Gradually, a few more children found their way home. Two cousins from Dhaulagiri, Kunja and Agrim, after spending two weeks with their mother over the course of several months and visiting the local school in their village, were able to return home. We continued to search for families. Nepal is such a difficult country to get around that Farid would be gone an entire week and come back to report he had managed to locate only three families. It was painstaking work. But the results were worth it.
“What time is youR FLIGHT?” Farid asked. It was a morning in late September, and there was not a cloud in the sky. The rainy season was officially over.
“Five o’clock,” I said. It was nearly inconceivable that I was leaving Nepal.
Liz and I had tried to find a solution where she could live in Kathmandu with me. We had gone so far as to find a house next to Dhaulagiri; Liz had even gotten her dog, Emma, properly vaccinated for the big move and found somebody to rent her condo in DC. But it was just too difficult. Liz had been unable to find work in Kathmandu, and she had a good job back in the States. I also had to admit that returning to the United States was probably the best thing for NGN as an organization, since I would be able to fund-raise more effectively from there. We already had a great staff in place in Nepal to carry on the work. The difficulty for both Liz and me was knowing that we would be far away from the children.
My biggest concern was finding someone to replace me as country director. We needed somebody who could work well with Farid, somebody who shared our values, somebody who the children loved. We just couldn’t imagine who that could be.
Then, out of the blue, Farid called me one day and told me to meet him at the tea shop. The tea shop was run by Tibetans and served one dish: momos. Momos are similar to Chinese dumplings: steamed dough filled with vegetables or, as we preferred them, water buffalo. I came to find him sitting at our usual table—the only table outside, a dangerously unstable, rickety thing—sipping tea, staring out at the quiet street that encircled Swayambhu, near our children’s home, watching the Tibetan monks walking around a massive prayer wheel the size of a small car. They would turn it three times clockwise before moving on around the stupa or retreating back into the monastery just next to my own building. He had ordered me a lemon tea, which now sat next to him, steaming.
“Conor, I hope you are prepared for this discussion,” he said.
I sat down and took a cautious sip of my tea before adding a spoonful of coarse brown sugar from an open bowl on the table. “What discussion?” I asked.
“I am going to prove what karma can do for you,” he said, his voice deadpan.
I put down my tea. The woman brought out two plates of buffalo momos, one for each of us. Farid picked one off the plate with his fingers and popped it in his mouth.
Farid told me that one day earlier, he’d had a long conversation with Anna Howe. Anna, who helped us find Amita and facilitated my trip to Humla through D.B., had remained engaged with NGN. She and Farid had become close; Anna had been a practicing Buddhist for many years, and she and Farid had bonded over their shared beliefs.
Anna, Farid said, was leaving the ISIS Foundation. She loved the work and being with children, but she wanted to work for a smaller organization. She wanted to stay in Nepal, but she said it was unlikely she would find the perfect job. In her perfect world, she told him, she would work for an organization exactly like NGN, the very organization she had been so instrumental in helping to launch.
“Do you know any organizations like that, Conor? Which might be looking for a country director like Anna?” He was smiling now.
I couldn’t believe it. I thought I might have misheard him. I put down my tea and called Anna that moment, asking her if it was true that she might want to work with us, to potentially take my place as country director. She sounded as excited as me, saying what an incredible blessing this was, and that she would be absolutely honored to take the position.
After a short conversation, I hung up and put my phone down on the table. I took a sip of my tea, and Farid and I sat in silence for a few moments.
“That’s amazing,” I said finally.
“It is amazing,” he confirmed.
That had been just three weeks earlier. Since then, Anna, Farid, and I had spent a lot of time together. She had come with us earlier that morning, my final morning in Nepal, when I said good-bye to the children at Dhaulagiri.
At the leaving ceremony at Dhaulagiri, I had sat in a chair where I would receive a tikka and flowers. First in line were the staff. Ganesh and Devaka, the house father and mother, wished me a safe trip. Then came the cooking and cleaning didis who worked with us, Moti and Sunita. Then it was the children’s turn. They stood in a line while I sat in place. Some were shy, handing me flowers and sloppily smushing a small tikka on my forehead before giggling and running off. They were having a grand time, as I knew they would—it was like a festival for them. Most of them had little sense that I was leaving the country.
Farid joined us for a final group photo, then it was time to leave. We were heading up to the main road when I saw Amita. She stood in the path, her arms spread wide, blocking my exit. I didn’t try to get around her. I just stood in front of her in silence, waiting for her permission to leave. Her scowl faded into a reluctant smile. I took her in a big hug, picking her up. Then Kumar leaped on, and Samir and Dirgha and Bishnu, those beloved children who had started it all. Then all the kids joined in, in a massive, spontaneous thirty-person group hug that ended when we tumbled over under the sheer body weight.
We passed my apartment on the way up the road. Farid and I would travel together down to Godawari so I could say good-bye to the Little Princes. I told Farid I wanted to just stop by my apartment to take a quick shower before going to see the kids.
