Little Princes

by Conor Grennan

  The next morning, Min Bahadur was gone. I walked outside looking for him. He was nowhere to be found. I saw Rinjin walking back from the river, and I limped down the hill to intercept him.

  “Min Bahadur—he’s gone. I can’t find him.”

  Rinjin was drying his face with a worn towel. He slung it over his shoulder before answering.

  “He saw from files that one child is from village of Puma,” Rinjin said. “Min Bahadur says he can get there quicker by going over high pass, alone, and bringing back mother of the girl. I’m sorry, I cannot remember this girl’s name right now, I gave the document to Min Bahadur. But he will bring the mother back. She will meet you here.”

  Five hours later, I was sitting with a woman and her sister. There was no mistaking this woman for anybody other than the mother of little Amita, the only girl of the seven children. Most of the seven children didn’t speak about their parents. Amita was different. She spoke of her mother often, about what she and her mother had done together, that her mother had taught her how to sew and prepare rice, that they had never left each other’s side, until Amita was sent away, to flee the Maoists, to get an education. It was rare for girls to be given this opportunity, and her mother had sold her animals to give her daughter a chance at a better life. Instead, Golkka had left her with Krish and Nuraj’s mother, where Farid and I had found her almost a year earlier. Since then, Amita had been asking to go back home.

  Now, I was face-to-face with her mother. I wanted to hug this woman. She looked so much like Amita. She also reminded me, somehow, of my own mother. Not in her appearance, but in the look she gave me, that expectant and fearful look my mother wore every time I saw her at the airport: excited and terrified at the same time, worried that maybe something had happened to me at the last minute—maybe I hadn’t gotten on the plane; maybe I was in some room somewhere in the world, hurt, unable to get home.

  Amita’s mother had that look now: thrilled at the possibility of news of her daughter but terrified that the news might be bad, that her daughter might be sick or hurt or lost. I wanted to comfort her like I comforted my own mother. I wanted to tell her that her daughter was a shining star in our lives, that we adored her. I wanted to tell her that Amita missed her deeply, that she only wanted to come home, that nothing and nobody could ever take her place in her daughter’s mind. All that would come soon enough. Now, I only greeted her, as I did every parent, with a namaste, and kept a respectful distance.

  D.B. acted as translator for our conversation. I had told him. much about the seven children over our long days together, and he knew these children were the reason I had returned to Nepal. I had confided that, before I came up with the name Next Generation Nepal, I had considered the name Seven Babu, the Nepali term of endearment for young children.

  The mother took the photo of Amita in one hand while clutching a tiny baby, Amita’s newborn sister, in the other. Joy spread across her face, through her entire body. With D.B. conducting the interview, I captured the moment in a photo. It became one of my favorites from the hundreds I took during that trip. D.B. asked me if he could tell her the whole story of her daughter, beginning to end. I told him he could, and I watched as he explained how we had come to find Amita, wearing old clothes and no shoes, living in the single-room shack in Kathmandu with Krish and Nuraj’s mother and six other children from Humla, doing little but waiting for the next chance to eat. Like the others, she had been reluctant to come out of the dark when I had first come to see them. But she was bolder than the other children, a natural leader in a place where leaders are rarely women. Amita not only came out of her shell, she brought the others out of theirs. We worked to find a safe home for her, and thought we had. Then she and the other children disappeared. It would be months before we found her again, alone on the road, carrying those two empty bottles, uncared for, looking for water. It was a miracle we found her at all.

  I watched as the mother’s bright smile faded and tears spilled down onto her baby. D.B. spoke calmly, with love in his expression, but he spoke plainly. She needed to understand the danger her child had been in. We had to at least try to prevent her from sending her next daughter away with the same irrational, impossible hope shared by so many mothers in Humla. Amita was safe now. She was going to school. She was eating daal bhat every day. And she missed her mother.

  After two hours with Amita’s mother, it was time for her to start the trek back to her village. She needed to get back before nightfall—walking at night was dangerous. She clasped her hands together in thank-you to me, and was about to turn when she seemed to remember something. She reached into the sling that held her baby and pulled out a bag of three hard-boiled eggs. She spoke quickly to D.B.

  “She say that she meant to give you these earlier,” he explained. “But she was too excited to hear news of Amita and she forgets. She asks your forgiveness. They are for you to eat.”

  She smiled and pointed to the eggs, putting her hand to her mouth. It was always difficult to accept these gifts, knowing how little the parents had and what it must cost them. But I also knew that this was for them. They needed me to know how much their children meant to them. And I did, long before she remembered the eggs.

  I thanked her, and she turned around. I wanted to follow her home, to sit with her and have dinner with her. She was a mother, in every sense. She exuded it. In those minutes, in the exchange between us, I saw just a little bit of what Amita must have missed so terribly, and it made me homesick.

