Little Princes Read online

  Nuraj’s mother packed a small bag for her sons with the few possessions they had—a small shirt, some dried rice. She comforted Nuraj and Krish as she sent them away with a stranger. They were going on an adventure, she told them. They would be safe. This man was going to take care of them, so they must be good boys and do what the man said. She would talk to both of them very soon.

  A few months passed, and Nuraj’s mother heard no news of her children. She asked the other villagers who had sent their children. None of them had heard from the man. Nuraj’s father took the phone number given to him by the man and walked for several days until he reached Simikot, the largest village in Humla, where there was a phone.

  Nuraj’s father listened to the empty ringing on the other end. He hung up, and checked the number again. Yes, he had dialed the right number. The man had even written his name next to the number: Golkka. He dialed again, but it made no difference. Nobody ever answered. He had been given a false number. His child was gone, lost in the chaos of Kathmandu, hundreds of miles away. He hung up the phone, and started the days-long walk back to his village. He would have to tell his wife, the boy’s mother, that their sons were gone.

  Farid and I listened to Nuraj’s mother, speechless. The Little Princes Children’s Home was not an orphanage at all. These children had parents who were alive. And by some miracle, one of them had found us.

  Nuraj’s mother had come that day from the Ring Road around Kathmandu, where she lived. They had lost almost everything in Humla, thanks to the child trafficker; they had little choice but to seek work in Kathmandu. When she described where she lived, I knew the place exactly; it was only a few minutes walk from the climbing wall that I frequented. It was a terribly impoverished area, a neighborhood that I would pass on the bus and wonder who could survive in such a place. She had moved into a shack there, leased to her by a woman with some neighboring land. She tended the land in exchange for the shelter. Her husband had gone to Nepalganj, Nepal’s second largest city in the south of the country, to find work. She lived alone with her youngest son, a disabled boy of two years old, the younger brother that Nuraj and Krish did not even know they had.

  Their mother had learned about the Little Princes when an international aid worker had come to her shack; he had been told of the family by a neighbor who saw the mother living in destitution. The doctor had offered to take the son to the hospital for a check-up. When the aid worker heard her story about her journey from Humla, he told her about an orphanage he had heard about in the village of Godawari. He suggested they might know something about her two missing sons. She left her youngest with a neighbor, and set off walking to Godawari, along the empty roads, cleared out by the bandha. It had taken her all day. She had not asked directions. When she saw the path leading down to the orphanage, she said, she knew it was the right way. When she saw the yellow house in the distance, she knew her sons were there.

  She had waited long enough. I went upstairs and brought down Krish and Nuraj. I walked into the room, and Nuraj clutched the arm of his older brother. Krish was only seven, but was a great protector of his little brother. I stood back, expecting a joyous reunion.

  The boys, though, stayed at the edge of the room. They would barely even look at their mother. Farid walked to them and squatted down, trying to get them to speak to her. They said nothing, and continued to stare at the floor. The mother walked slowly to them and sat in front of them, on the floor, taking their hands in her hands and speaking softly to them. Still the boys did not react.

  After a few moments, the mother got up slowly and approached Hari. She said something that I could not hear. Then she turned to Farid and me, clasping her hands together in prayer-like fashion and saying dhanyabhad, thank you, and she walked back out the way she had come in.

  “Wait . . . what did she say, Hari? Why is she leaving?”

  “She say she understand reaction of her sons. She say she will come back. She say thank you to me and to you and to Farid Brother.”

  The two boys never looked up. Farid asked me to take Nuraj back upstairs with the other boys, and then he put his arm around Krish and led him out into the front garden. This would be a sensitive conversation. The children trusted Farid above all others, and Krish was a bright young boy.

  I ignored the flurry of interest from the other boys up on the roof. Raju was part of the group, too, but his questions, shouted above the other questions, were not about the strange woman and what had happened, but whether Nuraj wanted to play carrom board. I left Nuraj with him and brought the rest of the kids to the far corner of the roof, leaving them with strict instructions not to bother Nuraj. An hour later, Farid and Krish came back inside, and he sent Krish back to the roof to play with the other boys.

  “What was that all about?” I asked him as we went back out to the garden to talk.

  “You would not believe it,” Farid said, cursing under his breath in French.

  The children had been instructed by Golkka to tell anyone who asked that their parents were dead. It was more effective in getting donations from tourists, and would also help explain to local authorities why one man had so many children under his guardianship.

  “If a child made a mistake and told of his parents being alive, Golkka beat him. Can you imagine?” Farid said. “Krish saw his mother coming—his own mother, after this long—and all he could think was that they were in trouble. He warned his brother to pretend not to recognize her. He was scared that if he said anything, we would beat Nuraj.”

  It was unbelievable. “So they know her?”

  “Of course they know her. She is their mother,” he said. “Conor, I did not tell you, but I have seen this woman before. In this village. I suspected she might be their mother, but I could not believe it. I ran out to find her, but it was too late, she was gone, unable to find her children. She must have come back, to look again.”

