Plot

A real-world fairy-tale about the journey of Pinki and Ghutaru, two children in rural India whose lives are forever changed by a simple surgery they never imagined possible.

Pinki is a five-year-old girl from a village in the Mirzapur District, India, born into a desperately poor family, and with a cleft lip. Pinki never realized that this condition required just one simple operation until she met Pankaj, a social worker traveling from village to village gathering patients to go to hospital in Varanasi that provides free surgery to thousands each year. This real-world fairy tale follows its protagonist journey to a dream smile from isolation and shame.—TriVin Dreamer

Approximately thirty five thousand Indian children are born with cleft lips and palates every year. There are about 10 Lakhs Indians with this malady, which can easily be corrected by a simple surgical procedure, which is known to occur in 4 to 12 weeks' fetus' mostly due to nutritional deficiencies and/or genetics, but erroneously blamed on eclipses, and results in isolation and alienation. Five year old Pinki Sonkar and eleven year old Ghutaru Chauhan, both with cleft lips, are amongst thousands who travel, by foot and by auto-rickshaw, to G.S. Memorial Plastic Surgery Hospital in Banaras for free treatment with hopes of leading normal lives.—rAjOo (gunwanti@hotmail.com)