Little Princes (18 page)

“Yes, Conor—we have the perfect house for you. Truly, it is perfect. It is this yellow house next door to the other Umbrella houses, you know this one? It can hold maybe twenty-five children, no problem. And it has a well in the front patio—a deep well! You can have water for free, you do not have to pay this stupid truck to come give you water,” he said. He took a drag from his cigarette and held out his arms toward Viva. “Kathmandu! It’s madness! No water! Why there is no water here?”

“They’ve overbuilt in this part of the city, they have no capacity, Jacky. I’ve been dealing with this for years. Years. You’d better get used to it because I’m tellin’ ya right now, it ain’t gonna change in our lifetime. But enough of that, my love—tell him about the house, will ya?”

“
Ah oui, la maison. C’est parfait,
Conor. And it is available. I spoke to the man, he can give it for a very good price. Twelve thousands rupees per month, about 160 U.S. dollars. It is very good price, believe me.”

I didn’t know the house, so when I left Jacky and Viva’s, I went to find Jagrit. He knew the neighborhood like the back of his hand. I found him sitting outside with some of the older boys, just inside the gate of one of the Umbrella homes.

“Jagrit,” I said when I got close to him. “Come over here please,
bai
. I need your help.” (
Bai
means “younger brother” and was a common term we used for the kids.)

“Yes, Conor sir! I am at your service!” he called, and he turned to the others sitting next to him and spoke to them in a mock-dramatic voice and in English, clearly for my benefit. “I am sorry, I must go. I have important work to do. Sir needs me. Without my help, he say he may even die—”

“All right, Jagrit. . . .”

“You hear his voice? It is shaking! I think he is very afraid. I must go.”

When he came close enough, a big grin on his face, I got him in a headlock, which he quickly managed to escape from. We walked back out the front gate.

Jagrit knew which house Jacky meant, and I followed him. It was only four houses away, down a small path. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was our house. It had a field right outside and a small front patio, as well as a front gate with a lock. Best of all, it was right in the neighborhood, next to the other Umbrella homes, only a couple of minutes from the small primary school and Jacky and Viva’s house. I negotiated a deal with the owner later that afternoon, using Jagrit as translator. We shook on it, and it was done. Next Generation Nepal officially had a children’s home.

I sent Farid a photo of the house. He loved it. Liz wanted to see the photo as well, so I e-mailed it to her, too. Since I was already attaching that photo, I included other photos for her as well, of Little Princes, of the six children playing together, of Kumar smiling for the first time, the day Gyan had brought him to Umbrella. In return, Liz e-mailed me a photo, the first she had ever sent. The photo showed Liz hugging a girl to whom she had become attached, a Zambian orphan of about ten years old named Basinati. I knew of the girl; Liz had described her in detail to me. In the picture, Basinati wore a simple yellow dress and a bright smile.

But all I could think about in that photo was Liz. She was gorgeous.

I was so taken aback that I wrote to ask her, as casually as I could, “Oh, is that you in the photo?”

“Yeah, Conor, that’s me, the short one in the yellow dress. No idea who the weird blond girl is hugging me,” she wrote back.

Okay, I had deserved that. But I couldn’t stop looking at the photo. This woman who had been my confidante, who had kept me going through difficult times and with whom I found myself building a real intimacy, was stunning. I put the photo on my desktop. If there had been a church nearby, I would have lit about four hundred candles.

F
arid arrived in Nepal on November 21, cleaner than I’d ever seen him. That would change soon, I thought, noticing my own dust-infused fleece and worn-out trekking pants. With Farid back in Godawari, it was like a family reunion. The children were ecstatic, and I wasn’t far behind them. It never felt quite right going through all this without him.

I waited for his arrival to break the news to the children: I was moving out of Godawari, out of Little Princes. If we were going to build a new home for trafficked children in Kathmandu, then I needed to be in Kathmandu.

