Vanishing Girls (13 page)

Chapter 12

D
athi’s e-mail lacked the careful politeness of the last one; she had clearly dashed it off in a hurry:

uncle sold me for R10,000 to an agent for hotel work in Mumbai but granny warned me about such agents and so I left uncle’s home

I answered her immediately in the hope that she was still at a computer:

Dathi, what do you mean? Are you safe?

I waited, staring at the screen. But she didn’t answer.

I read and reread her message, trying to elicit more information than was actually there. Having spoken with stone-cold Uncle Ishat, I wasn’t surprised he didn’t want her. But
sell
her? For ten thousand rupees—how much was that, anyway?

I went to the den, where Mac and I were staying on a sofa bed (Ben was happily camping in a sleeping bag on David’s floor), and pulled the laptop out of my backpack. Cross-legged on the floor, I booted up and started Googling.

I began with a literal search, based on what Dathi had told me, and typed
girl sold to agent in India
in the search box. At the top of the list was a link to the
Times of India
: “Young girls sold for Rs 2 lakh.” A lump formed in my throat at the mere suggestion of girls being actually
sold
, though I had no idea what a lakh was.

I clicked through to the article, which described an active marriage market for young girls and women. Price depended on things like age, virginity, looks, prior marriages, etc. A quick search told me that Rs 2 lakh equaled about five thousand dollars.

The lump cascaded into my stomach, igniting a sensation like seasickness when you realize your balance is suddenly off: dizzy, queasy, light-headed. I closed my eyes. Breathed. Opened my eyes. Continued searching.

One lakh equaled one hundred thousand rupees. But Uncle Ishat had supposedly sold Dathi for ten thousand rupees. I looked at her e-mail again to see if I’d gotten that right. I had.

Ten thousand rupees, it turned out, were worth about two hundred dollars. Was that the going rate for a girl these days in India? You couldn’t even buy a television in America for that little money.

My head began to pound but I didn’t stop. I had to know more, to convince myself that I wasn’t exciting my imagination with the typical Internet poison that so easily passed as brutal honesty and truth. I quickly discovered that blogs, chats, and testimonials about human trafficking were legion; exploring them felt like an endless fall down a bottomless well. Finally I decided that it was only worth reading well-researched articles that had been written by reputable journalists and published in respected journals; it was the only way to glean any reality unvarnished by paranoia.

The more solid the information, the more I trusted it, and the worse the story got.

Because it was, apparently,
true
.

It wasn’t news that young girls in India and Africa were sold into marriage, often to much older men, as Chali had been. But it
was
news to me that they were also regularly sold for “hotel work” or “housecleaning,” which were euphemisms for the pipeline into prostitution. I was aware of human trafficking but what I hadn’t understood was how huge the problem was, how many girls and boys, but mostly girls, were sold into commercial sexual slavery by their very own families.

The magnitude of one number, in particular, shocked me:
1.3 million
. That was how many children were sexually enslaved in India alone. About half came from India; the rest were imported from other countries.

Some were as young as my Ben. Many were girls Susanna’s age. Girls on the cusp of puberty—like Dathi, who was twelve—fetched the highest price. When they tried to run away, they were beaten into submission, forcibly drugged, and turned into addicts as a form of chemical restraint.

“First time rights” for a child’s virginity went for around R25,000, or about five hundred dollars.

After that, they were tortured. Held in cages. Raped.

In India, a typical child prostitute “serviced” about ten “customers” a day, seven days a week. It was the most horrifying math problem I’d ever faced: seventy men, every week, who bought sex from a child for the price of a cup of coffee. Scratch that: It was the brothel that sold the sex and kept the money; the child got nothing.

I sat back, away from the laptop, my mind reeling, my body shaking like a leaf in a storm.

What would Uncle Ishat buy with the two hundred dollars he got for Dathi?

A sudden wooziness overcame me; I had barely eaten any breakfast and it was already late for lunch. I closed my eyes, leaned against the end of the sofa bed, and waited for the sensation to pass.

