Little Princes

  He broke into a wide grin. “Okay, Brother—show more photos,” he said.

  We looked at the photos and I told stories for almost two hours. The children couldn’t get enough. When we were finished I handed out the letters I had from their parents. They took them solemnly, as if receiving a knighthood. Then I took out an extra treat: I had printed out photos of their parents for each of them. When they saw the stack they yelped in delight and crushed around me. As I called out each name, a little arm would reach out of the crowd, accept the photo, and run off to a corner to stare at it.

  I had passed out the last photo, the one to Crazy Rohan, when I saw that Raju and his seven-year-old sister, Priya, were still standing there. Priya was holding his hand, pulling him away.

  “I am sorry, Conor Brother,” Priya said, still tugging. “I tell him no photo for us, but he no listen.”

  It was as if somebody had pulled a plug, draining all the joy from my body. I thought back to the day I had sent Min Bahadur to go look for their parents, and the moment two days later when he revealed that they were, in fact, deceased. I recalled how deeply that had affected me then. Priya, the sweet little girl, had known her parents were dead. But it had opened a wound for her, and especially for Raju. I sat down so that I was looking up at them.

  “It’s okay, Priya—you take very, very good care of your brother, you know that? I am very proud of you,” I said.

  “Thank you, Brother.”

  “Raju—I don’t have a photo for you, but I hope that next time we will have a photo, maybe of one of your uncles or aunts, okay?” I took his hand from Priya, and he wiped the tears out of his eyes with his free hand. He nodded.

  Priya said something to Raju, he paused and then nodded again. “Brother, maybe can you show Raju pictures again?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah—of course, I’d love to. You want to see them, too?”

  “Yes, please, Brother.”

  The three of us went upstairs to the rooftop, taking three small stools with us. I asked Bagwati to make milk tea for us. And I went through the photos again, all two hundred, telling them everything I could remember.

  The two days I spent at Little Princes were pure peace. It was like digging up a time capsule you had buried long ago and spending a few days living among your childhood toys and drawings and favorite hat and pretending, just for that time, that this was how it had always been and would always be, this simple life that floated safely along. We spoke about Humla constantly. The children helped me fill in some lingering questions. What were the women pounding as they slammed the oarlike stick against the rock, when there was no wheat? They were pounding dried, cooked rice into churaa. What were the men boiling in large pots that seemed filled with straw? It was tobacco, or something like it.

  On the third morning, as I was helping the children get ready for school and preparing to head back to Kathmandu, I got a call from Farid.

  “I have good news, Conor—but you will have to be patient. You will see it when you come home,” he said, and refused to tell me anything else, despite my pleas. “Like the children, Conor! You are too impatient!” he said happily.

  I arrived back at Dhaulagiri House. The children, as usual, were playing outside. They knew me now, and they greeted me with cries of “Namaste, dai!” from across the field. Farid was swinging the youngest boy in the house, Adil. He had a particular fondness for the boy because of his poor eyesight. We resolved to get him glasses; until that happened, Farid spoke louder to him so that Adil could follow Farid’s French-accented Nepali to be picked up or swung around.

  I waited for them to stop spinning. Farid and I were able to talk business in front of the younger Dhaulagiri children. Their English was not as advanced as the children at Little Princes, so we could say anything we wanted to in complete privacy. Farid was still gripping Adil’s wrists but catching his breath before another spin when he told me the news.

  “Your trip worked,” he said. “You remember the father of Navin and Madan coming? You remember it was only a few days after you met him in Humla?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “More parents have come. Not parents of our children in Dhaulagiri, but the parents of children in the other Umbrella homes. Many, within just two days of one another, while you were in Godawari. They have come to see their children. Viva asked them how they found us and they showed us piece of paper with your handwriting, the address of our home. They could not take the children home yet, they are too poor, they are not prepared, but the children were so happy, you should have been here to see it. You would have liked it very much, Conor.”

  “That’s fantastic!” I practically yelled. I was shocked that the trip had yielded results so quickly. I couldn’t even imagine how excited the kids must have been.

  “And you remember finding Kumar’s father, yes?” he asked.

  “Yeah—I brought back a letter for Kumar.”

  “He called this morning. He called Dhaulagiri, on the house phone with the number you gave him! Kumar was so excited that he fell down the stairs—the front stairs, there—and I was afraid he had maybe killed himself with his excitement, but he jumped up and ran ran ran for the phone. He told me it was three years ago he spoke to his father. Imagine, Conor! Three years in the life of a nine-year-old boy! I took a photo of it to show you—he had a very big smile.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Even when I found the parents, I doubted, somehow, that connections could be made. It seemed impossible that we could actually affect any change in this country. Kumar’s father must have walked three days to get to the phone in Simikot. And what an act of faith it must have taken to do that, trusting another person who gave him a phone number and a promise that his child was safe, three years after he had disappeared. Having no children myself, I had completely underestimated the lengths to which a father would go for his son. What a long three days that walk must have been for him, wondering if anybody would be on the other end of the phone. Then hearing this strange man calling his son by name, Kumar, and hearing a mad tumble down the stairs and a voice, older but uncanny, on the other end of the line. . . . I could not imagine how that felt for him.

