Street Dance

Fourteen-year-old Yubaraj works around the clock parking cars in Katmandu. For his family it's survival - for him, a kind of suicide by exhaust fumes.

KATMANDU, Nepal - This is Yubaraj Khakada's world: an endless dull parade of metal and fumes. Cars and motorcycles that must be shoehorned into parking spaces on the side of a garbage-filled street.

He works a stretch of concrete near the tourist section of Katmandu called Thamel, a maze of trinket and trekking shops, restaurants and bars, mostly catering to foreigners who have come to hike in Nepal.

Two years ago Yubaraj was in school in the eastern village of Bethan. But then his father died, although he won't say how.

A working man at age fourteen » View

The elders in his village said Yubaraj should leave Bethan to come here and work to support his mother, two sisters and brother.

"I'm the oldest," he says, smiling shyly.

So at the age of 12, he became a man, working 14-16 hour days, seven days a week, as a parking attendant.

He pads up and down the pavement in a graceful street dance that he has performed over and over in the last two years: waving drivers into impossibly tight spots, writing up tickets on slips of cardboard scraps, making change, putting a motorcycle rider's kickstand down with the flick of his foot, pulling another rider's bike out of a slot by the grab bar on the seat.

It is life-numbing work for a bright boy who would rather be in school.

"I wish I could be studying again," he says. "But what choice do I have?"

Instead, Yubaraj deals with the dangers of reckless drivers and drunken idiots who stumble out of bars and refuse to pay him, sometimes even slapping or punching him when he asks for what's due.

"Those are the times when I wish I could be gone from this place, " he says, ruefully.

Like a taxi driver, Yubaraj is an independent contractor. He must pay the man who owns the space 820 rupees (about $12 U.S.) every day, regardless of how busy it is. Anything he makes after that is profit.

Long days on the streets » View

"I start at 10 a.m. and I usually have to work until 10 p.m. to make the 820," he says. "Then I can start earning for myself."

Yubaraj says he makes about 2,500 rupees a month, about $33, but sends two-thirds of it back to his family. The rest he uses to pay for a small room in a hotel where he lives with a couple of older boys.

He washes his own clothes and usually eats two meals a day of rice, beans and curry at the hotel.

"At first, I used to get lonely," he says, "but now I'm used to it."

Yubaraj says he goes home only once a year, during a period of festivals and celebrations in Nepal. He says he doesn't really have any friends in Katmandu and he just shakes his head when I ask him if he ever gets a chance to just play or relax.

Yubaraj Khakada

"I don't even think about that," he says. "How can I?"

Yubaraj says he worries that he could lose his job, because Nepali law forbids children from working before they turn 16. But it's a law that most everyone knows is widely ignored here.

As tough as his life is, Yubaraj knows he's better off than some others. At night on the block he works, the street children begin to come out in packs. Filthy and in rags, they beg from those going into Thamel for dinner or drinks.

Yubaraj looks at them and is thankful for the ongoing line of headlights waiting to park — the thing that keep him perhaps a few steps ahead of a different fate.

"I do want to go back to school," he says.

But as the head of his household with the responsibility of supporting his family, he's just not exactly sure how, or when. For now his street dance must continue.

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