LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

you no remember names,” he said. It was an observation rather than a question.

      “Yes I do!” My protest was both instinctive and absurd, like a schoolboy in trouble.

      Anish sat down next to me, facing the shallow pool where the boys were splashing around. He pointed at one of the boys.

      “That is Hriteek. You know because he is always climbing,” he said. Sure enough, Hriteek, whose picture I had crumpled up the day before, was trying to climb the entrance gate. Anish pointed at another boy. “That is Nishal, looking like he will cry right now. With the towel is Raju, he is most small boy here. That is Santosh, the tall boy. . . .”

      This lesson continued for the next ten minutes, Anish slowly drying on the flagstones in the hot sun, me beside him in the shade so I wouldn’t burn. When he had named all the boys and the two girls twice, he quizzed me on a few of them, all of whom I got wrong except for when he asked, slightly exasperated, if I knew his name.

      “Yes! Anish!” I said proudly.

      He smiled. “Okay, Brother. You pass,” he said, and went to get his clothes.

      Soon everybody was out of the pool. Then it was laundry time for all the clothes that needed washing. The children had stuffed their clothes that needed washing in small plastic bags that they had found discarded around the village. When the plastic bags tore, the children would find tape and repair them. I thought of my local grocery store double-bagging a can of soda and felt another stab of guilt over my wastefulness.

      The children carried their clothes across the path to where the water flowed out of the pool and down a two-foot-wide shallow canal to a stream. Working together, they used soap to scrub their pants and shirts. The youngest boys, Raju and Nuraj, didn’t have the arm strength to tackle such a project, so they concentrated on their little socks, laying them on the concrete and scraping them with a small chunk of soap. The orphanage had a woman who washed the boys’ clothes for them (a washing didi), but this was another way of teaching the children to take responsibility for themselves, of keeping them in as normal a life as possible considering they had been robbed of their families.

      Back at the orphanage, the children hung their clothes to dry, then resumed their yelling and bouncing off each other. They had boundless energy. My own energy level was not nearly so high. But as luck would have it, the most popular game at Little Princes was a board game called carrom—or carrom board, as the children called it. The children (indeed, all of Nepal) were obsessed with this game. It is played on a square board with holes in the four corners. The object of the game is to flick a blue disc across the board at the black-and-white discs in an attempt to knock the discs into the holes. It’s like a cross between billiards and shuffleboard.

      Every child in the house not only wanted to play this game, but they wanted to play it against me. I was first taught the rules by Santosh, who at nine years old was one of the older boys in the house.

      “Look, Brother, you hit with your finger, yes, like this. See, I score, so is my turn again. And I hit again . . . and I score again, so my turn again. . . . And I score again, so my turn—”

      “I get it, Santosh,” I interrupted.

      “You try now, Brother!”

      I flicked one of the discs, which ricocheted off the board. Santosh watched it fly past him and slide under the couch. Then he looked back at the board.

      “Okay, Brother, you miss, so my turn again. . . . And I score, so my turn again.”

      He beat me in six minutes flat; I had put up about as much fight as a loaf of bread. The children were eager to play me, not to see if they could win—they all won—but to time one another to see how quickly they could shut me out. The fact that I was trying as hard as I could to just score a single point was a severe blow to my ego. Nuraj was hardly even paying attention, and that little four-year-old ran the board on me.

      I came closest to beating Raju. After initially refusing to play him a third time, citing a broken hand—it was the first excuse that came to mind—I finally played him only after he agreed to let me have the first fifteen shots in a row. I scored twice before Raju’s turn. He promptly scored continuously until all his discs had disappeared down the holes. The children gathered around for that match, jabbering away in Nepali. Anish leaned over to me.

      “Brother,” Anish said in a loud, hoarse whisper that was louder than his normal speaking voice. “Everybody saying they never have seen Raju win this game before, Brother.”

      “Thanks for that translation, Anish—that’s very helpful.”

      “You are welcome, Conor Brother,” he whisper-yelled.

      This loss was still fresh in my mind when Raju and Nuraj asked me to play Farmyard Snap. I felt like this was my chance to redeem myself. I smiled to myself when they challenged me, and told Raju to bring it on.

      “What means ‘bring it on,’ Brother?”

      “It means we can play.”

      “Brother, remember I give you many many hits and I win you in carrom board, Brother? Very funny, yes, Brother?”

      “Just get the cards, Raju.”

      Farmyard Snap, as you may recognize from the name, is the same game as Patience, Memory, or Concentration. You turn the cards facedown, mix them up, and try to match the pairs. In this case, the pictures on the other side were of barnyard animals. It was a well-worn deck of cards, clearly used by other volunteers to help the children learn the English words for the various animals. English was an excellent skill for them to learn, and furthering the education of the children was one of the main reasons for being here. And as we laid out the cards, I tried to remind myself of that. Truly I did. But all I could think about was how badly I was going to crush these kids in Farmyard Snap.

      I won the first game handily. To my slight disappointment, they both just laughed every time I uncovered a match, clapping for me as if they were letting me win. They even cheered for me when I won; Nuraj went out to tell some of the other boys like a proud father. When he returned I challenged them to a rematch to show my victory was no fluke.

      “What means ‘rematch,’ Brother?”

      “We play again—if you don’t mind me winning.”

      “Yayyyyy!” they cried together.

      Games two, three, and four didn’t go as planned.

      Raju and Nuraj held a quick tête-à-tête following their loss in game one and decided they would play as a single team. I consented. Their game-time chatter sounded innocuous enough. It was unclear if they were even talking about the game at all, as I noted during one particularly animated debate between them, which ended when Nuraj put his entire fist in his mouth and Raju sullenly conceded some point. Still, I couldn’t trust them, and I was soon proven right. The cards were bent from extensive use, and they were able to push their little faces against the floor to see what was on the other side. Since they never actually touched the cards, I wasn’t able to penalize them, nor could I get my huge head low enough to see the other side myself—though I did try, which was a source of much amusement for them. They also pointed out to each other where the other donkey was, or where they remembered seeing the ducks. When it was my turn, they tried to distract me by loudly singing Nepali songs or climbing on my back and tugging on my hair. There was nothing in the Farmyard Snap rules against this per se, but it put me at a disadvantage that I was unable to overcome.

      “Remash! Remash!” they chanted after the sixth game.

      “I can’t—remember my broken hand?” I reminded them.

      “Brother, I no think hand broken,” Nuraj said, poking at my hand.

      “Let’s go find the other boys outside,” I suggested.

      “Yayyyyy!”

      The rest of the boys were playing soccer next to a nearby wheat field, and I sent the two little cheaters off to join them. Then I sneaked back to my bedroom

Скачать книгу