“When I turned 16, I started thinking. I had slaved for this man for 10 years for nothing in return, while my labour filled his Bhakari with grains. The animals had become fat and healthy and the man drank from copper glasses while I starved to become a two-legged skin and bones. How could a human lack compassion for his own kind? One day, I gathered all the courage to ask him about my father and mother. I told him about my longing to see them. That made him furious and he started to hit me. It was then I decided that it was time for me to leave from his clutches or else my life would be spent as a slave. As I screamed for help a few elderly men of the village came. And they refuted the man’s action and told him he could not hold me captive against my will. They warned him of the Panchayat and their laws. Lastly, the man gave up and I remember it as sunlight, before I left, I undressed my rags to show him I was not taking any of his possessions. I never looked back. I walked and walked in search of father and mother. From one village to another. I knew my father’s name and that was all I had. I was hungry and I was thirsty. For several days, I slept on people corridors. Some gave me water and some gave me alcohol and flour to eat. I dreamt of meeting mother and my brothers and sisters. I dreamt of home and finally resting to the fire that mother would make for me. The string of hope kept me alive. One day, I met a man who looked at me and said, “You resemble a Thapa man I know. Are you his son?” Without thinking, I told him I was and that I had been separated from him for 10 years and that I wanted to go home. The man told me that they lived at the end of a village on the edge of a cliff which he pointed to me. I ran as I wanted to reach home before the sun disappeared behind the hills. I ran so fast that when I reached the shed that father and mother lived, I fainted. When I woke up I was inside the shed. And for the first time after ten years I saw mother. In the corner, she was heating some corn in a broken pot. My sisters lay by her side with barely enough clothes to cover their bodies. I looked around and I realised that father and mother live in destituteness and had no possessions of their own. Mother came to me and and put a fistful of corn in my hand and with tears in her eyes, said, “Son, I am happy you are home. Your father must be out begging for food for himself. He hardly brings any home. I work all day in return for this corn. We are lucky if your father brings nettle leaves. We have no food for tomorrow.” What mother said, broke my heart to pieces. I went out and I took out a pouch I had hidden from the man in which were 30 coins I had won by betting in marbles. I bought half a sack of millet flour and asked mother to keep it. She made Dhedo enough for ten men. I sat in the dark corner and I watched my starving sisters devour it in one sitting. Tears did not stop running down my face.”