Little Princes

  I remembered reading that e-mail and thinking I wanted to be near somebody like that. I wanted to be near somebody who could hear somebody sneeze and somebody else say “Bless you” and be able to conclude that human nature is, at its core, good. I wanted that kind of optimism in my life all the time. I wanted it to rub off on me. I wanted to see the world like that. I needed it right here, right now, sitting on this rock.

  I got up and walked up to the men.

  “Ready?” I said. They got up and loaded their packs, and we continued up the trail toward the village of Jaira.

  Three hours later, D.B. pointed out Jaira. It was an hour, maybe less, along a traverse, downhill slightly from where we stood. We stepped off the path for a herd of goats barreling toward us from behind. I would hardly have even noticed them if the shepherd hadn’t slowed down just as he passed me, coming to a full stop for perhaps one full second to stare at me before jogging after his goats. They raced on toward the village.

  Forty-five minutes later, we arrived. I sat down. Rinjin and Min Bahadur would find the parents. They could do it more efficiently than I could as they spoke the language and maybe even knew some people in the village. Besides, it gave me a chance to rest. By now I was used to people gathering to stare at the white man propping his leg up, unwrapping a bandage from his knee, touching it gingerly. There was no alone time in Humla, not for me. Going by past experience, I would have at least an hour before Rinjin appeared with the first parent. I rested my head against my backpack and closed my eyes.

  The shepherd stood above me. I recognized him from the trail—he wore a thick, dark red scarf around his neck. Rinjin and D.B. were speaking several feet away. They saw me stir and walked toward me, still talking.

  “Hi there,” I said to the shepherd, dusting myself off as I stood up. I had taken to greeting people in English—out of laziness, partly, but also because it discouraged them from trying to start a conversation. Sometimes it even thinned out the group. The shepherd didn’t move.

  Rinjin came up to me. “Sit, Conor. We will stay here,” he said.

  “I’m okay,” I assured him. “I can walk, I just needed a rest. Did you find anything on the father?”

  Rinjin looked confused for a moment. Then, leaning into my ear, whispered. “The shepherd is Jagrit’s father, Conor.”

  Since meeting the postman, I had imagined this moment. Now, face-to-face with him, I was positive this was the father. Rinjin had confirmed it, and the resemblance was uncanny. This was the moment I had been waiting for. Yet I suddenly found myself having no idea what to ask Jagrit’s father. For his part, he just looked back and forth between Rinjin and me, genuinely confused as to who we were and why I needed to speak to him. I talked to him about where he was from, his wife’s name, and so on to establish that we were talking to the right person. It was him, there was no doubt. I asked him if he had a son.

  “Yes—his name is Khagendra, he lives with me,” he told me.

  I waited. He did not say anything else. Rinjin, who often conducted much of the interview himself by now, knowing my questions by heart, purposefully waited for my next question.

  “Ask him if he has any other sons, besides Khagendra,” I said. Rinjin translated the question.

  The father said nothing. He stared at me, as if trying to work out why I was asking that particular question. Rinjin repeated the question.

  The man nodded.

  “Ask him if this other son’s name is Jagrit—or something that sounds like Jagrit. Hold on—that might not even be his real name. How can we possibly know—”

  Rinjin cut me off, putting his hand on my forearm. “Just let me ask him.” He translated the question.

  Again the man said nothing. I watched him press his lips together so tightly it looked like they would never open again. Then he nodded again.

  I took out the photo of Jagrit and handed it to Rinjin, who handed it to the father.

  The man stared hard at the photo, holding it up to his eyes for what felt like several minutes. Then his hands, still clutching the photo, dropped slowly to his lap. Tears fell, absorbed by dusty trousers. Rinjin leaned in, as if to comfort him, but never touched him. I felt like an intruder in an incredibly personal moment. I wanted to give him time, let him go see his wife, take a few days to take this news in, to come to believe it in his heart and understand how his life might change, how his son’s life might change.

