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for our hands and clambering over each other to smile up at us. Ten feet away, yet separated by twenty bodies bouncing between us, Chandler also stands with several kids holding each hand and more clinging to her arms, her pale skin and long blonde hair almost lost in the sea of children. She knows many of them on sight, familiar with their stories and the pictures she's seen countless times. The amazement on her face makes her look even younger than her fifteen years.

"Hello," "Welcome," "Good Evening," the children say. Small hands reach for me. There's Santosh! And Sibani, Daina, SaluI pick up the tiny ones like Papuni and search for other faces I haven't seen yet. Children run up to show me small things I had given them the year before stickers, crayons, hair clips. They display these cherished treasures; such simple possessions, so proudly owned and taken care of. They ask for nothing from me other than being here. In many ways they are just like other children I've known with homes and families of their own except for their neediness, their raw hunger for affection, love, belonging.

They had been imprinted on my soul forever.

* * *

I never expected to be in India. And without a doubt, I never thought once I had been I would return, again and again.

It wasn't the exotic beauty that drew me back. It wasn't the warmth of the people, their gentle and inquisitive nature, their open hospitality. It wasn't the storied, ancient history of the country or its rich and varied culture. It was not the colors or the spices or the sounds or the spirituality of the place. India is all of these things, to be sure, and I have grown to love them all. But they were not what seeped into my being and pulled me close, becoming a part of me that I missed with a strange emptiness when I left.

It was the children.

They are everywhere. They fill the railway stations, the cities, the shanty villages. Some scrounge through trash for newspapers, rags or anything they can sell at traffic intersections. Others, often as young as two or three years old, beg. Many are homeless, overflowing the orphanages and other institutional homes to live on the streets.

There is a holocaust quietly happening among India's children. The perpetrator is poverty, and its foot soldiers are disease, gender and caste discrimination, unclean water, illiteracy, and malnutrition. Its allies are corruption, ineffective government policies, and rich industrialized nations that, in an indifferent and arrogant imbalance

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