Little Princes by Conor Grennan Read Free Book Online

take up about sixty seconds.
    “Okay, boys, so, you know how—” I began slowly, drawing out my words. Then, miraculously, I was interrupted by Santosh.
    “I teach, Brother!” he said, leaping to his feet.
    “Yes! You teach, Santosh!” I shouted, my arms shooting skyward in jubilation. “What would you like to teach?”
    “I teach water, Brother!”
    “Yes! Yes! Water! This is excellent, Santosh! Water is science! You are doing very well! Go!”
    I did not care what Santosh did at that point. He could have eaten paper and I would have cried “Behold! Science!” All that mattered was that all eyes were focused on him, not me, and that the clock was ticking.
    Santosh was incredibly bright. I had seen him invent toys for the other kids to play using only the bamboo shoots in the garden. When I needed to fix something in the house that was broken, I would ask Santosh how to do it. Even knowing that, I was blown away when he started talking. He taught the group about the water cycle, from start to finish, about the importance of evaporation and what causes dew, and how pollution affects the cycle. I was listening along with everybody else, thinking Really? I had no idea!
    The thirty minutes sped by, and I dismissed the class to general applause. The next group came in, the middle kids, the seven- and eight-year-olds.
    I waited for Santosh and the others to leave. Then I closed the door and again arranged the children in a semicircle.
    “Okay, everybody, today we’re going to learn about the water cycle!”
    The children cheered, and I silently thanked Santosh.
    T he children were often surprisingly independent. Bedtime, however, was not one of those times. In one bedroom, the six youngest boys slept together in one king-sized bed on a thin straw mattress, just like the one I used. Getting each of the six children into bed presented its own challenge. Raju would recount his entire day in painstaking detail, oblivious to your efforts to get him to raise his arms so you could get his T-shirt off. Nuraj would stand completely still, head and eyelids drooping, and allow you to undress him and outfit him in a full teddy-bear suit. After struggling to get his legs and arms into the appropriate holes and triumphantly zipping it up from ankle to neck, his eyes would pop open like an android snapping to life and he’d yell “ Toilet !!” and he’d start thrashing around like Houdini in a straitjacket while you picked him up and raced him to the bathroom.
    Evenings were a difficult time for Nishal, who was often sulking, if not outright wailing, about some injustice. Volunteers took turns comforting him, but I soon began taking care of Nishal every night. Sulking and wailing at bedtime was one of my defining traits when I was Nishal’s age. I needed constant attention, and I figured the quickest way to achieve it was by sulking. Now I struggled, as my parents must have, to find the right balance between being loving and being strict. It was strangely healing for me; I had never quite gotten over a sense of guilt for my childhood temper tantrums. My mother must have had the patience of . . . well, of a mom, I guess. Making sure Nishal went to bed, absorbing that energy from him, did wonders for both my patience and peace of mind.
    One by one we would round up the rest of the children and plop them into bed. When they were all lying down, covered with a large blanket with their little heads lined up in a row like a rack of bowling balls, we would give them all little hugs good night and turn off the lights, then head over to the bigger kids’ room.
    There were ten boys in the other room, two kids per double bed. (The two girls, Yangani and Priya, slept downstairs in a room with Bagwati, our live-in cooking didi .) I would come in to find Farid moving from bed to bed, getting one pair to lie down as the pair across the room popped up, a life-sized version of Whac-A-Mole. When the children saw me walk in they would leap up