Mahesh is just one of many children who cross the open border into India every year, lured by unfounded dreams of lucrative employment and a better standard of living beyond the sparse opportunities of their own rural existence.
Sadly the reality is often very different.
Binay Sahi, a cleaner at a health centre working fulltime to fund schooling for his children so that they might escape the life of manual work that he himself has endured, was oblivious to his son Mahesh’s escapist fantasies.
On February 20, after a brief dispute with his father over school grades, Mahesh fled from his family home, leaving behind five siblings and a mother and father with no clue as to his whereabouts, effectively vanishing.
Traveling as a non-paying minor on a local bus and then skipping the fare on a train to Calcutta, India, Mahesh was befriended by a stranger who advised him to turn back, that India was no place for a young boy like him, all
alone. But by this point, there was no turning back.
Picked up by a police patrol, Mahesh found himself in the care of the welfare organization, Childline, and subsequently, a halfway home operated by the NGO, Cini Asha, which works with the ever-swelling number of displaced children living on Calcutta’s dusty streets.
For many Nepali runaways, this is the end of their story. Destined to spend their childhoods in homes with little or no education and no means of returning home under their own steam, their plight goes largely unnoticed to the outside world.
Fortunately, for Mahesh, however, this time somebody was taking notice.
On a routine visit to the Cini Asha home, he was spotted by an EBMF staff who persevered to find and reunite him with his family back in Nepal, a process that entails many man hours, administration and legal documentation works.
Finally, after a rescue operation that spanned three days, Mahesh and his father enjoyed an emotional reunion at Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, before starting the long journey back home to Matiyar Ba in Mirchaiya in Nepal where Mahesh could once again concentrate on the simple matter of being a child, carefree and safe with his parents, and where he belongs, once again.
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