  I stood daydreaming about that moment as Farid spun Adil around outside the house, the boy’s tiny body whirling parallel to the ground before Farid ran out of steam and he bent down to give the boy a comfortable landing. I didn’t want to ask the next question—I was afraid of the answer. But I had to know.

  “And Bishnu? Any news yet from Gyan?” I asked.

  Farid straightened up slowly, leaving Adil laughing hysterically on the ground, begging for another ride.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “I called Gyan this morning. I am worried, Conor. I am worried that the boy may be gone.”

  That evening my phone rang, displaying a number I didn’t recognize. I was reluctant to pick it up; it had been a very long day. But I had learned that you never knew when an important call might come through. I answered it and heard, on the other end, through a sea of static, Liz’s voice. It was January 2, almost a week since we had last spoken.

  “Oh, hi!” I said, realizing that I had already set off in a nervous lap around the room.

  “Hey, I’m in Mumbai—I miss you guys!” she said. “How’s everything going?”

  You guys? What did that mean, “you guys”? Did it mean the kids, or me, or me and the kids? This was fifth grade all over again, trying to guess if the pretty girl with whom I was infatuated liked me, too. Not that I was going to say anything to her, of course. My courage didn’t extend that far. After a minute or two I calmed down. I had so much to tell her, and she was eager to hear it all. I had her on the phone for twenty minutes before remembering to ask her about her own trip.

  “It’s great—we’ve been having a blast . . . but I really miss being with you and the kids, and I was thinking, the rest of my friends are going to
southern India tomorrow, and I don’t really need to go with them—”

  “Come here!” I practically shouted over the phone. “The kids would love to see you, they ask about you all the time!” It was true. The girls asked every single day, without fail, if Liz was coming back.

  “Would that be okay? I wouldn’t want to be a burden, but I would totally be willing to help with anything—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous—I would love it! We would love it, everybody.”

  “Okay . . . well, great! So, tomorrow, then? It’s supereasy to get these flights right now—”

  “Tomorrow would be great!”

  She went and grabbed a piece of paper with flight information, and rattled off a couple of flight options, finally choosing the most convenient one for the following afternoon. Before she signed off, she said, “You know, I have to tell you—my friends that I’m traveling with here, they think I’m crazy to be going back to Nepal.”

  I knew what she meant. If I had told my buddies, with whom I had traveled halfway across the globe for a three-week vacation, that I was detouring off to meet up with a girl (orphans, I mean—meet up with orphans!), they would have given me endless hell about it. I didn’t know if it was the same for Liz, but I had to assume it was not an easy decision for her.

  “Well, listen, I don’t think you’re crazy. I’m really, really happy you’re coming,” I told her.

  “Good. Me, too.”

  Liz and I spent seven more days together. It felt perfect. Life was beautifully simple: get up, go hang out with the children, see some touristy stuff in Kathmandu, have a typical Nepalese lunch at some small café, pick up the children from school just around the corner, help them with their homework, spend the evening hanging out with them. On the second night we were there, Farid and I traded accommodations. From time to time, he needed a break. Neither of us took any time off, not even weekends, and Farid had the added responsibility of living at the house. He loved it, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. But about once a week, he would stay at my apartment, maybe watch a bootleg DVD on my laptop, and get a peaceful night of sleep. I would take his place at Dhaulagiri, putting the kids to bed and sleeping in his tiny room downstairs. I loved those days, mostly because I would wake up to the sound of kids running around early each morning. It reminded me of living at Little Princes.

  We made the switch during Liz’s visit, and she joined me in the house. She stayed on the top floor in the girls’ room, which drove them almost mad with joy, while I stayed downstairs in Farid’s room. I liked Farid’s room. I had once offered him a room in my massive apartment, free of charge, but he preferred to live with the children. In his room, I detected something else as well.

  Farid had spent almost two years in Nepal caring for children, and I had watched with fascination as he turned more and more to Buddhism. His small room had prayer flags and incense and a guitar, but was otherwise almost completely free of material possessions. He was focused on following a principle tenant of Buddhism to control one’s desire for things. Staying in his room was like stepping into his life for a night.

  That evening in Dhaulagiri, Liz and I were treated to a blackout. It was a common occurrence during the dry season in Nepal; electricity was mostly water-powered, and electricity cuts lasted anywhere from four to ten hours a day. Liz and I went through the pitch black house with a flashlight to find children holding tight to various beds or chairs like survivors of the Titanic clinging to debris, waiting to be rescued. With little to do but gather around a single candle in the living room, the children sang songs, calls and responses, with the boys singing one verse and the girls responding with the next. The candle barely lit the faces of the children; anyone in the slightest shadow almost disappeared.

  But I could see Liz’s face. Her blond hair picked up the glow of the candlelight, which fell on her cheeks and her eyes, and her neck disappeared into the shadows. The rest of her was almost invisible, as the children were piled up on both of us as if we were couch cushions. We lay there, crushed by the children’s body mass in a way that felt so normal in Nepal; and I had the good sense to take note that, in that exact moment, with no money, no clean clothes, no electricity, no good food—just Liz and twenty-six children—I was as happy as I had ever been in my life.

