Kunwar Ram sits huddled on a woven camp cot, his head resting on his knees, hugging his calves. He is all of five. His mother Radha, caresses his hair, her pregnant belly protruding. “He cannot see,” she mumbles in Hindi, not looking at me.

Kunwar suddenly looks up, his head moving constantly. His eyes are shut, the skin fused together. “We showed him to good doctors, his blindness is permanent,” says the girl from Humanitarian Aid International, the organisation that is facilitating my visit.

“He can be sent to blind school and taught to read and some skills. Do you want him to remain here with you, or do you want to send him to a blind school where he can be taken care of?” She asks Radha, the mother. Radha looks at her with her piercing light eyes and says haltingly, looking straight at us, “par accha to ho jayega na?”

I have no answers. The lingering hope in her voice feels brittle.

I am at a Pakistani Hindu refugee camp in Majnu Ka Teela, Delhi. Some hundred Hindu families, mostly from Sindh, Pakistan, live in makeshift huts at the camp. The lucky ones have huts made with brick walls, the less fortunate ones have huts fashioned from bamboo, plastered over using mud.