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Moin Khan was seven years old when he hugged his parents in Bihar before boarding a train for Delhi. Three years later, his parents boarded the same train last night for Delhi, where the child they loved is now buried. He was ten.
Moin's parents, like so many others in Madhubani, are desperately poor. So when their relative said he ran a factory in Delhi where Moin could work, it seemed pointless to refuse. The same man now stands accused of murdering their son.
In a two-room sweatshop in Northwest Delhi, Moin worked 15 hours a day to make bindis. He was taken as an apprentice and was given food for his services.
His uncle, Kalimuddin, was a relentless taskmaster. On Saturday, he allegedly hit Moin repeatedly. Another child who worked at the same sweatshop says he saw Kalimuddin banging Moin's head against the wall.
It's not clear yet how much later Moin died.
At a cemetery nearby, Mohammed Mahboob Alam walks slowly towards Moin's small grave in the corner. He had never met the ten-year-old who is buried there. But he cannot stop thinking about him.
When a group of 20 people arrived at the cemetery with the child's body, Mr Alam was unnerved by their apparent haste to bury the boy. Mr Alam is on the committee of the mosque that governs the cemetery. And so he decided to inspect the dead body.
It was mapped with bruises.
By then, most of the men who had brought the child to the cemetery had disappeared. Mr Alam phoned the police, who are now questioning some of the men who were still with the child's body when the police showed up. Kalimuddin however is missing.
Moin's story- like so many other young child workers in India - remained untold till it was too late to help him. In the lanes near the factory where Moin was killed, the police says, hundreds of other children work in similar sweatshops.
Periodically, they are rescued in raids manned by both the police and social activists. Sometimes, they are sent home to their villages where ruthless poverty stabs their families into sending them away again to cities - where they work, an unseen force of tiny hands and brave hearts confronting lives that adults would be lucky to survive.