Free Little Princes by Conor Grennan

“No, Brother—you are weak, like a girl,” he whispered back.
    A few minutes later, we found a doctor coming out of his office. He did a quick examination of Santosh, pressing on the boy’s chest, and determined there was indeed something wrong. He led us to the Constant Observation Room, where I laid Santosh on the last available bed. The other four were taken by mothers and their young children. Lying flat, Santosh’s feet touched the rusting metal at the foot of the bed.
    The doctor returned to take a blood sample. He struggled to find a vein in the poorly lit room, so I took out my flashlight and shone it on Santosh’s arm. A minute later, sample secured, he told us we could relax for the rest of the evening. The tests would be done the following day. Sandra and I would stay overnight with him, because the pediatric ward was hopelessly understaffed and they were unable to care for all the patients.
    The only sources of heat were three portable heaters, and the nurses had commandeered all three on the other side of the glass in the Constant Observation Room. Santosh was covered only by a thin blanket, so we dressed him in all the clothes we had brought for him, including his gloves and a jacket, and Sandra managed to find one more blanket. I put on two fleeces and still I was shivering.
    When Santosh was finally asleep, we pulled two wooden stools up to the bed, one on each side, and laid our heads on opposite sides of the foot of the bed. The relative height of the stool to the bed plus the bitter cold conspired to make sleeping a near impossibility. When a baby began wailing a few minutes later, Sandra raised her head, clearly exhausted.
    “Listen,” she whispered. “You try to find some blankets and a free bed somewhere. I will get into bed with Santosh.”
    “You must be joking—that bed barely fits him.”
    “I’ve slept in much worse, believe me.”
    After her story of being taken by the Maoists, it was easy to believe.
    I knocked on the window to ask the nurse about extra blankets. After a few tired denials that such blankets existed, I asked if I might, then, borrow just one of their heaters to bring into the room to help keep Santosh warm. She rolled her eyes, stepped over the row of three heaters, and motioned for me to follow her to a storeroom.
    “All we have is here,” she said. “Take what you want. Do not tell doctor I let you here.”
    The storeroom was almost bare. I took the only useful items I could find—a plastic hospital pillow and two tablecloths—and walked back to our bed. Sandra, sure enough, had managed to contort herself in beside Santosh.
    “Okay, I’m off,” I whispered.
    “Good—where?”
    “Uhh, not exactly sure—down the hall, I guess?”
    I didn’t tell her I had not yet found an extra bed. The nurse had given her reluctant permission to sleep in any spare bed I could find, provided I was up early and that nobody in the room noticed me. That was as good a deal as I was going to get that night. I wandered down the hall of the pediatric ward, my footsteps echoing. Every room was the same: overcrowded, unclean, without sinks or trash cans or any indication that it was being monitored by anybody but the patients inside.
    In a wing far, far away, I poked my head into a brightly lit room. There was a bed that had been recently vacated, judging by the fact that the sheets were unmade. Inside, several tired-looking Nepali women were breast-feeding babies. I stepped back out and looked at the sign on the door. I couldn’t read the Sanskrit, but the English translation below it gave me pause, even in my exhausted state. It read: MATERNITY WARD . I steeled myself, then strode in.
    The women’s eyes followed me as I made my way through the ward. Babies stopped nursing. The air was thick as water; time slowed down. I considered what these poor mothers who had just endured the trauma of childbirth must have been thinking, a young pale man marching in at 2:00 A.M. carrying two