  “How did you not tell me this before?” I asked, confused.

  He shook his head. “It did not seem possible that it was her. I thought I must have imagined the entire thing. Today, I can see that it was. This is their mother.”

  We spent a lot of time with Nuraj and Krish over the next few days, and using Hari as a translator to make sure there were no misunderstandings, we told them that their mother coming was a very good thing, that this was cause for celebration. They had an opportunity that none of the other children had—to spend time with their mother for the first time in years. We repeated this message like a mantra, not just to the two boys, but to all eighteen children. We promised Krish and Nuraj that as soon as the strike ended, we would take them into Kathmandu to see their mother on a regular basis, to reestablish a relationship between them.

  The children saw that Farid and I, unlike the child trafficker, were not punishing Nuraj and Krish for speaking about their mother. They saw that, on the contrary, we were celebrating the fact that their mother was alive. They could trust us—really trust us—in a way that had not been possible for them since they had left their villages. It brought us even closer to the children. We watched layers of fear that we had not even known existed peeling away from them.

  They began to speak about their families for the first time in years, at least what they remembered of them. The children were more animated than I had ever seen them. In the evenings they spoke at length about Humla and their brothers and sisters and parents, and their villages came alive before me. But there was sadness, too. For the first time, I heard bigger boys crying at night, when they thought everybody was asleep. We had opened caged memories, but we had no solution for the children. There was still a war. Humla was still inaccessible. Their parents had no idea where they were. The children remembered, but with those memories was the realization that their mothers and fathers might as well have been on the other side of the moon. They were still alone. Nothing had changed.

  The strike ended a few days later. Once again mi
nibuses were running to Kathmandu. While I stayed at Little Princes, Farid took Krish and Nuraj to see their mother and their little brother. They returned several hours later, glowing. The children gathered around them and soaked up every last detail of what it had been like to spend an afternoon with their mother. What had she said? What had they talked about? What did they do together?

  Every few days Farid and I would take them on the long bus ride to see their mother. The change in the boys was visible. They were still our boys, still part of the house, but the two brothers spent more time together. They spent more time studying. They spent more time alone, talking. Mostly, they looked forward to these visits with their mother.

  But as the security situation worsened, traveling to and from Kathmandu became more and more difficult. The country was now caught between the Maoist rebels on one side and a dictator in King Gyanendra on the other. Journalists bold enough to criticize the monarchy were thrown in prison. Democratically elected opposition leaders were placed under house arrest. And that was only the beginning.

  The king, declaring a return to democracy, had called for municipal elections in February 2006. But there was a catch: The elected leaders would be operating as puppets under the king’s absolute authority. The election was boycotted by every political party in Nepal and condemned by the international community. Protests ignited on the streets of Kathmandu. The police, under the king’s orders, donned bulletproof vests and carried automatic weapons, and set about arresting and beating the protesters, killing one.

  Citizens took to the streets. The king tried to contain them. Ahead of a widely publicized prodemocracy rally, the government cut off all mobile phone service and kept it off for a month. Still, word managed to get out. So the royal government called a curfew for the entire day of the scheduled rally. Those brave enough to show up were beaten. Government agents began arresting student leaders, simply walking into their classrooms and taking them away.

  To add to the misery of the population, the Maoists called for a nationwide bandha, or strike, prohibiting all travel on the day of the election. Anyone caught going to a polling station would be attacked by Maoist sympathizers.

  Then things really got strange.

  The royal government was unable to convince citizens to risk life and limb to violate the bandha in order to vote in the farcical election. So the king took a different approach. If the citizens would not violate the bandha on their own free will, then he would force them to violate it.

  Overnight, the police impounded five hundred random cars in Kathmandu. An announcement was released to the news stations: owners of the vehicles must pick up their cars from the police compound on the first day of the bandha and drive them home. If they did not, they would forfeit their car forever. These unlucky citizens would be forced to put their lives and their vehicles—which represented a significant portion of their net worth—at risk.

  The announcement went on to imply that the government was not insensitive to the potential risks; they would offer insurance on all the vehicles in the (highly likely) event of damage to the car. The government also announced, as was quoted in the newspaper: “In case of death of driver, co-driver, or helper of vehicle plying during the strike, the government will give an additional percent amount besides insurance compensation.”

  The February elections were, by any measure, a complete failure. Public turnout measured about 2 percent. Most polling stations had more soldiers than voters. There were not even enough candidates to fill the positions; only about two thousand candidates offered their names for about four thousand seats. Maoists had threatened to murder candidates, and they succeeded in at least one case. A candidate was gunned down in the street; others had their houses bombed. The government, in response, offered free life insurance to anybody willing to run for office.

  The king declared the election a victory for democracy.

  Krish and Nuraj came back from visiting their mother one afternoon especially animated. The two boys ran down the path and through the blue gate, blowing past me and running straight to a group of the older boys. The children gathered around and listened to their story of what had happened that day. Farid, who had taken them, arrived a couple of minutes later. He asked me to join him on the roof. The sun was low in the sky, so I put on a hat and an extra fleece and went upstairs.

