The Definition of Love

How do you explain love? How do you begin to describe and comprehend the forces of compassion, faith and dedication that can so define a person that he will spend the hours of his life loving those whom no else stops to notice? Those whom he has no obligation to care about, no reason to work for, and no reward other than the knowledge that he is making some small dent in the endless tide of need.

The best you can hope to do is to stand outside a small, nondescript building on a dusty street in the middle of India, and watch two dozen once-homeless children rush out to greet the man who didn’t allow them to fall through the crack.

Here in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of India’s AIDS epidemic, C.P. Kumar and his family took in 26 abandoned children. The epidemic has created a secondary human rights crisis – the orphaning of children on a massive scale. There are nearly two million such children in India who have lost their parents to AIDS – the most AIDS orphans in any single country of the world, and their numbers are expected to double within the next five years. More children are living now with HIV-positive parents than have already been orphaned. These are the silent disasters.

For the past fifteen years C.P. has cared for these children left behind in the wake of the AIDS crisis. C.P. Kumar works as a clerk in the government during the day, but spends most of his evenings here with the children. I was immediately given a tour by the entire household. It didn’t take long.

The place was so tiny, the size of a small one-bedroom apartment, that I could not imagine how twenty-five children and a few staff members slept there. There were two small rooms – the boys slept on the floor of one and girls in the other. Next was a broom closet kitchen barely big enough for two people to stand in, and bathrooms on the rooftop completed the structure. The back “play yard” consisted of a small patch of red dirt. The entire place could fit into the living room and office of my house – which at twelve hundred-fifty square feet is modest by U.S. standards.

Yet the children living there seemed happy to have a home, with little reference point to the cramped and bleak shelter in their completely healthy self-centredness of childhood. They were well dressed, well-fed and cared for. A thick garland of jasmine and marigold flowers was placed around my neck and the girls and boys lined up in separate groups in front of us on the floor. They stood one at a time to state their names, ages and level in school, then recited their ABCs as a group and sang. The blue walls were covered with pictures of animals, flowers and objects with the vocabulary words printed carefully in English. A world map and chalkboard were spread wide behind me.

For hours we played games and sang songs. Eager students brought me their schoolwork and stood by, nervously and proudly, as I pored over it. One boy of about ten with intense eyes and a mere wisp of a smile handed me an extraordinary science notebook. It was filled with intricate drawings of scientific experiments complete with hypotheses, notes, procedures and results, most of which I could not understand due to their complexity.

Most of the children were very young, ranging from four to ten years old, with only a couple of twelve or fourteen. The oldest was an eighth-grade girl called Sutrasini. When she wasn’t playing chess she followed me quietly, watching with the interest an almost-adult exhibits in the actions of a grown-up. She was a serious girl who seemed to be drawn to someone older that she could try to relate to, and I asked her questions about herself and her life at Little Hearts. Used to an everyday existence spent with these small children, Sutrasini yearned for someone to take her seriously, to recognize her maturity and intelligence as the young woman she was on the verge of becoming.

Sutrasini and the others attended school right down the street, and C.P. and his wife Mamatha - along with their own two sons, Prince and Boon - provided a loving surrogate family. Little Hearts was truly a place for children who had nowhere else to go. Often a teacher or other local official would bring a child to Little Hearts; in other cases C.P. heard of situations in the local community and offered to take in the orphans.

Their stories were heartbreaking. In early 2003 he read about an infant who had been abandoned in a nearby village after her fourteen-year-old mother was gang-raped. The mother disappeared after the attack, leaving her tiny daughter behind. A local teacher brought the infant, Anantha, to Little Hearts. Four years later Anantha was a healthy, chubby-cheeked girl in a frilly yellow dress whom I could entertain for hours with hand-clapping games. She didn’t tire of them until dark had long fallen and her eyes drooped sleepily. As I put her to bed, Anantha craned her neck on the pillow and gazed at me sombrely, a hand cradled beneath her cheek and eyes wide and unblinking. I felt that I was being appraised, that she could see all the way into me, and I hoped I measured up to whatever thoughts were in her mind.

* * *

Every day C.P. Kumar poured through local newspapers for stories of orphaned or abandoned children. Sadly, they appeared all too frequently. In Nellore District, a city of approximately 375,000 surrounded by twelve hundred villages and hamlets, one out of every ten people is a child under six years old and increasingly, the culprit of these children’s lives is AIDS.

There were many such stories, each more agonizing than the last. One article appeared under the headline “How Long This Darkness?” Three brothers had recently lost their parents to AIDS and had only an elderly grandfather left to support them. The grandfather used to work as a field labourer, but that income was not enough to support three growing boys and he began to supplement his meagre salary by begging. Local villages refused to take them in. The reporter ended the article by urging the government and NGOs to come forward and help them. When C.P. called about the children, he was told that he was the only person who had.

I asked C.P. how he could possibly accept the three boys – he was already well past capacity with the twenty-five children living at Little HEARTS. He gazed back at me for a long moment of silence before answering. “If not me, who?” he asked. “If not now, when?”