  Liz was able to relate to the girls in a way that I was never able to. They adored her. She was able to get them talking and interacting in ways that Farid and I were not. Besides being a rather lovely quality in a person, it was critical in helping see the children through the trauma they had so recently experienced.

  No child in the house needed this attention more than little Leena. While the other children slowly cracked through their shells, Leena kept to herself. In the week that I had been watching her, she had never smiled, never spoken, never laughed, and never cried. Not once. She moved around only to follow her older sister, Kamala. Leena always did as she was asked, whether it was going to bed or doing her homework or helping with small chores around the house, but she never played with the other children.

  I had never seen anything like it, but then I had never been around such severely traumatized young children. Farid and I spent many days discussing how to best care for her. Neither of us were psychologists; we had no idea what the “proper” treatment was. So we did what we always did—we came to the best decision we could agree upon and hoped for the best. In this case, all we could really do was continue to show her as much love and attention as possible, and hope that she found a way to surface out of her paralysis. Liz was wonderful with her. She spoke to her and held her, even as the little girl sat stone-faced. I loved watching Liz with Leena, watching her pour out love without expectation.

  Over the course of the week, Liz and I had long conversations and, unsurprisingly, found that we really liked each other. I’d had long-distance relationships before, living a couple hours away from a girlfriend. These relationships endured the distance because we had built up a strong enough bond that we thought it could stand up to the test of not seeing each other except on weekends, of speaking on the phone. I had spent a little over a week with Liz. We had only just admitted our feelings for each other. Now she would go back to DC and say . . . what, exactly? That her boyfriend— this guy with no money to his name whose voice she had just heard for the first time a week ago—lived next to a children’s home in Nepal, nine thousand miles and eleven time zones away, with no immediate plans to return to the United States?

  The day after she left, I wrote an e-mail to Charlie, my college buddy back in the States. I told him this: “I’m not saying I proposed to this girl I just met. But I am saying that I understand now why people get married: it’s because they meet Liz Flanagan.” Charlie’s response was simply one complete line of question marks and exclamation points.

  Liz and I wrote back and forth probably a dozen e-mails per day. When the fatter monkeys weren’t bringing down my Internet cable, we also spoke on the phone. (Good old Skype!) Because of the radical time difference, I would call her at exactly 7:30 A.M. her time each day; that call would serve as her alarm clock. We would talk again at her lunch break, when I was going to sleep. We often talked for up to three hours a day. That was our relationship.

  Two weeks after Liz left, I went to an English-language bookstore in Thamel and bought a Bible. As I took the rupees from my wallet to pay for it, I told myself it was so I would get to know Liz better, maybe even impress her with some knowledge of her religion.

  But as I took it home, I knew it was more than that for me. Just as living in this extreme environment had drawn Farid to Buddhism, I was being drawn to Christianity. I decided not to tell Liz that I’d bought it; contrary to my initial instincts, it was suddenly very important that she not think I had done this for her. Instead, I spoke to Farid about it the next day, after staying up late reading the night before.

  “I think it is a very good thing that you bought
a Bible, Conor,” Farid said, after we had put the Dhaulagiri children to bed and gone downstairs to make tea. “I cannot say why. But I think I know you quite well, and I can only say this makes sense to me, that you did this.”

  I was happy to hear Farid say that. He was unlike any person I’d ever met. Everything he said mirrored his beliefs perfectly, and he never seemed to worry how this would sound to others. He was interested in the truth. Finding that truth was the thing that had first brought him to Buddhism, as he explained to me later that evening.

  “I never understood why there was so much suffering, Conor,” he said. “Even in France, I never understood. Buddhists recognize it. They see life as purposeful. Everyone is trying to escape this . . . I think the word is cycle, yes? . . . this cycle of suffering and rebirth, to achieve this Nirvana, they call it. I never had any religion, I never thought about it. Then when I came to Nepal, I spent more time with the children and I saw so much suffering. The question reawakened in my mind. Why do we suffer? I began to learn about Buddhism, and I knew—for me—it was right. This answer to my question had always existed, but somebody had just lit a candle and showed me that answer.” He paused. “Does that make sense? I am not sure how to explain it so well in English, maybe.”

  “You explained it perfectly.”

  “It was the same for you? With Christianity?”

  “Yes, partially,” I said. “Except for me, I already knew about Christianity. I went to church when I was little, the age of Raju and Rohan and the others. I knew there was something about it, that God was real, that this was the truth, but nobody else around me seemed to think it was the truth. Nobody I knew was a Christian, and I let that influence me for my entire life, until I came to Nepal. In Godawari, with the Little Princes, I found myself praying sometimes—did I tell you that?”

  “You told me, yes.”

  “And, to me, it felt right, it felt comforting. Then I met Liz, and she’s a Christian, and I thought, you know, this is a very good opportunity to rediscover God. Because I can learn more about Liz at the same time,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling at that. “That must sound strange, no? That the catalyst—the thing that turned me back toward Christianity—was a woman?”