  The roof was empty except for Farid, sitting on the railing, looking out toward the mountains. On clear afternoons like this, the Himalaya were visible across the Kathmandu Valley, lit up with a dull pink by the setting sun. Even from this distance, they dwarfed everything else in sight.

  “There are more children there, Conor,” he said.

  “More children where?”

  “With the mother. There are seven, living with her in that tiny shack. Humli children.”

  Farid told me what he had understood from the mother. Golkka was still trafficking children. The worse the war got, the more families were willing to pay him to take children from the villages. He was dumping them with orphanages run by international organizations, organizations that were concerned only about the safety of the children and often bought his story that the children were true orphans. But word spread in Kathmandu of his practices. Organizations had to make a hard choice. They stopped taking children from him, even knowing that some children might have been in danger. But there was no other way to stem the flow of his trafficking.

  The business was too lucrative for Golkka to give it up that easily. Then, he found Nuraj’s mother. He recognized her from Humla, and knew that her husband was away. He knew he could take advantage of her. A poor, uneducated woman from a remote village simply did not stand up to a man like Golkka. He brought her seven children and told her to keep them. Then he vanished again.

  “How does she support them? I thought she could barely feed her own son,” I said.

  “This is the problem—she cannot support them. They are starving. I have seen it. They could die, these children,” he said. Farid was having difficulty controlling his anger. “We have to do something about this, Conor. We must.”

  I agreed completely. Not just for the seven, but also for the mother. She was barely surviving herself. Golkka had added seven more people to a sinking lifeboat.

  Two days later, when the children were in school, Farid and I took the bus to the mother’s shack. We stopped in a local shop on the way. It was a typical shop, a small hut with one wall open to the street where you could buy rice and vegetables by the kilo from old cloth sacks. We bought as much as we could carry and lugged it to the mother’s home. We entered a gate into a small compound.

  Three children peered out the open door of a one-room brick shack, loosely covered by a sheet of corrugated tin. Another small face appeared out of the dark room and stared at us. I had become accustomed to the gregarious Little Princes, the way they would leap at strangers like mad little alligator wrestlers, hanging on for dear life and machine-gunning questions at their new friend. These children, shadowy figures peering out the door lit by an overcast sky, were silent. They were not afraid, but their curiosity and suspicion seemed to keep them in a perfect balance of wanting to come closer and wanting to disappear back inside. Approaching the doorway, I counted seven children. They were filthy. Their skin was dried and cracked, their clothes dusty and torn, their hair chopped unevenly. Most of them were barefoot.

  Farid and I carried the food inside. We greeted Nuraj’s mother, who stood up with her two-year-old son, whose deformed back was exposed. I cringed, despite myself. The mother smiled apologetically and pulled a shirt over the boy. I felt like a complete jerk.

  The eldest of the seven, a lanky boy of maybe twelve named Navin, sat inside on one of the two beds. The only light came in from the narrow doorway. There were no windows, and any holes in the brick had been stuffed with old newspaper to keep out the cold. In the dark, I could see that he had something wrapped around his hand t
hat he held tightly. Farid took him gently by the elbow and led him outside. Wrapped around his finger was an old rag that he must have found on the street. Farid carefully unwrapped it. His head recoiled, and he wrapped it back up and whispered something to the boy. The boy said something back. Farid nodded and hurried over to me.

  “You can stay with the children?” he asked me. “I must take Navin to hospital—his finger was caught in a gate, the . . . this part,” he pointed to the tip of his own index finger, “this part is almost off.”

  I told him I would stay, and he took Navin down to the Ring Road where they immediately caught one of the ubiquitous old hatchback taxis and sped off.

  This appeared to be more excitement than the children had seen in some time. They were now all outside, staring at me, perhaps wondering if I too might grab one of them and fling them into a taxi and speed off to God knows where. That could explain why they kept their distance. I sat on the ground and took them in. There were six of them now. The eldest of the remaining boys bore a resemblance to Navin; I wondered if they might be related. He turned away and walked back inside the shack. The others remained, plopping themselves down, one by one, in the dirt, waiting to see what I would do next. They ranged in age from perhaps five years old to about nine. The youngest was a tiny thing, even smaller than Raju, and he wore a permanent grimace. They all did, now that I got a better look at them.

  There was only one girl in the group, a girl I would come to know as Amita. She had long, straggly black hair and Tibetan facial features, narrow eyes and wide cheekbones. It was a common look in Humla and in the north of the country, when her ancestors had come over the mountains from Tibet and the surrounding region more than four hundred years earlier. The ratio—one girl to six boys—was in keeping with the approximate proportion of girls to boys brought out of Humla. When parents sent their children with child traffickers, they sent boys most of the time. They believed that the boys were at greater risk of abduction, but they also believed that a boy would do better in school and would be able to return to Humla as a grown man to take care of his family.