  On our second night at the former Maoist encampment, we were woken by the sound of loud, drunken voices. We rose together, quickly. The voices got louder. They were approaching from across the bridge. Now there were only four of us: D.B. had taken his team to a village five hours south to look for the families he had been charged with finding by Anna Howe and the ISIS Foundation. My team of four stayed behind because of my knee. They would return in two days. It was four of us against however many men were now stomping across the rickety bridge toward us.

  Rinjin, who was on watch when we heard the men, quickly grabbed our bags and dug through them. He pulled out every flashlight we had and thrust them into our hands, two per man. He whispered an order to the two porters, then turned to me.

  “Hold one in each hand. Spread your arms as far apart as they go. Point them at the bridge,” he whispered. “Do not turn them on yet.” He moved several paces away from me and did the same thing with his flashlights.

  I realized what Rinjin had done—we would look like eight men, not four. Still the voices came closer, and for the first time I heard aggression in their tone. Something had set these men off, and there was nothing else on this side of the bridge but our house. They were coming for us, but why? How had they known we were even here?

  Suddenly my stomach knotted up. The man in the camouflage jacket.

  He had shown up when Amita’s mother had left; he had come all the way up to us to listen in on what we were doing. It never occurred to anyone in our group to tell him to leave—men came up to us all the time to listen to interviews, to find out what we were doing there. But this man was different. He seemed irritated that a foreigner had been speaking to Amita’s mother, and told off one of our porters. The porter, not one to back down, yelled at him to get lost. He was outnumbered by our team, and he sulked away. But I saw him the next day as well, walking past our camp. He must have noticed that our group was smaller. He watched us for a few minutes and left.

  It had to be him. And he had brought friends. I tried to remember if I had said anything to him, given him a nasty look, anything. It didn’t matter. It was who I was, what I represented, not what I had done to him personally. I was a foreigner, and foreigners had helped the Nepalese government fight the Maoist threat by offering aid. What was I doing in their territory, interfering? Even now that the Maoists controlled this region? Now, even when the royal government had lost, been overthrown? It wouldn’t take mu
ch to convince some drunken former rebels that they had a unique opportunity, here in the dark, to teach me a lesson.

  We turned on our flashlights and held them out; I looked into the darkness where the bridge should be, then up and down at our guys. Rinjin spoke loudly to our porters, who barked angrily back at him, interrupting each other. This was part of it, to make sure they knew we were several men. I kept my mouth shut, but my head was exploding.

  The clamoring over the wooden bridge came to a stop. The drunken shouting died into whispers. They must have seen that the situation was not as the man in the camouflage jacket had described. There were not four of us, there were eight. And even drunken Maoists were not eager to start something they could not win. Who knew if the foreigner was even among them?

  Rinjin and the porters also quieted. Together we stared into the still dark. My heart pounded. I hoped Rinjin knew what he was doing.

  Several tense minutes passed, and the footsteps receded, back across the bridge. One of the porters kept watch for the remainder of the night. We did not hear from them again. But I didn’t fall asleep again for a long time. I hoped that would be the last of the danger in this mission.

  D.B. and the others returned the next afternoon. Knowing we would break camp soon and might not have access to the river for several days, I walked down to the water for a much needed scrubbing. Halfway down, I found Rinjin speaking with a man I had never seen before, squatting on the ground in typical Nepalese style. I stood above them, bar of soap and towel in hand, for few minutes, then sat on a rock next to them. Neither one acknowledged me—they seemed lost in intense conversation. Finally I interrupted, frustrated at being ignored.

  “I’m not clear who this man is, Rinjin,” I said. I was cold. I recognized that this was making me irrationally irritable. It was only 3:00 P.M. and the sun had already dipped behind the adjacent mountain. I pulled out my hat from my daypack.

  “He is the postman,” Rinjin said slowly, sensing my irritation. He’d had a longer day than me, having gotten up early to prepare the rice and daal over the open fire, yet he seemed incapable of losing his patience. “He is a postman from the village of Jaira, but his post office is here.”

  I knew that we were nearing Jaira, Jagrit’s village. But I had thought we were still quite a distance away.

  “So Jaira is what, his postal route?” I wondered if the term was the same in Nepali.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said.

  “How far are we from Jaira?”

  “Maybe nine, ten hours walking. For you. Shorter for him. ”

  The postman was looking through the photos of the children that Rinjin had taken from my bag. He did not recognize any of them, and he could not read the profiles, since they were written in English. I was accustomed to villagers being curious about the files, but I was reluctant to let strangers study them. Rinjin was sensitive to this as well; he took the photos from the postman after only a few minutes and handed them back to me. In the past few days I noticed Rinjin becoming more protective of the children. I flipped through the profiles and found Jagrit’s. I scanned it for the names of his father and mother. I did not bother with Jagrit’s name itself; everything was traced by the name of the father. I was hoping the postman might have known him.

