear to you on the life of my son—your bananas will be bought today, in the next hour for sure. Erase all doubt from your mind. In fact, it is actually done already, even as we speak it is being concluded, as sure as the sun rose in the east this morning those bananas have been purchased. They belong to you now—the shopkeeper has no rightful claim to them any longer. You can open your mouth now in preparation for consuming this banana, which is here, right now. It is in my hand and on its way to your mouth, so I hope that you are ready to enjoy this fine banana. Your teeth may now begin to close as the banana is now in your mouth. How does it taste? Is it very fine?”

  What that man really means is: “What bananas?”

  The flight did leave that day, but there was a delay. Because D.B. and I were the only passengers, they converted the interior of the plane into a cargo area, putting down the seats and filling the plane with sacks of rice. Humla was three years into a drought; they needed all the food they could get.

  Sitting in a cracked plastic seat in the passenger lounge, I was relieved that none of the children, save Jagrit, knew where I was going. This mission was beginning to feel very real, and there was enough pressure without twenty-four children back in Kathmandu waiting for me to return with news of their parents.

  Even from a low altitude, weaving between the mountains, one would never guess the world below us was inhabited. There was not a house in sight. The landscape in the dry season was a quilt of rusts and golds, split down the middle by the Karnali River running north to south. Not an inch of flat ground, at least not visible through the airplane’s narrow window. As far as I could see it was just wave after wave of hills and snow-capped mountains extending to the horizon and into Tibet, just a few miles to the north.

  D.B. pointed out his village, but I couldn’t spot it. I listened to his description of an invisible cluster of mud huts and thatched roofs—his uncle’s house, the one-room primary school—and followed his finger, pointing to a village that blended into its surroundings. He noticed my blank stare. No matter, he told me, I would see it up close soon enough. But first, we would set down in Simikot, the district headquarters situated ten thousand feet above sea level—and hopefully the one place in Humla with flat ground.

  The first thing I identified below us, moments before hitting it, was the landing strip at Simikot. It was dirt. I thought that was only in movies, dirt landing strips—reserved for drug runners or dinosaur-infested islands.

  Moreover, there was no airport to speak of. The door of the prop plane opened while we were parked on the runway and local men started unloading the rice. I craned my neck to scan the sky behind us; it seemed like an awfully dangerous place to park a plane. Nobody else seemed bothered, however, so D.B. and I climbed out with our bags. We had brought gear for the men who would be joining us, down jackets and boots so that they would not be walking in flip-flops. Sadly, flip-flops were the typical footwear for porters in Nepal, even at high altitudes.

  One of the men saw us getting off and put down his sack of rice to give us a hand. He tentatively took my backpack, glaringly modern in the present surroundings, contemplated it for several seconds, then put it on upside down. He clipped random buckles together tightly and haphazardly until the pack was gripping him like a frightened octopus. He carried it past the runway and up to the only guesthouse in Simikot. The guesth
ouse was run by a local nonprofit organization. The man in charge of one of the projects, Rinjin, was not much older than me. He greeted D.B. with a hug. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law.

  D.B. and I began putting together our teams. We wanted eight men in total, including ourselves. He would lead one team of four and I the other. That way, if we needed to split up at any point to find specific children’s families we would each be well-equipped. This meant, for me, that the first order of business was finding a guide. D.B. had suggested on the plane that Rinjin would be a good candidate. The moment I met him, I agreed; he was perfect. His English was excellent, and he had earned the trust of the villagers in southern Humla through his work on local hydroelectric projects, trying to bring electricity to the region for the first time. I needed him. The problem was, he was busy with a full-time job, and I would need him for three weeks.

  I had tea with Rinjin, warming ourselves next to the fire after our evening daal bhat. We talked late into the night. Rinjin understood the importance of what we were doing. He asked me in many different ways why I was doing this for children in Nepal. Why not somewhere else? Why not helping in my own country? I had no good answer for him, except to simply say that in Nepal, nobody else was taking care of them. What other reason was there?

  As we said good night, Rinjin took my hand and told me that if I, an American, was willing to take this risk for the children of Humla, then he was duty-bound and honored to take it with me. I thanked him. And I secretly loved how he had said it; I could not imagine an American outside of the marines talking about being duty-bound and honored in the service of his country.