  But our time was limited. It was always limited. I was meeting parents and doing the equivalent of throwing a bucket of cold water in their faces with the news of their long-lost children, then asking them tough questions and recording their answers, all within the course of an hour or two. I watched them come alive when I told them their children were safe. I watched them die a little as they relived the loss of their child to a child trafficker. It was intimate and overwhelming and I felt, over and over, unqualified to be doing this job. But there was nobody else to do it.

  Jagrit last saw his parents when he was five years old. The boy in the photo was fourteen.

  I never had any intention of showing this man the document I was now pulling out of my pack. I hesitated for a moment, then handed it to him. The father took it from me and stared at it blankly. He was illiterate. Rinjin gently took it back and read it aloud to him. I waited for him to finish. The shepherd’s head hung down as if a weight had been slung around his neck. A man he had met just an hour earlier had just read him his own death certificate.

  “Your son believes . . .” I started to say, looking to Rinjin for guidance. “Your son, Jagrit, he believes that you, and his mother, and the rest of his family, are dead. He has always believed that. That document you are holding—your death certificate—we have the same document for your wife. It is an official government document. It was forged by the man who took your son.”

  The man said nothing, but looked back up at me. His eyes closed slightly, as if he has received too much information to process.

  Rinjin was watching me. “I will ask him what happened,” he said, motioning for me to open my notebook.

  The father recounted the whole story. His eyes never met ours, but stared into space. I couldn’t understand the words, but he seemed to travel back in time and watch the entire event unfolding in front of him. He spoke of the government official who told him he had seen potential in Jagrit as a young boy, who promised to put him in a top school in Kathmandu. The official had asked the family to provide a large sum in advance. The father waited to hear news of his son. Weeks became months, and months became years, until one day there was no hope left. It was as if his wife had never given birth to the boy, as if he had never held that bright young child, his firstborn son.

  Rinjin and I were riveted. I felt like I had lived the story with him, watching from afar, seeing the father—the shepherd—and his small son, Jagrit, together first, then saying good-bye, not understanding it would be for the last time. When the father finished, I closed my notebook. We sat together for a while, silent. The father stared at the ground. Then he said something to Rinjin without looking up.

  Rinjin translated. “He is asking if you will tell Jagrit that they are not dead.”

  “He can tell him himself,” I told Rinjin. “He’s going to write him a letter.”

  We stood fifty feet away and watched while the father, sitting with the village schoolteacher, the only literate man in the village, dictated a letter to his son. When he was finished he walked over and handed it to me, folded several times into a tight square with Jagrit’s name written on the front in Sanskrit. I didn’t ask what he wrote. Rinjin wanted to know if I had any more questions for him.

  “No, it’s okay, he can go,” I told him. It was a two-hour walk back to his house, outside the village, and it was already getting dark. “Wait . . . tell him his son—tell him he is an amazing kid. Everybody loves him. Make sure he understands that.”

&nb
sp; Rinjin told him. The shepherd, Jagrit’s father, smiled for the first time. He clasped his hands together in a silent thank-you, and set off up the trail.

  The extraordinary circumstance under which Jagrit’s father, the dead man, came to life gave me a glimmer of hope for two of our other children: Raju and his sister, Priya. We had always thought them to be true orphans. Back at Little Princes we did anything we could to help the children keep a connection to their families. One of those things was helping them write letters to their parents, even if they might never see them again. All of the children did it, even Raju. It was Priya, his sister wise beyond her seven years, who explained to her brother that they could not write letters, that they had nobody to send them to because their parents were not living. That was a difficult day.

  But now there was a ray of hope—a dim ray, perhaps, but a ray. Their parents might still be alive. I almost did not want to think about it, the idea was so overwhelming.

  I charged Min Bahadur with getting to Lali, the village of Raju and Priya, across the river and to the northeast. He was the strongest in our team and knew the region better than anyone. He could make it there and back in less than two days. I gave him all the information I could about the two little ones and sent him off, unburdened by packs so he could move quickly.