The children protested. Farid and I told them about the seven children and why it was important to open this new home. We explained that they were fortunate to be in a safe environment at Little Princes. They had people looking out for them, a good home, and the chance to go to school. Many other children, children just like them, were less fortunate. They needed help, and we were going to try to help them. Besides, we said, they were getting old. They hardly needed us anymore. The bigger boys were already doing a great job taking care of the younger children, just how it would be if they were back in their own villages. The older boys smiled and looked at one another, proud of their responsibility.

Farid saved the good news for last: he would be staying in Godawari for at least the next week. The children cheered. They adored Farid and had asked about him constantly when he was still in France. He was both a father and an older brother to them.

As it was a sunny November afternoon and a school holiday, Farid and I sent the children outside. The two of us sat drinking tea as the kids kicked around a half-inflated soccer ball and threw an old Frisbee that, when flung, would go either straight into the dirt, or fly in a wild arc, often landing several hundred feet from the intended target. While we watched this with amusement, Rohan, one of the youngest boys, ran up to us.

“Brother, I take Jablo, okay?”

I looked at Farid, and back at Rohan.

“You take what?”

“Jablo, Brother! Jablo!”

“I don’t think that’s a word, Rohan.”

He marched past us and into the house then the office, where I could see him digging through the box of secondhand toys. He came back out with two sticks attached by a small rope, and a yellow plastic thing that looked like a double-ended goblet or oversized hourglass.

“Jablo, Brother!” said Rohan, holding it up. “I take, okay?”

I had seen one before, but only at a Phish concert during college, where shaggy-haired young people stood around in clouds of marijuana smoke. I certainly didn’t have the faintest clue how to use it. As it turned out, neither did Rohan. He knew that the two sticks were to be used to toss the goblet up in the air. He poked at the goblet with the sticks with all the finesse of Edward Scissorhands trying to lift a teacup. No luck. Then Nishal, who had just hurled the Frisbee into a tree, saw and came running over. He grabbed the sticks from Rohan and took center stage in front of Farid and me.

“I do, Brother! Watch!”

Nishal apparently knew how this thing worked. He rolled the yellow goblet thing back and forth until it caught the rope between the sticks, at which point he kind of slid it back and forth moving his arms, and finally tossed it up. The goblet went high in the air and sliced right through the web of this bright green spider the size of a cat, sending the eight-legged beast careening down toward us, which nobody saw except Farid and me. We shrieked and tripped over each other scrambling to get out of the way. Everyone stopped what they were doing. Nishal quietly returned the Jablo to the box, where it stayed for several months.

I would later learn that the children did not want to take it out because of us; they had decided that, for some reason they would never fully understand, foreigners were terrified of Jablo.

S
etting up the Next Generation Nepal children’s home would take time. There was no such thing as a one-stop shop in Kathmandu, an Ikea-type warehouse where you could order everything you needed. Farid and I, together with a Nepali friend of ours, drove through the alleys of Kathmandu collecting everything we needed. The wall-to-wall carpeting we bought was the only furnishing not made by hand. Thirty bunk beds? We visited a metal smith and negotiated a price. Mattresses? We had our choice of mattress stuffing: synthetic materials at the high end, straw-stuffed sheets at the low end, the same material we used in Little Princes. We chose the middle route: mattresses stuffed with coconut hair. It was not exactly comfortable, but it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than those hay-stuffed things we had in Godawari. Where they got the coconut hair was a mystery; I didn’t recall seeing even a single coconut in the country. Free-standing shelves were made by the bamboo maker. Wooden shelving was made by the local carpenter, who, per Nepalese tradition, had shaved his head and wore only white for exactly one year to mourn the passing of his father. Purchasing sheets meant negotiating a price on meters of fabric, while buying blankets required haggling over the weight and quality of the cotton inside.

I foolishly expected the blankets to be delivered to our house in normal, blanket form. Instead, a man showed up at our house the next day, not with a blanket, but with some fabric and a bag of cotton. I thought back to the conversation with the shop owner, wondering whether there had been an additional fee for actually assembling the blankets. As it turned out, the common practice was to make the blanket right on your front porch. The blanket-maker dumped the cotton into a heap about the size of an armchair. Then he took a long, thin stick and beat the cotton until it was the proper . . . I don’t know, fluffiness, maybe? He stuffed it all into the sheets that he had sewn together and voilà. A blanket was born.

