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pyramid-shaped peak in the distance.
    What Babu didn’t know is that Lakeside, the name for Pokhara’s tourist district on the eastern shore of nearby Phewa Lake, was actually less than a mile away. He could walk there in under ten minutes. When the bus finally arrived and the attendant asked for 60 rupees to take him there, Babu was ecstatic. He still couldn’t afford the ticket, but the attendant let him on anyway, appreciating his excitement. It was only a few minutes’ drive, after all, and the young boy seemed to be particularly eager about it, even though he could have easily walked.
    After only a few minutes on the road, Babu saw his first lake. The vast expanse of Phewa Tal came into view in pieces at first—a patch of blue between two banyan trees, blocked by buildings, flitting in between alleyways. Even with the punctuated view, Babu could tell that this new body of water was bigger than any of the mountain rivers he had ever seen, and eerily still: unmoving, flat, and over a mile across.
Wow … what is this?
Babu wondered. Then, glancing down a narrow street leading to the shore between two buildings, he saw a man on the water, sitting in a kayak, like the ones he had seen floating down the Sun Kosi River near his village.
This is it,
he thought.
    “Stop the bus!” he yelled. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
    The sun was above the horizon now, and the valley’s morning fog began to lift as Babu ran into the street. On the sidewalk, lying on the pavement not far from where he was standing, he saw a line of neon-colored whitewater kayaks, each anywhere from 6 to 9 feet long, scratched and faded from years of unapologetic rental use. Looking farther down the street in each direction, he could see even more kayak shops: their brightly colored boats sporadically lining the sidewalk off into the distance. (There are still well over a dozen of the shops in town. Pokhara is the self-proclaimed “Whitewater Capital of Nepal.”) He approached the store immediately in front of him, smiling from ear to ear, excited to have finally found a place where someone, anyone, might be able to teach him how to kayak.
    “Can I have a job?” he bluntly asked the man opening up the shop in front of him. “I want to learn how to kayak.”
    Evaluating the short, skinny frame of the boy standing in front of him, the man replied bluntly in return. “You’re too small,” he said with a frown. “You can’t work for us.”
    Undeterred, Babu walked down the street to the next shop he could see with kayaks in front of it and asked the same question again.
    “Do you even know how to swim?” they asked him.
    “Yes!” Babu said, thinking that the skill his father taught him back in the village might just help him land his dream job. The shop owner didn’t believe him, however, and asked him to leave.
    At the next kayak shop he visited, they yelled at him to get out before he could even explain that he was actually willing to work in exchange for paddling lessons. The rest of the day, Babu walked from kayak shop to kayak shop, asking for work with no success. He soon began to wonder where he was going to sleep. The sun was beginning to drop, casting long shadows on the pavement. He suddenly realized how hungry he had become. He hadn’t eaten all day. Finding an empty bus stop bench, Babu laid down and cradled himself for a long, cold night’s sleep. Confident in the fact that he would now, after running away from home for the second time, and after having traveled more than halfway across the country, learn how to kayak. Soon.

    Charley Gaillard, owner of the Ganesh Kayak Shop in Pokhara, had known Babu for nearly two years now—ever since the small boy had shown up on a bus with a big smile and started asking every kayak shop owner in town for work. Gaillard, a lanky white-haired Frenchman in his mid-fifties who had originally moved to Pokhara in 1974 to live with his Nepali wife, hadn’t hired him at the time. Babu, despite his