  We watched him leave, then continued our journey south. I tried to put Min Bahadur and his search out of my head, but it was difficult. The walks were long and lonely, and I had hours of time with my thoughts. I imagined a father picking up Raju the way I picked him up, of Priya helping her mother cook for the family, of the two playing together in the fields and lying between their parents at night, warmed by their body heat.

  At the end of the second day, Min Bahadur caught up with us in a village called Tulo. He immediately sat next to Rinjin and spoke to him softly. Rinjin listened intently. Then he called me over.

  “Their children’s names are Raju and Priya Atal? You are sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.” I held my breath.

  “Min Bahadur found those in the village that knew them,” he said. “Four years ago they got very sick. . . .” Rinjin paused, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. They are dead.”

  The first time I ever had food poisoning, I was in a hotel room in Jacksonville, Florida. I woke up with it after an evening at a seafood buffet, and stumbled to the bathroom. My flight to New York was departing in less than three hours; I didn’t leave the bathroom for the next fourteen. I lay curled up on a nest of towels, my face resting against the cool tub, sucking water from the tap, wondering how I was going to survive. The cleaning lady stopped in, thinking I had vacated the room, and I just had the strength to croak out most of “Come back later!” before my stomach seized up again so it came out as “Come back—blaeeegh!” Vomiting, for me, is a loud affair. Decibelwise, I might compare it to the inside of a sports bar in Boston the moment the Patriots score a Super Bowl–winning touchdown with three seconds on the clock after coming from six hundred points down. The cleaning lady couldn’t get out fast enough.

  That was a spotless Marriott in the United States. Now I was in Humla, and it was only a matter of time before I got sick. Sure enough, I was struck down two weeks into the journey. I was usually able to sleep through the night, exhausted from the day. But one night my eyes popped open from a dead sleep. I needed to get outside. Like, ten seconds ago. It was pitch black in the hut and there was a family sleeping beside me, so I controlled my overwhelming urge to bust out through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man, and instead shuffled gingerly toward the door. Not gingerly enough, as I found out when I accidentally kicked a sleeping chicken across the room, causing a holy panic in the claustrophobic space. I felt my way out the door, then it was just a matter of how far away from the house I could get. Not terribly far, as it turned out.

  Already weakened from days of walking and dehydration, the food poisoning felt like it had the power to kill me. It was difficult to hold down any food at all, which was dangerous because I was expending an enormous number of calories each day. My team learned to watch for signs that I was about to stumble or even collapse. We couldn’t afford to stop; we were already behind schedule because of my knee. And with the snow, we would have to start thinking about other ways out of Humla. I tried to keep my mind off the fact that if further complications developed there was no help, no hospital, and no easy way out.

  With my new illness, I was experiencing a level of discomfort I didn’t know existed outside of passing kidney stones. Food poisoning causes the body to evacuate everything it can, as rapidly and inconveniently as possible. To make matters much, much worse, in Humla, there were no toilets. And when I say no toilets, I do not merely mean a lack of comfortable indoor plumbing—I mean no toilets. I asked “Where is the toilet?” on my first day in southern Humla, and was told: “No.” I don’t think I had ever gotten that response before. It shouldn’t really be a yes-or-no question, after all.

  Three days later I was on the mend, able to eat daal bhat for the first time. I even encouraged the others to walk ahead, though Rinjin insisted on staying behind me. We had been walking for two hours when I came over a crest to find D.B. and the rest of the men sitting on rocks, looking down the valley. He smiled when he saw me, and came back up the path to meet me.

  “You see the mountain there? The last one, very tall?” he pointed down the Karnali River, to a mountain about the size of the one we had descended the first day when we had landed in Simikot. I nodded.

  “At the top is Shreenagar,” he said.