Even more interesting, I learned, was what happens if, say, a year down the road, you find that the blanket has lost its fluffy factor. You simply wait for another man, who every few days patrols the neighborhood. You don’t see him coming, but you hear him—he plucks an object slung over his shoulder, something that looks like a one-stringed harp. You can hear him coming from far away. Flag him down, pay him a small fee, and he takes apart your blanket, dumps the cotton back out, and uses this harp thing to twang at the cotton until its fluff factor is back up to fluffy standards. This began an e-mail debate with Liz about how this actually worked.

“So he just twangs the cotton, and that makes it all fluffy again?” Liz wrote. “What’s the physics behind
that
?”

“I have no clue. Maybe it has to do with the revitalizing property of the metallic vibrations?” I offered.

“Yeah . . . I’m not a physicist or anything, but that doesn’t sound right to me.”

“No, me neither. But it sounded smart, right?”

“A little, I guess,” she wrote. “You should have said you were quoting it from an article, like from
Scientific American.
That
would have sounded smart.”

“Right. Next time.”

Dhaulagiri House (we named it after one of the highest mountains in the Himalaya) was finally ready. Farid and I made up the beds ourselves, eliciting giggles from the local women helping us. When the last sheets had been laid, Farid and I went outside and then walked back in, to get the full effect of the house. I walked slowly from room to room. It was beautiful. Farid had put a tremendous amount of work into it, having done most of the calculating of what we needed and most of the shopping. When it was done, there was something magical about it, as if we had managed to close our eyes and wish hard enough for a home for twenty-five children. And suddenly here it was, under our feet, surrounding us, pristine, unmarked by a single footprint or smudge on the wall. This would change soon enough. But at that moment, it was still fresh, like the perfect gift still in its original packaging. And we had created it.

Farid and I walked back outside. Farid had a wide grin on his face.

“Conor, would you mind if I went to get them?” he said. He had been looking forward to this moment for many months. The moment was here, and I felt it belonged to Farid.

“Go for it,” I said.

Farid went around to the neighboring children’s homes and gathered up Kumar, Amita, Dirgha, Navin, Madan, and Samir. He brought them back to the front gate of the house where I was waiting for them. I lined them up, shoulder to shoulder, and Farid and I stood in front of them.

“You have been inside this house?” Farid asked them.

They shook their heads vigorously. “No, Brother—no, promise, Brother!” I realized, as did Farid by the look on his face, that the six children were afraid they had done something wrong. In their short life experience, that meant getting beaten.

Farid walked to the wooden front door, exquisitely carved with the story of the Buddha. He swung the door open and turned back to the children.

“This is yours. This is your new home,” he said.

They didn’t move. They must have thought it a game, or a test, or something else that they couldn’t yet work out. Navin, back to being the man in charge after his stay in the hospital, finally pushed past the others and walked inside. The other five slowly followed him. Nobody touched anything. They peeked into the living room. They congregated near the front door, a couple of them smiling nervously. Samir, six years old, tugged on my pants and asked, in Nepali, whose house this was. The other children stared at me. Everybody was smiling now, waiting for the punch line of this little adventure.

“Brother, Farid already told you. This is your house.”

“Our house?”

“Your house.”

A pause.

“Our house?”

“Yes, your house.”

“We sleep here?”

“Your beds are upstairs.”

Another pause.

“We can see?” Kumar asked, hesitantly, worried about looking foolish.

“Yes, you can go see,” I said.

Nobody wanted to be the first, but the second Navin put one foot on the first step, Kumar ran past him, up three steps, bolder. Suddenly they were racing, falling over each other to get upstairs first. Even Dirgha, his usual stubborn self, held back only for a few seconds before sprinting after them. It was gratifying to see him run like that, fully recovered from his battle in the malnutrition ward.