Noorbhi

Noorbhi. Thats her name. When I met her, something told me - she's the one.

She's fifteen. She's married and she looks after a kid sister who is all of five.

She lost her mother to AIDS a few days ago. Yet, she has a smile on her face. She seems to have dealt with her loss.

Two years back, her father too died of AIDS related illnesses. He was a labourer in a cotton mill in Guntur, a small dusty town in a state in South India called Andhra. To keep the family afloat, and to supplement her mother's tiny income from her sweeper's job at a hotel, she took over her father's job.

At that stage, the neighbours weren't kind to her and her family. They were treated pretty much as untouchables. Then with a sensitisation program by a Non Govermental Organisation there, the stigmatization thankfully stopped. And the community actually came around to help out a great deal.

At work, she had to fight off an attempted rape and that was the end of her days as a child labourer.

A distant relative has married her and given her (and her sister) shelter.

And another relative has taken them into their home. The shack she lived in earlier just blew down in a storm (the big cyclone on the East Coast) the day I met her first.

She's the one. I'm planning to tell her story in my next documentary. So everyone can see first hand what happens to children who are affected by AIDS. They may or may not be infected with HIV themselves. But as orphans they take a huge hit.