The old woman bargained poorly and I gave her more than she asked for. It was a sad place where the children cried often and silently. All of the resident adults - with the possible exception of the grandmother - were addicted to opium. I shrugged off my pack and escaped the cheerless hut for the only marginally brighter garden. A middle-aged woman stood among the mustard greens, aggressively weeding out the leftover vegetables to make way for the new years' planting. She unearthed two white radish roots, hairy with fibers and tough as wood. A nearby shaven-headed girl immediately dropped her hoe and snatched them, depositing one into the hands of her younger sister and gnawing on the other without bothering to wipe the dirt off first. Her smaller sibling sat on a rock and clung to her grubby treasure, occasionally rubbing it against her cheek or nicking it with her nail and then sucking on her finger.

Dinner was pickled banana heart and cooked weeds, same as the pigs. I ate with the children while the family's unmarried sister prepared the opium. She had a beautiful, thin-boned face, the luminescent smile of an addict, and the wracking cough of a terminal tubercular. She lit a kerosene lantern and carefully lowered herself to the thin, woven mat to begin her preparations. She kneaded the brown paste into a long tube, then cut it into balls with the meticulous precision of a watchmaker. By the time she had filled her bong and taken her first puff the others were ready to join her. Only the grandmother stayed apart, holding a tiny infant between her knees and poking at the fire with a stick for warmth. I was given a bed of straw laid perilously close to the flames and a brick for a pillow, and fell asleep to the flickering kerosene flame and the sad, old eyes of the woman cradling her starving grandchild.