• After their first two sons died before reaching the age of one, Bhajan and Alo Sarkar decided to name their third son Amar (immortal). The boy did survive, until in February 1995, at age 16, he disappeared. He remains untraced. A video cassette of a neigbourhood wedding in which Amar figures and his horoscope are all the Sarkars have to remember him by. “He went out to play,” says his mother Alo, 52. “The other boys returned home, but our Amar never returned.” Bhajan, 52, who runs a paan shop and lives in a bamboo shanty, says he lodged an FIR with police the very day his son went missing. The couple say the police never came to inquire about the boy.

• Debakanta Rabha, 13, says he ran away from home in a village Buskhuli in Goalpara district because he wanted “to study and become an officer” and his father, a labourer, couldn’t afford to send him to school. Now, he’s living his dream, studying at the Sonagram High School, a reputed government school for boys in Guwahati. But that has become possible because some volunteers from Snehalaya, a Don Bosco-run home for destitute children, found him working at a tea-stall. Says Father Lukose of Snehalaya: “He gave us his address, but was unwilling to go back because his father was unable to feed him, leave alone send him to school.” He now lives at Snehalaya and visits his parents once or twice a year. Father Lukose said half of the 80 children in Snehalaya are runaways who didn’t want to return home, mostly because the family was very poor.

... contd.