Madhav, from Udayapur, Nepal, led me to his bedchamber, where he would doze on the floor berth. The inside temperature of the accommodation was sweltering with the rusty zinc rooftop. I sat down and gasped. I ask him whereof his parents. “They stay back home and are confronting difficult livelihood”, he articulated as he nodded his eyes to overhead window. The window latch held his cotton pant. He took out the key and unlocked his tin box. He showed me so many pictures he had drawn.

His impulses always winded off like sand alongside the river bank, but never touched the sky. The bright blue sky above the banks always remained cloudless. “Where will I go next year, I am clueless,” Madhav wrote to me on loose leaf notebook. Suman, a boy who had no option to pursue his sixth standard the year after next also pitched up; was also stranded in the left bank.

The winter stream of Tamor River drifted downs and eroded the colorful dream of Madhav Prasad Acharya. Eleven in numbers, the kids who lived in the left bank of the River with an interpreter and a village chef; always wandered to find a deaf school with higher grades. “We are employable only up to 5th standard. The VDC has been promising us to transfer our kids to higher standards for many years, which I see is difficult enough and undoubtedly rare”, the interpreter said. The rotary club also stood on the left bank. The chef was a lean man of over 50 years of age and a black-faced, who always wore a knitted blue beanie cap. He never regretted for the secret griefs of growing old with these kids.

In the door yard, we had our photograph taken. All the kids posed to be photographed and painted digitally. They also made me laugh, play and enjoy my time like I was meant to live that day forever.

The strength of Madhav’s drawings will impact my heart forever than the serenity of Tamor River. There were still many, which he would certainly wish me to see. His drawings symbolized both of his optimism and pessimism to which he had always been subjected. It seemed as if everything came to end in photograph. My assignment ended. The winter cloud started engulfing the left bank when I left it.