elefanterosado
Sunil
Agra, India. May, 2001.
I found him in rags, supporting his family at the age of 14. He was and remains scrupulously honest, hard working and kind. He drove a dirty, dilapidated bicycle rickshaw and was lucky to make ten rupees a day, not counting the cut he handed the Fagan who leased him his poor peddler's taxi.
We hired him for three successive days and he graciously chauffeured us through his beautiful city, home of The Taj Mahal. The city's beauty was a a tourists' mirage; at night, he and many others like him, returned to its marginal, squalid fringes. He showed up at our hotel at 4 a.m. once, although we hadn't asked him to come until 6. He waited without complaint, in the soon-broiling sun, grateful for a job. Eager to show us the Taj, the crown of his city.
When we bought him a new and spiffy rickshaw before leaving Agra, he was mobbed by cabbies more than twice his age who would never in their lives own such an opulent vehicle. Within minutes, he became the It Boy of Agra's rickshaw cabbies. But only for a few minutes.
It still wasn't enough, and the guilt I felt at aiding and abetting a child's slow decent into near slavery plagued me. Upon returning to the U.S., I begged him to sell rickshaw, pocket the money, and return to school. I sent him money every month for five years. All of which he faithfully spent on a secondary education. In that time he endured total estrangement from his mother ,who only wanted the money his new American friend was sending him, but would not in return give her son one shred of a costless but invaluable love. She had found him in the street a starving child, she told him, and to the street he could return. She did not want him. She was not his real mother; only a temporary stand-in.
Despite the education I bought and paid for and the money I regularly sent my "second son" (as I call him), oceans away in India he remains lost and struggling and alone. He wants to become a doctor and help the poor. But more than anything, he craves the love he was cruelly denied.
"For me you are God, Didi," * he tells me repeatedly in our phone conversations. "This life is for you. I have nobody else. Only you."
And my heart breaks anew.
*Didi is a Hindi endearment, which can loosely be translated as "sister," but there is a special reverence attached to the term.
Sunil
Agra, India. May, 2001.
I found him in rags, supporting his family at the age of 14. He was and remains scrupulously honest, hard working and kind. He drove a dirty, dilapidated bicycle rickshaw and was lucky to make ten rupees a day, not counting the cut he handed the Fagan who leased him his poor peddler's taxi.
We hired him for three successive days and he graciously chauffeured us through his beautiful city, home of The Taj Mahal. The city's beauty was a a tourists' mirage; at night, he and many others like him, returned to its marginal, squalid fringes. He showed up at our hotel at 4 a.m. once, although we hadn't asked him to come until 6. He waited without complaint, in the soon-broiling sun, grateful for a job. Eager to show us the Taj, the crown of his city.
When we bought him a new and spiffy rickshaw before leaving Agra, he was mobbed by cabbies more than twice his age who would never in their lives own such an opulent vehicle. Within minutes, he became the It Boy of Agra's rickshaw cabbies. But only for a few minutes.
It still wasn't enough, and the guilt I felt at aiding and abetting a child's slow decent into near slavery plagued me. Upon returning to the U.S., I begged him to sell rickshaw, pocket the money, and return to school. I sent him money every month for five years. All of which he faithfully spent on a secondary education. In that time he endured total estrangement from his mother ,who only wanted the money his new American friend was sending him, but would not in return give her son one shred of a costless but invaluable love. She had found him in the street a starving child, she told him, and to the street he could return. She did not want him. She was not his real mother; only a temporary stand-in.
Despite the education I bought and paid for and the money I regularly sent my "second son" (as I call him), oceans away in India he remains lost and struggling and alone. He wants to become a doctor and help the poor. But more than anything, he craves the love he was cruelly denied.
"For me you are God, Didi," * he tells me repeatedly in our phone conversations. "This life is for you. I have nobody else. Only you."
And my heart breaks anew.
*Didi is a Hindi endearment, which can loosely be translated as "sister," but there is a special reverence attached to the term.