Authors: Conor Grennan
Little Princes (19 page)
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.
T
he 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.
F
arid 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.
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.
T
he 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.”