  Shreenagar. It was the last village; the last two families were up there. But two days earlier, Shreenagar had become something else as well. It had become a way out of Humla. The World Food Programme (WFP), the UN-sponsored agency active in the region, was making rice drops at the top of that mountain by helicopter. With a helicopter, I could catch a ride out. I could get to Balaju or Nepalganj or wherever they were going. It didn’t matter. Wherever they were going would have a road or an airport. I had been in Humla for almost three weeks. I had done what I had set out to do. It was time to go home. One more day to the mountain, a three-hour hike straight up, and I would be at the helipad.

  We took our time, stopping for lunch with some men fishing in the Karnali. My stomach turned at the idea of eating fish, but for the other men, fish was a rare treat. We decided not to start the climb until the next morning, when the sun would hit our side of the mountain and warm us as we hiked. By the time we began the ascent up the switchback trail, I was feeling stronger than I had felt in days.

  Dhananjaya was the man responsible for this region for the World Food Programme. He saw us coming up the trail and came down to meet me. I told him about our mission, and about my knee. He confirmed that Simikot was still snowed in—WFP was able to land there by helicopter, but no planes were coming in our out.

  “You are very lucky, Conor,” he told me. “Tomorrow our last helicopter of the season arrives. I am going home as well, also back to Kathmandu, to my family. We can easily fit you on board. I know the pilot, he will be interested in your story.”

  Kathmandu sounded so sleek, so modern sitting in this village. I looked at my watch. It was December 15. Remarkably, after everything that had happened in the past three weeks, I would be home early, in time to meet my college friends coming to visit, and a few days before Liz arrived in Nepal. I couldn’t wait. I had spent so many hours thinking about her. On several occasions in the past three weeks Rinjin had caught me smiling.

  “You are thinking about a woman, I think,” he said the first time, laughing and jabbing his index finger in my chest.

  “No,” I said instinctively, somehow embarrassed that I had been caught. “I was just thinking about an e-mail from a friend of mine.” Technically, this was true. At that moment, I was thinking about an e-mail. I didn’t mention that it was from Liz. She had written to me in the middle of the night, her time. It
was the middle of the afternoon where I was, and I had written back immediately, asking her what she was doing up at that hour.

  “Oh, it’s kind of embarrassing actually,” she wrote. “There was this crazy thunderstorm tonight, so Emma, my big lug of a yellow Labrador, jumped into bed with me because she was scared. It took me, like, forty-five minutes to fall asleep again, and just when I did, Emma rolled over in her sleep and fell out of the bed with this really loud thump and I jumped about ten feet in the air. So I’m letting her sleep in the bed now and I’m on the couch so I decided to e-mail you to say hi.”

  I loved so much about that e-mail. I loved that she lived alone with a huge Labrador, a dog that leaped into bed with her during thunderstorms. I loved how she told the story of Emma falling out of bed. But most of all, I loved that when she was awake in the middle of the night, she wrote to say hi to me, as if we were best friends, as if we had known each other for years.

  I would be meeting Liz in a matter of days. I had trouble focusing on anything else, including preparing for my last interview, an evening interview with the parents of a boy from Little Princes named Ram; my mind was on the helicopter, on getting back to Kathmandu. But Rinjin showed up with not only Ram’s parents but three generations of his family, from a one-year-old baby to a grandmother of indeterminate age. It was a perfect final interview, a lasting image of an entire family surrounding a mother who held one single photograph of an eight-year-old boy from Little Princes, a boy who was anything but an orphan.

  Just after dawn the next morning, I said good-bye to my team. Most of them would accompany D.B. to a few other villages to help him complete his work, interviewing the parents of children Anna had asked him to find. All of them, including D.B., would remain in Humla for the winter. This was their home. Rinjin offered to stay with me, but I insisted he begin the long trek back to Simikot.

  We took one last group photo, overlooking the mountains in the gray dawn. I said good-bye, filling an envelope with twice the salary I had promised the men and asking D.B. to divide it among them. I watched them set off on their quick descent down the mountain, unburdened by the hobbled, food-poisoned Irish-American. Min Bahadur turned and gave an awkward wave—a western gesture he must have learned from me—before disappearing out of sight.