Book excerpt: My Cries and My Triumphs is my story as I experienced it as a little girl and as a teenager. This book carries some of my deepest feelings as a kid when I lived in a small coal-mining town in India. It is also about the influence my mother had on me. Somewhere and somehow I clung to the hope that someday I was going to thrive, no matter what. This book is about my loss, pain, trials and tribulations, and hope.