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land on both the sewers and the food.

We ducked through a piece of material strung across the front door of a house. It was dark inside, with two small beds pushed together in a T formation. A two-burner electric hotplate provided the only kitchen. Cooking utensils and clothing lined open shelves above one bed. On the other the youngest grandchild, Venugopal, laid curled up in a tight ball. His older brother, Yesu, was away at work.

Grandmother Durgamma invited me to sit on a red wooden stool with a gesture of her hand, and she crouched down next to me on the floor, her purple sari trailing in the dust that covered the concrete. Her face was deeply lined, the large gold ring in her nose flashing in contrast to the dark skin around it.

Sitting together in her small house, Grandmother Durgamma spoke to me about her life. "It is very hard taking care of my two grandchildren. I have leg pains, I cannot run with them. I want to take care of them but it is hard. I am only one." She held her fingertips to her forehead and silver hair as she spoke. Her hands were like delicate parchment paper, dry and seemingly capable of flaking away at the slightest touch.

"I am always thinking about their futures," she continued. "If something happens to me, when I die, what will happen to them? I don't need anything for myself. I am living only for my grandsons." It was the same question in my mind as I glanced at the listless form of Venugopal, who made barely a lump on the bed next to me. Their situation seemed so tenuous, their survival entirely dependent on this hobbling old woman and a twelve-year-old boy.

The family's plight was an all-too-common legacy of India's exploding AIDS epidemic and a familiar story in Andhra Pradesh, the epicenter of the crisis with the highest infection rates in the country. The pandemic has created a secondary human rights crisis the orphaning of children on a massive scale. The leading cause of death worldwide for people ages 15 to 49 the very ages at which many people are raising families AIDS is an epidemic that wipes out the middle-aged population, leaving the very old to take care of the very young as well as the other way around. As it devastates this generation, it leaves hundreds of thousands of children in its wake. They are the missing face of AIDS, these children left behind.

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In spite of their hardships, Venugopal and Yesu are among the more fortunate children living with HIV because they have family homes, however meager.

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