"Duvi’s in India, gone off to find himself,” my sister says.

India, Nepal, countries of the Himalayas. Mountains rising blue in the mist, red in the sun, where teenagers with strapping bodies and little-boy eyes get lost as they tramp around trying to find themselves.

“He’s much more okay than you remember. He’s changed.” She says this because I look skeptical. Duvi, that skinny boy, that branded child? How could he hold his own in that daunting place?

We were neighbors long ago, but his family had moved away, and moved on, it seems.

Duvi had been a cute kid. Friendly and chatty, with a quirky vocabulary from watching too many videos. It was all he could do. He was ten and couldn’t read. He was one of the first boys to use a new learning center for children with learning disabilities. He told us about it, casually, when he came to borrow eggs. “I started at a new place. That one. You know my rebbi?”

He also had ADHD, was all over the place, maybe other things too. That, his mother shared. Just another thing in her laundry list of problems, disclosed self-deprecatingly when she returned the eggs. Or didn’t return them. She laughed too loudly. As if her wild laughter would take the edge off the electricity getting shut off again, a house in shambles, an ex who showed no interest and gave no child support, and a son with several neurological disorders.

“Life,” she said, hands up, head thrown back, guffawing.

What could we do but give her a rugelah from our nothing-fancy-but-cheerfully-serviceable kitchen we suddenly felt bad about, grateful for?

A tough background for Duvi. But he was ten, just another neighborhood kid. He could throw a ball around. He said the funniest things in utter innocence. The guys liked him. He was friends with my 11-year-old brother. Kind of. Because Duvi was too floaty to know how to be a friend.

Come Purim, Duvi donned a Na-Nach kappel and a pair of yellow tzitzis. Add a pushke, and presto, he was a Breslov collector. The other boys on the block were more carefully dressed. This one was a robot. That one was a Purim Rav.

I don’t remember what my brother was, only that it wasn’t his day. The doorbell kept ringing and he’d run to answer it, hopeful and eager. It would be first one friend and then another for my sisters. People and packages for the family. Wine and hamantaschen and chocolate and nosh and nothing for him.

The day drew into late noon. Duvi, the Breslov chassid, was roaming around with his shopping bag of nosh, up and down the street, finally settling on his front stoop where he had a clear view of our house. He must have seen the girls coming, sensed my brother’s disappointment.

Just before we went out for the meal, he arrived at our door. He was holding a huge package that looked like a conglomeration of everything he’d received that day. Cans of Coke, a glass bottle of Schweppes, bags of Bissli, all the best nosh.

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 634)