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“What man?” he stalled.
“At the vendor’s stall. The man with the beard.”
He looked past her to the street. “Just somebody I used to work with.”
“You worked for the helicopter tour company?”
“No, it was on something else. A project.”
The project had been the subject of his master’s thesis, the culmination of plans and preparation he’d begun as a raw undergraduate intern on fire to make a difference in Nepal.
The idea was to hire Sherpa guides to take trekkers around in the Khumbu and to Annapurna, pay them a living wage, and put them through continuing education so they would be at the cutting edge of ecotourism. The more credits they had, the more they got paid. The curriculum emphasized local expertise and traditional ways, combined with evidence-based international best practices.
Kal had done an internship for Brian in college. When he got the pilot project worked out, he’d pitched it to him first, and Brian was enthusiastic. Brian followed Kal’s plans and put the guides to work. Meanwhile, Kal took meetings with Nepalese government officials to push the adoption of a policy that would first incentivize and later make it mandatory for trekkers to hire one of these trained local guides rather than whoever they ran into outside the airport, or no guide at all.
The point was supposed to be to show how combining an official state commitment to ecotourism with empowerment of local guides could work for everyone: give the tourists a safe experience they could feel good about, protect the fragile landscape, put more money in the government’s coffers in the form of higher permit fees, and attract business to Brian’s operation in the bargain.
It didn’t work out that way. The government got snarled up with infighting and never delivered on its promises. The guides skipped training, worked side businesses, and asked for tips they weren’t supposed to get, which the tourists didn’t like. Brian lost money. A hundred other things went wrong. By the time the earthquake brought the whole thing to an end, it felt like a mercy killing.
But afterward, it kept getting worse for the people he’d tried to help. They lost their stake in the business, they lost their homes, Pasang had lost his daughter. Then his life.
Kal gestured at Rosemary’s plate. “Keep eating.”
He almost wanted to tell her about it, but that was stupid. Who wanted to talk about being a failure?
“Where’d you grow up?” he asked.
“Kent.”
“That’s in England?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
“Green.”
“Try another bite,” he suggested.
She did, and he lobbed her a few more easy questions, which she answered in one syllable until she said, out of nowhere, “I gave birth to Beatrice at home.”
“Tell me about that.”
She was looking past him, lost in herself, but she’d gotten some of her color back. “I was a few days past my due date, and I woke up around midnight with a contraction. I knew I’d started labor. I got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and very calmly vomited into the toilet.”
“That sounds like you.”
“And I worried, afterward, that I’d woken my husband, Winston, but I hadn’t. The worry told me I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to know.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I sent him off to London in the morning, to the office, and I couldn’t lift my arm to wave goodbye or he would’ve seen the circle of sweat on my nightshirt and known something was wrong. I took a pitcher of water upstairs to the bedroom. It took me an hour to climb the stairs—it seemed like an hour—but I made it to the bed and poured myself a glass of water. I unplugged the phone. We didn’t have mobiles then. Winston came home from the office at half-six, took one look at me laboring in the bed and went gray.”
“I’ll bet.”
She bit off half of another dumpling and ground it between her back teeth. “Beatrice was born an hour later.”
“Healthy?”