  Rinjin read the name of the father off the photocopy I had of the father’s death certificate. The postman’s eyebrows jumped. He had known him—quite well, it seemed from his reaction. This was good news, as it would make our trip to Jaira more efficient if the postman could tell us which part of the village to go to and to whom we should speak. I took out my notebook and opened to a fresh page. I told him through Rinjin that we were heading to Jaira in two days, explaining that we were looking for families of children living under our care in Kathmandu, and we were trying to get as much information as possible about this boy. I started to ask if he knew of any living relatives of the father when the postman interrupted me to ask why we weren’t going to visit them ourselves?

  I looked up from my notes and paused for a long moment.

  “Visit who?” I asked him.

  The postman named the father and mother.

  Rinjin and I said nothing. There must have been some kind of mistake. I pulled out their death certificates and handed them to Rinjin. Rinjin took them from me and held them out to the man. He pointed at the names on the certificates and asked the postman to be absolutely certain we were talking about the same people. Of course, he told us, puzzled. He had known them since he was a boy.

  The death certificates had been forged. Jagrit’s parents were not only alive, they were just a day’s walk from where we sat. If it wasn’t so tragic, I would have laughed at the absurdity of it. Here was a boy who had grown up believing his entire family was dead, who had been shown evidence of it on government-stamped documents. And yet all it took to disprove it, to alter the course of this boy’s life, was to go to his village and check if his family might actually still be alive. I was struck by how viciously the civil war had torn this country apart. Children had been taken by traffickers and the door to their village had been slammed shut by the Maoists. Nobody could get in or out, even to check if their family members were still alive. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by the amount of work that needed to be done in Nepal. But in that moment I also felt focused. I had a single task in front of me. My young friend in Kathmandu needed me right now, even if he had no idea how badly. If Jagrit’s parents were alive, I was going to find them.

  I woke up before the others. Lying in the dark, unable to fall back to sleep, I thought about Jagrit, about what I would find at the end of the day, about the postman’s reaction. I tried to imagine what the trail would be like that day, whether it would rain, what the condition of my knee would be. These thoughts, unhampered by any stimuli save the sound of men breathing, had free rein and kept me awake. I got up and went for a walk in the predawn light down to the bridge and stood in the center, watching the wide river race beneath me like God’s treadmill.

  After an hour, a fire sprang to life back at our camp. I climbed back up the slope to help prepare the tea.

  Later, on the path, I could feel a difference in my knee. I measured it by the length of time I could go in the morning before it caught fire, before the long thick nail was hammered in, just below the kneecap. That morning it was fifty-five minutes, a new record. But the going was tough that day. I had been drinking steadily, and I was out of water. The path had taken us up, away from the river. Rinjin handed me his own bottle.

  “You can use your pills in this,” he said. He was referring to the chlorine tablets I carried with me. I had never drunk unpurified water in Nepal, and I was not about to start when I was a week’s walk from a hospital, no matter how pure the Karnali looked. Yet I was in no position to refuse his offer. Humli men were strong, they could go without water. But the more dehydrated I got, the more I slowed us down. I took the water and dropped in the tablets. They would work in twenty minutes. I cheers’ed Rinjin with the canteen.

  “Thanks.”

  “It is nothing.”

  It was far from nothing. We had been walking for six hours, including an hour’s rest during lunch, rice cooked over an open fire on the side of the trail. I was exhausted. And things were about to get worse: D.B. was waiting for me up the trail. I caught up with him and sat down on a rock.

  “How is your knee, Conor?”

  “Much better than before. Still moving slowly, but better,” I said.

  He nodded, looking down at my knee. Then he met my eyes. “Rinjin told me about the postman, and about Jagrit. This is the same boy you told me about? The bright one from Umbrella?”

  “Yes, same boy.”

  He paused. “I would very much like to find the family of this boy. But there is a chance that the postman is not completely . . . accurate. In Humla, we often confuse relations. We call cousins brothers, for example. This postman is no
t lying, but he may be confused between the father and brother,” said D.B.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “We even asked him about the mother, he said it was definitely the right person.”

  D.B. smiled, and nodded again. “Yes, you are probably right,” he said. “Anyway, we are not far now.”

  But the way he said it, sympathetically, told a different story. D.B. doubted the parents were alive, and he knew this region and the culture. He was uncomfortable telling me; he would not have said anything unless his doubts were well-founded. In a matter of minutes my spirits plummeted. I had allowed myself to get excited about finding Jagrit’s parents alive, about returning to Kathmandu with this extraordinary news. What if his family really was dead? What if I couldn’t even find his uncle? I continued to sit on the rock. The team didn’t move, but waited respectfully up the path, where D.B. had rejoined them.

  As I sat there, I allowed my mind to wander to Liz. In that moment, I remembered a short e-mail she had written to me a couple of weeks before I’d left for Humla. Appropos of nothing, she had written this:

  This morning, on the crowded train to New York, a man in the row in front of me sneezed. The woman in the row behind me said “God bless you.” He could not have heard her, since I barely heard her, and the train was packed. But the fact that she said it gave me a sense of the innate goodness of man.