“I would wait to take a shower until after you see the Little Princes, Conor,” Farid said thoughtfully. “The tikka the boys put on your face—it is not subtle.”
“They’re not covering my face with tikka this time,” I assured Farid. “They can do a little bit, if they put it on the tip of their finger, like the Dhaulagiri kids, but that’s it.”
Farid smiled. “Ah. Yes, of course you’re right, Conor. Very good plan.”
Raju was applying a fistful of tikka to my temple when I noticed that his other fist was also filled with the rice and red dye.
“Raju—no. No. No more. No more tikka, Raju.”
He paused, confused. “Luck, Conor Brother!”
“I have luck already. The first tikka is luck. I don’t need two tikkas for luck.” I saw Santosh sneaking up behind me with another fistful of tikka. I spun around.
“Santosh! No. I’m serious. No more tikka,” I said as sternly as I could.
“No tikka on your cheeks yet, Brother,” he protested. “Very bad luck!”
“It’s not supposed to be on my cheeks, Santosh. It is supposed to be a small area on my forehead. You would do this to a Nepali man? Cover his face in tikka? You would do this to Hari?”
“You are traveling very very far, Conor Brother! More luck needed!”
I stood up and went to the bathroom mirror. My forehead was covered in the thick red paste. It looked like I’d been in a car accident. I took a rag to wipe some of the excess tikka off.
“No wipe off, Brother!” Santosh was standing behind me. “You look very beautiful! And very very lucky!”
“Oh, please!”
“True, Brother!”
I turned to face him. He was smiling. He had surprisingly white teeth. “I don’t know why I let you boys do that. I’m going to look ridiculous on the bus.”
“Because we are fun, Brother! You not have much fun in America I think,” said Santosh, admiring the red goop covering my face. “You come back soon to live here with your wife, Liz Sister. You may share a room with us, no problem.”
“I’m not coming back to li
ve, just to visit. But Liz and I will be back in three months, in January. We’ll be here for two weeks,” I told him.
“Much better that you come with your wife, Conor Brother!” Santosh said. “Liz Sister much more beautiful than you! You are a little hard to look at for me.” He grew suddenly mock-thoughtful. “You need more tikka, maybe. . . .”
I put my arm around his shoulder, and we walked back into the living room. The rest of the children were gone—they were now waiting in a long line that stretched from the front door to the blue gate, leading out to the path. Farid was marshaling the affair expertly, joking with them and rearranging them until they were in the right order, youngest to oldest. Each of them was holding white and yellow flowers that they would present to me on my way out. They stood shoulder to shoulder, chatting excitedly as they always did. Somehow they never ran out of things to talk about, even though they had spent virtually every minute together that day and the day before that, stretching back almost five years, not just in this house but in the house of the child trafficker who had first taken them from Humla. Some of them had been together more than half their lives.
I didn’t go out just yet. My arm still slung around Santosh, I walked through the house one last time. Santosh swung his arm around me, and his hand rested on my far shoulder. When I had first met him three years earlier he had been nine years old—he was much smaller then, and his arm had not been nearly long enough to reach all the way up to my shoulder. Suddenly he was unstuck in time, leaping forward from the nine-year-old I had carried through the hospital to become this twelve-year-old boy next to me.
Together, we walked outside, into the sunshine, to the start of the line of children. Santosh rushed off to grab his own flowers and take up his place in line between Dawa and Bikash. Bikash, at the end of the line, was also suddenly a young man, standing a full head taller than the rest of the boys. He was fifteen, old enough in Nepal to be married or a member of the staff. Raju was the first boy on the left, holding his flowers high, head down, singing quietly to himself. The boy who had hung from my neck the first moment I walked in the gate of Little Princes was gone, and I hadn’t noticed until that moment. This boy, this Raju, was seven, maybe even eight years old. His face was thinner, his arms longer, his voice stronger, richer, even in mumbled song.
Nuraj elbowed Raju in the ribs and he jumped, startled, and noticed me there for the first time. “Conor Brother!” he yelled. “Flowers, Conor Brother!”
I took them and continued down the line, accepting flowers from each child and watching them transform before my eyes; I released them from the images I had kept of them as young children, just months after being rescued from Golkka, when they were still undernourished and small. They were not supposed to age, because I was not supposed to still be here. It was three years since I first walked through the gate, when they were so completely unknown to me that I could only tell them apart by the clothes on their backs.
I walked out the blue gate, three years older myself, and up the path. The children waved frantically, shouting my name as I walked with an armload of flowers and a face covered in tikka. But they stayed within the walls of the Little Princes, because they still had to get ready to go to the temple, where they would wash their clothes and play in the shallow pool.
Farid walked me up to the road. He would be staying in Godawari for a few days. Together we waited for the minibus that would take me back to Kathmandu and the airport. We said nothing for a while, just stared up the road in the direction the bus would come from.
