"The bad thing about the operation is he won't be able to get an erection without having something put in there when he is older," Redett explains.

The information is translated.

Shocked and in disbelief, Abed asks the doctor to repeat himself. He wants to make sure he understands exactly what the doctor said.

"When he's of age and he's ready to start a family, what did you say he will need?" he asks.

The boy will have to be flown back to the United States, Redett says, so that doctors can put in an implant that will allow him to have an erection.

And even after that, he adds, Okkhoy will need the help of a fertility doctor to successfully procreate.

The news devastates Abed.

He had hoped this trip to Johns Hopkins would make everything okay, because so much of Okkhoy's life isn't.

Abed, a rickshaw puller, sold his rickshaw and his home to pay for his son's medical treatment in Dhaka. His family is in hiding. He is in debt.

He knows there will be no return trip. Reality won't allow it.

When the family returns to the townhouse, Abed lets loose.

"Plastic surgery? Plastic surgery? We came all the way here for a cosmetic surgery that won't fix anything?" he testily asks Khan, the human rights lawyer.

Khan ponders for a minute what to say. What can possibly make up for a father's dashed expectations?

"Have faith in God," she finally says. "God has grand designs for your son."

A trial awaits

Back home, a difficult trial awaits -- one in which Okkhoy will eventually have to take the stand and relive, second by excruciating second, what was done to him.

"We hope that there will be some appropriate punishment," says Sohail, the battalion commander. "An exemplary punishment for these criminals so that the rest of the country knows."

The gang, according to battalion officials, has maimed at least five other children -- all of them around Okkhoy's age.

One of the men who confessed told investigators how the gang kept the kids confined for months in tight spaces or even in barrels and deprived them of food.

Then they'd send them out to beg.