“Well, there’s absolutely no way we can take him”, I thought to myself with relief as I watched the young mother walk in through the gate holding her child in her arms. The child appeared to be no more than eighteen months old and his body was so bent and twisted it was almost painful just to look at him. “He’s too young, for one thing, and we have no facilities for such severe physical problems, for another. No way. We can’t.” I went on arguing my case with myself and avoiding the eyes of the mother for as long as possible.

She was in the office now and I sat behind the wide desk and prayed that the interview would be short. “What can you do for my son?” she asked. She got right to the point, and her smile was so sad and so sweet that it stopped me in my tracks.

“What’s his name”? I asked, almost in spite of myself. I had to force myself to look at him. “Rahul”, she sad proudly, beaming down at him. “Hello, Rahul,” I said, coming around the desk and sitting in the chair beside him. He looked directly into my eyes and seemed to search my face carefully. Then he smiled. I have seldom been so moved by a child as I was by Rahul at that moment. I felt as if he was surfacing from some unimaginable depth, perhaps with a message. I smiled back at him and his eyes locked with mine until I finally looked away. His mother was watching me expectantly and with an effort I shook myself free of the strange spell I had fallen under.

“I am very sorry,” I said slowly. “Karuna Vihar is a school for children with mental handicaps- we have no facilities for a child with the kind of physical problems Rahul has.”

“But you must be able to do something,” She said helplessly. “Anything would be more than he’s getting now.”

“In any case, he’s far too young,” I said, as if that settled everything. “We couldn’t possibly take him until he’s at least three.’’

“He’s three and a half”, she said sadly, as if she already knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

She left soon after, but I had a premonition that we had not seen last of her. The next day I discovered, to my surprise, that she lived just three doors down from the school, in a house I passed at least twice everyday, and I had never seen her before. She and her husband lived in the servants’ quarters of a large house in our neighborhood where she worked part-time mornings and evenings while he looked after the children. Once he left for work, she was pretty much stuck in the house as she found it too tiring to carry Rahul around.

Karuna Vihar, however, was close enough for her to make frequent visits. Hardly a week went by that she didn’t drop in – sometimes to consult with Linda and Paula, sometimes to importune me, but mostly just for the company of people who didn’t stare at Rahul or whisper about him or make her feel she had done something terrible to deserve a child like him. She told me one day as she was leaving that just seeing all of us made her feel lighter.

It was the reverse for us. Seeing her made us feel miserable, knowing how little we were doing for baby Rahul. Every few days someone would groan. “Oh, there must be something we can do for him!” and we would all rack our brains yet again and still come up with nothing.

Karuna Vihar was nearly a year old when we welcomed our first young volunteers from abroad (not counting Paula). Kate and Sophie came to us through the GAP organization, a British program which placed students in- between high school and college (in the “gap” year) in service oriented institutions around the world. We had thought when we applied for volunteers that by the time they joined us we would have plenty of children and more than enough for them to do, but our application was processed so quickly that they arrived a little sooner than we expected.

Within a few days it was clear that Kate and Sophie really wanted to work. They were eager and willing to do just about anything we asked, but they were anxious that the work be meaningful. Cleaning cupboards was not exactly what they had in mind. Paula did her best to make use of their energy and talents, but there were simply not that many. with no Hindi and no Special Education skills, what they could do were necessarily limited. Then Paula had a brainwave. What about using them to design a program for Baby Rahul?

Three things seemed essential: Rahul needed physiotherapy and a chance to socialize with other children and Rina, his mom, needed a break. The next morning, Paula gave Kate and Sophie their new assignment. First, Linda would train them in how to exercise Rahul’s arms and legs to prevent the contractures that would inevitably develop without physio. When they were ready, they would go to Rahul’s house and conduct the sessions there. Then they would take him for a half hour walk around Vasant Vihar (I gave him them an old stroller of Moy Moy’s), ending up back at Karuna Vihar in time for the singing session. Rahul would join the other children in the music room for forty minutes before being brought back home. With any luck, Rina would have had a chance to get he own work done, with maybe even an extra ten minutes for a cup of tea.

Kate and Sophie plunged into their new responsibilities with great good will and it was delightful to see how quickly they were able to establish a rapport with both Rina and Rahul, neither side knowing a word of the other’s language. Within a few weeks, Rahul was an accepted part of the Karuna Vihar scene and it was clear to all of us that it would have to continue even after Kate and Sophie left. “Now that it’s begun,” Paula pointed out, “it won’t be so difficult to continue…. it’s always starting that’s the hard bit.”

Kate and Sophie stayed for four months and never missed a day with Rahul. When they returned to England, Madhu, one of our assistant teachers, took on the job so that he could continue coming to school everyday. His presence had a sobering effect on all of us. He was an exceptionally sweet-tempered child, crying only when he had his physiotherapy sessions, and it was impossible to take our own problems too seriously in the light of his. Looking at him, it was also impossible not to wonder about the mysterious nature of the universe: why should a child have to suffer like this?

Leon Bloy, the great French novelist, once wrote “There are places in the heart that do not exist, and into them enters suffering that they might have existence”. I had experienced some of this myself with Moy Moy, and looking at Rina I thought it must be true for her as well. There are levels of pain one would never choose to experience, and yet the space thus carved in the heart can be filled with a joy unimaginable in a normal life. Moy Moy’s silence has transformed our relationship from the usual human comedy of errors with misunderstandings, hurt feelings and crossed signals into an intuitive, free-flowing, dance-like mosaic, an easy back and forth interplay in which we seldom miss our cues.

Being the mother of Moy Moy, I do not think I can be accused of romanticizing when I say that Rina’s relationship with Rahul has elements of the Divine. She communicates with him wordlessly, on some primeval plane, anticipating his needs and moods as if their bodies are one and all the boundaries that normally separate us from each other have been dissolved. Seeing him, and knowing the poverty his parents struggle in, one would expect her face to be haggard and drawn with the sheer weariness of her task. But in fact, it confounds all expectations in its serenity and sweetness, a living lesson to the world in how to live a life.