New Year’s in Nepal: Home of the World’s Smallest Man

By Conor | January 5th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I first learned about the World’s Smallest Man from the kids in our children’s home.

They were very proud of him. They knew him by name. I was not surprised. I like small countries like Nepal because they have a few things for which they demand recognition. In Nepal, the claim to fame du jour is the world’s smallest man. The fact that they have the world’s tallest mountain – that every school child around the planet has heard of Mount Everest – is old news. Similarly, the birthplace of the Buddha is in Nepal. He was born in Nepal. The Buddha! He’s Nepalese! You think the Hoboken-ites take pride in Frank Sinatra? They got the freakin’ Buddha!

But they don’t talk about that. Again, old news.

Within perhaps 20 minutes of seeing the children for the first time in two years, however, they were breathlessly telling Liz and me about Khagendra Thapa. They said his name as if we surely knew who he was.

And they brought it up out of nowhere. I was probably in the midst of commenting how peaceful it was here in their new home, north of Kathmandu, where we (Next Generation Nepal) moved recently because we had expanded our children’s home from 20 children to 30 children.

Or perhaps I was in mid-sentence, noting that this new village in Hattigauda was similar to the old village of Godawari, in that it was at the base of the enormous circle of hills that enclosed, and thus formed, the Kathmandu Valley.

Maybe I was mentioning how clean the air was here, a 15 minute walk from the road, through the wheat and potato fields that were now just dirt and grass in the dry season.

Whatever it was, it was enough of an in for them to bring up Khagendra Thapa.

“He is as tall as one shoe, brother!” Kamal shouted, apropos of nothing.

I paused, in the middle of asking Dharma how his exams were going, and looked at Kamal.

“Who is as tall as one shoe?”

“Khagendra Thapa, brother!”

The boys nodded vigorously. I glanced at Liz, whose own furrowed eyebrows gave me confidence to ask my next question.

“Remind me.”

“Shortest man in world, brother!” This was shouted by perhaps half a dozen of the boys, the older ones.

In truth, all the children are the older ones now. I’ve known the Little Princes for exactly five years now. They are becoming young men – the eldest ones are, anyway, and there are no small children among them, save the more recently rescued ten children that increased the number from 20 to 30 children.

“Now waiting for Guinness book to make confirmation,” Kamal clarified. “They come and they measure him and they see that he weighs only four KG [kilograms] and he eat only three ounce food per day.” More nodding from the others. They knew this story like they knew their own names. “Tall as one shoe! We see photos, brother!”

Later, at our hotel, I confirmed it. This little dude, Khagendra Thapa, is 18 years old and stands 22 inches – thus crushing the current record held by a gangly 28 inch Chinese man. He is, indeed, quite the tiny fellow. And he was standing next to a shoe. A huge shoe, yes, but a shoe.

It wasn’t the excitement of being in the same country as the world’s shortest man that kept me awake that night. It was recalling the pride that the children took in him. Khagendra Thapa would put Nepal on the map, in a way that the Buddha and Mount Everest had failed to do. His name would spill from the tongues of every fifth grader in social studies class, as sure as Abe Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. His tiny face would be chiseled in granite on Mount Rushmore or maybe given his own wee statue in front of the US Supreme Court, sitting in the scales justice, with a grapefruit on the other side of the scale.

The world’s shortest man is quite the claim to fame. And those kids knew it.

I am also told, often, that Nepal is also second in the world in terms of amount of rivers or something like that. That one was never quite clear to me, to be honest. Something about having a lot of water compared to the size of the country. This statistic is only quoted ironically, however, because in Nepal electricity is, for the most part, hydro-powered, and yet last year there were electricity cuts for 16 hours per day. Imagine that!

Did you imagine it? Crazy, right?

I remember those days of long electricity outages, when I was living here. I remember living next door to the children’s home and, when the power flicked back on in Kathmandu after six straight hours of darkness, hearing the cheers from the children coming through my open window.

Nepal is a place you can’t forget. The sense of smell in the human body is the only sense that is hardwired to the brain – that is, it requires no thinking, it simply transports you back to a place or time. Nepal is all about smells. It’s all about incense and spice and animals and dust and street food and the oil that Nepalis put in their hair and burning trash on the street that disintegrates into the pavement.

And how everything feels. The torn up back seat of every battered taxi, covered in a swatch of carpet. The boys leaping on us when we visit, the girls holding our hands as we walk, the short, smooth hair of the younger boys when you tussle their hair, the feel of mushy, boiling rice and lentils and potatoes and cauliflower covered in spices as we scoop it off the plate with our bare hands and shovel it into our mouths, breathing quickly to cool it as it burns our palettes.

The sounds of near-constant honking, and the views of the Himalaya through the smog, and the taste of whatever spice is covering the vegetables that is so hot it makes your nose run. All these things advance on us simultaneously here, they flank us and ambush us and, sometimes, help us retreat from the chaos in Kathmandu.

Mostly, it is nice to be back in Nepal for this reason:

For the last year, almost exactly one year in fact, I have been writing this book about Nepal, about the children of the Little Princes, about the experiences here, about the boys and little girls themselves. I’ve been living with them in New York City, which means that Liz has also been living with them. It’s been all consuming, every single day I’ve been in that world. And 100,000 words and over 300 pages later, the book is finished. I turned it in, and Liz and I left for Nepal. It was our own epilogue.

The children and our amazing staff are doing wonderfully, by the way. We have found the families of well over 200 children, and are supporting about 50 children. We need your help, and it would be totally awesome if you wanted to subscribe to the newsletter or check out our website at www.nextgenerationnepal.org. It’s new, and it’s good times.

Happy new year everybody!