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Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal. Conor Grennan
Читать онлайн.Название Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007354191
Автор произведения Conor Grennan
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
I looked down at my plate. I’ve seen potatoes. I’m half Irish— I’ve eaten hundreds of potatoes in my life. My friends, this was no potato. This was not even a kind of potato, as the children were suggesting. It may have been some kind of root vegetable, based on how ugly it was; like those animals that live on the ocean floor, where it’s so dark that looks don’t matter. But it didn’t belong on my plate, and it sure as hell wasn’t going in my mouth.
I put the kind of potato to one side and picked up the other object on the plate, which looked like a ball of dried dung covered in sesame seeds. This, according to the children, was a “treat.” Nepali treats are to be feared. I learned that the previous year when I purchased, at the urging of the children, a drink box called Drinking Jelly. (Drinking Jelly is not a treat, for the curious among you. Drinking Jelly tastes like you are drinking jelly.) The sesame dung was a step down on the horrendous scale. It was sticky on the outside and tasted as what I imagine sugar-free soy chocolate might taste like if it had fallen in tar, fossilized, and been dug up millions of years later by hungry scientists.
After our morning visit to the temple, we returned to the house to find Bagwati, our cooking didi, standing on the front porch, wielding a jar of cooking oil. Something about this made me nervous. I kept several feet back as the children marched past me. I asked her what she was planning on doing with the cooking oil.
“Cooking oil, Brother!” she said, pouring some in her hands.
“Yes, oil . . . I know, I was wondering why you have it—” I didn’t finish my sentence. She had snagged Raju like a bear snatching a salmon, and was pulling off his T-shirt in one practiced motion. Suddenly she was rubbing him all over with cooking oil, all over his skin and scrubbing it in his hair like it was conditioner. The other children, squeaky clean from washing in the temple, were merrily stripping down to their skivvies and dousing each other with the oil from the jar, rubbing it on one another’s backs and arms.
Nishal ran toward me, glistening like an oil slick, hands cupped with oil. I saw him too late. I tried to run but slipped on a stray flip-flop. Nishal grabbed my arm and slathered me with oil.
“Nishal!”
“For festival, Brother!”
When one is not able to shower every day, one has, at best, mixed feelings about getting smothered in cooking oil. But a festival was a festival.
I FELL BACK INTO village life. I became closer with the children. The older boys stayed up later than they had the previous year, and they wanted to hear about life in America, and to share their memories from their home region of Humla. They asked me about things they had learned in school: airplanes, Michael Jordan, American football, the fastest cars, Australia, whales, World War II, electricity, and so on. They never believed me about the Moon, that men had walked on it, or about the size of the ocean. One afternoon I took them up to the roof terrace, from where you could see for several miles.
“Now imagine water as far as you can see, and as deep as the tops of the Himalaya, there in the distance,” I told the boys.
In unison: “Waaaaow!” For days afterward, they asked me to confirm it.
“Water would go from Godawari to Kathmandu, yes, Brother?” Anish would ask.
“No, it farther, yes, Brother?” Santosh would say. “You say many many farther!”
“Here to Kathmandu is only ten kilometers, right, Anish?”
“I don’t know, Brother.”
“It is, trust me. So the ocean, the biggest one, is called the Pacific, and it would be like going to Kathmandu and back here one thousand times.”
“Waaaaaow!”
I loved the children at Little Princes. I hadn’t realized how very much I had missed them for the last twelve months until that day.
I watched Farid with the children. He had spent almost twelve months with them, alone for much of that time, though Sandra had visited twice during that year. With only one volunteer, as opposed to the four they had had the previous year, the children had grown more independent. I watched Nishal chase Hriteek across the roof terrace, then trip and tumble head over heels. Miraculously, he leaped up again and continued the chase. A year ago, Nishal would have sat there crying until a volunteer came to pick him up. Anish, who had often helped with washing pots, above and beyond his nightly chores, now spent more time with Nanu, our washing didi, helping her with the laundry, as they beat the clothes against the concrete and wrung them out, one twisting in one direction, the other twisting in the other. Priya, Raju’s seven-year-old sister, was learning to cook together with Bagwati, watching her make daal bhat, helping pour in the spices.
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