“I remember doing this before the revolution, one and a half years ago, standing in this spot,” Farid said finally. “There was the bandha, and no traffic was moving. I had to walk for ten hours, with my bag, to the airport. That big bag I had, you remember it? It was such a bad time—you had just left back to America, I remember. They were fighting in the streets. It was not long after the Maoists had bombed the Ratna Park bus station, and the police had shot people for protesting. It was very violent out on the streets—they were arresting people breaking curfew. I did not know what to do. I had many hours to walk to the airport, and I did not want to be arrested, or to have them think I was some revolutionary and get attacked. So I put a sign on my bag. I made it from an empty page from one of the children’s drawing books. I used the big pen they have, the one they love—what is the name of that?”
“A marker.”
“Yes, a marker. I took the blue marker, and I wrote my big sign, and I attached it with a pin to my bag so everyone—the police and the Maoists—could see it, and see who I was. To see what I was,” he said. “Then I walked, for hours. I thought I would never get home. But I did, and somehow I was back in France. I thought I would not come back here for a long time.”
He was looking down the road now, seeing it as he did almost two years earlier, with no cars and the airport impossibly far away. He must have thought he was going home for good, that both of us were finished with Nepal. Then there was a revolution in the streets and seven children had disappeared, and our lives were suddenly tangled up with this mountain kingdom.
The white minibus came around the corner. Farid held out his arm to stop it for me. The squeal of the brakes started immediately, we could hear it all the way down the road as the bus gradually slowed. I slung my backpack onto my back. Farid held out his hand, I took him in a hug, clapping his back. Farid never liked good-byes. The bus puttered to a rolling stop in front of me.
“What did your sign say?” I asked him. “The one you pinned to your bag?”
He smiled. “It said TOURIST.”
Afterword
I got an e-mail from Farid in the fall of 2008.
“We are bringing the Little Princes back to Humla,” he told me.
This had been our dream for four years. The trip would only be a visit and would only be for nine children, a test to see how they would adapt after so many years of living in a harsh urban landscape, cut off from their families. But Humla was now safe, and the children had a two-week break from school.
The children were anxious as their small prop plane set down on the dirt landing strip in the village of Simikot. Almost all of them had spent more than half their young lives far away from here. But after just a few hours of trekking slowly south along the Karnali River toward their villages, they transformed into Humli children. They ate berries and cracked open fallen walnuts on nearby rocks and ran off the trail and into the fields, fueled by an extraordinary excitement. A day later, they spotted the village of Ripa in the distance, small mud huts built on steep terraces, and memories came flooding back. They giggled madly at the surprise in store for their families, who had no idea that their prodigal children were just a few hours away.
The village erupted at the sight of them. The older children saw parents and old friends, and there were many tears. The younger ones were shy—they had stopped giggling. They wanted to remember these people who were crying over them, speaking a dialect they no longer understood, touching their faces and clothes, but they were little more than toddlers when they were taken from this place. Their families were strangers to them.
But the bonds ran deep. By the end of their first day home, all the children, young and old, were village children again. They followed their mothers and fathers across the barren winter fields, where the crops would be planted in the spring, and into the forest where they would search for herbs. Their hands may have been softer than those of their brothers and sisters, but they stood taller and stronger than even their eldest siblings, who had lived through years of drought. They slept that night not on the mattresses of the Little Princes Children’s Home but on the floors of mud huts, wrapped in homemade blankets, huddled next to their mothers. There were no light switches to turn off now, nobody to shush them if they continued to chatter. When the fire died, they slept.
At the end of the two weeks, not a single child from the Little Princes wanted
to leave Humla. And though they had to return to Kathmandu for now, they were changed children. They were more purposeful now; they worked even harder in school. They no longer spoke of becoming astronauts or football players, but of becoming doctors and teachers in their villages. Their destiny had been set in motion, and it was back in Humla, working the land, marrying, starting families, rebuilding their villages, and carrying on traditions that stretch back centuries, long before the Maoist rebels took over the country.
Farid paused at the end of his story, letting it sink in. I hadn’t said a word in the last twenty minutes. It was March 2009; we were speaking on the phone for the first time in months. I had read his account of it at the time, months earlier, but hearing him tell it, with that familiar French accent, brought it to life.
“It’s incredible, Farid. I’m stunned. I wish I could have been there to see all that,” I said finally.
“Yes, you would have liked it very much, Conor. . . . Oh, and we must speak about something. I know we are already talking about moving the children’s home to Simikot, so that they can be in Humla. We must do that. But after this trip, I also believe that some of the children can perhaps return home, can live with their families,” he said, his voice accelerating with excitement. “Can you imagine, Conor? Imagine what it would be like, for these parents to have their children back, living with them? Becoming one family again?”
I looked across the living room at Liz. She sat in a wide armchair in our apartment in New York City, legs slung over one arm of the chair, her head resting on the other, watching me with a drowsy smile on her face. On her chest lay our three-week-old son, Finn, curled up against her shoulder like he would never let her go.