Little Princes Read Online Free PDF

scrubbed them down himself. When they had completed that stage successfully, they ran to me, the Keeper of the Shampoo. Raju was the first to reach me. I squeezed a dose of shampoo the size of a quarter into his palm. His eyes grew wide at the apparently enormous pool of shampoo in his hand. I realized my mistake and started to take some back, but he sprinted back to the pool, yelling to his little friend Nuraj.
    Farid noticed. “I think maybe a little less, Conor,” he said, thumb and index finger indicating a tiny amount. “I learned this lesson my first time also. You will see.”
    Raju had rubbed the shampoo into such a thick lather that he looked like he was wearing a white afro wig. The others went bananas when they saw this, scrambling out of the pool and begging me for shampoo.
    “I see what you mean,” I called over to Farid.
    Farid shook his head, marveling at Raju. “They are very resourceful, these children,” he called back. “You will find they do very much with very little.”
    After twenty minutes or so, the children began to exit the pool. One of the boys—maybe seven years old, with what I thought of as Tibetan facial features—approached me.
    “Brother, where you put my towel?” he said, putting his hand on my knee and twisting his torso to scan the courtyard.
    To identify the children, I had memorized the outfits of a few of them. They wore the exact same thing every day, as they only had two sets of clothes each. But now, this little brown body in front of me, clad only in his underwear, looked exactly like the other seventeen children.
    “Uh . . . are you sure I had your towel, Brother?” I said slowly, buying time, hoping he might accidentally yelp out his own name. The word brother was going to save my life here.
    The boy spun back to me and his hands went to his head. “Brother, you had one minute before! You say you take before I swim!”
    Time for a stab in the dark. “Oh . . . right! Sorry, Nishal, I forgot, I put your towel over—”
    “Nishal?! Ahhhh! I no Nishal, Brother!”
    “I never said you were, Brother!”
    “You say ‘Nishal’!”
    “No, no, I said ‘towel.’ ” Didn’t you hear me say ‘towel’?” This blew his mind.
    Farid walked up just at that moment. “Come on, Krish—we’ll find your towel,” he said, turning him around by his shoulders and leading him away. He turned back and gave me an empathetic little shake of the head, not to worry.
    I sat down near the edge of the pool, trying to blend into the stone and praying no other children would come up to me. I felt a tap on my shoulder. Anish was standing there. I recognized Anish because his skin was slightly lighter than the others, he was quite tall for an eight-year-old, and he had a distinctively round face with a smile that curved sharply up at the edges, almost cartoonish.
    “Brother, 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