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It was quite chilly and I got up with a start, feeling the roadside dirt on my lips. I was, at this time, one of many children on the street – dirty, hungry, with nowhere to go.

The night’s stale loaf of bread had already been digested and I was ravenous. Nevertheless, I started the morning’s work. This was at a tea shop, where I carried fifty buckets of water, two at a time, over some hundred meters. The chore took the best part of two hours and young as I was, I could have eaten a ton by the end of it! Instead, I got a fistful of watery rice and a cup of tea.

We laboured a good fourteen hours each day, not for money, but from the dire need of those few and paltry meals. Come night, we fell asleep on cold, bare floors and crawling insects feasted on our shivering flesh.

This book is for all the sorry street-bound children of our world; vulnerable, struggling to get by on a few rupees and embraced only by despair. As citizens and as humans, we must pull them out from this state, educate them, give them homes and, above all, their lost childhood.