I didn’t know Dathi—but now I knew something about her. She had run away, understanding essentially what was in store for her. Unlike so many children in her position, she had been educated and forewarned. A path out had been painstakingly carved by her mother and grandmother—until it all fell apart. I pictured her now, a spirited child in an unforgiving circumstance, running in place as in a nightmare, when the harder you try, the farther you fall behind. And then, in my agitated imagination, I saw the other girls—the missing girls; the dead prostitutes—running beside Dathi. Abby, too. All those girls joined by ghostly throngs whose lives had collided with avarice or violence or both. Trying so hard to run away, getting nowhere. Vanishing and forgotten as if their existence barely mattered.

Everything had been arranged for Dathi’s departure: the visa secured; the airfare paid; a one-way ticket scheduled for New Year’s Day; the airline already informed that a child would be traveling alone out of Nagpur and met in New York by an adult. I had watched from a distance while Chali made the arrangements, never imagining how important it would be that I knew what she had done.

The only thing left to do now was get Dathi on that plane, and pick her up at the airport. The rest could be figured out later.

But it was ridiculous. Wasn’t it? Impossible. Insane.

And yet it was such a small thing to do for another human being.

I got up and in the bathroom splashed cold water on my face a few times, dried my skin, then went to the kitchen for a glass of water. After a few sips and a few deep breaths, I was calm enough to dial Uncle Ishat’s number. I leaned against the sink, listening to the ghostly ringing of his phone nearly nine thousand miles away.

Finally, he answered.

“You again.”

“Please, don’t hang up.” I forced calm into my tone, when what I really wanted to do was scream obscenities at the man.

There was a pause. He was still there. I didn’t know how to begin a conversation like this, but sensed that if I didn’t talk fast I’d lose him.

“Let me have Dathi.”

His laugh bubbled, acrid and murky as burning rubber. “Good-bye.”

“Wait! I’ll give you twenty thousand rupees for her. Just put her on the plane to New York, that’s all you’ll have to do.”

His silence now thickened with interest. “
Twenty
thousand, you say?”

I hadn’t thought it through, I’d simply doubled what I knew he’d gotten for her, but immediately realized that it was only four hundred dollars or so, not an impressive sum, possibly not worth the trouble to Uncle Ishat to track her down and buy her back.

“Thirty,” I said. “Forty.” Bargaining now with myself. “Fifty.”

“Done.”

Just like that: I had bought a child.

“Tell me where to wire the money and I’ll do it right now.”

He gave me the particulars for his bank, which I jotted on the bottom of a shopping list magnetized to the fridge. I knew I had to send the money immediately. I also knew he might not comply with his end of the deal, or even try to find her.

“The flight leaves on Saturday,” I reminded him. Just six days from now. “Do you know where her visa and ticket are? Do you have any idea where she is? Will you be able to find her?”

The more questions I shot at him, the denser his silence became on the other end of the distant line. Finally he said, “Which question do you want me to answer first?”

“The ticket, do you know—”

“Yes, yes, I know what to do. I will wait for the money.” And he hung up.

I listened to a few moments of crackling silence before ending the call on my phone.

It took ten minutes on the Western Union Web site to transfer fifty thousand rupees from my credit card into Uncle Ishat’s bank account. My price tag was $1,140.31, which included a twenty-dollar fee to Western Union. It was about a third of our monthly mortgage payment. Less than the cost of our four round-trip tickets to L.A. A relatively insignificant amount of money to people like us: average middle-class Americans. It was like letting the water run when you answered the phone, not realizing that to a big part of the world you were allowing the equivalent of pure gold to swirl down the drain. The comparisons were absurd, unthinkable, and painful to take in. I closed the Web site, letting my finger rest a moment on the smooth surface of the touchpad while the cursor shivered helplessly on the screen, before realizing that someone was in the room with me.

Startled, I turned around.

“What did you just do?”

Mac was standing there in the den, sweating profusely, looking down at where I sat on the floor with the laptop. The screen was faced in his direction; he must have seen the Western Union logo blink off. I heard the plumbing activate upstairs, which told me that Jon was in the shower.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Did you just make a money transfer for something like a thousand bucks?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

There was no easy way to say it, and I wasn’t going to lie.

“I bought a kid.”

“What do you mean
bought a kid
?”

“Chali’s daughter, Dathi.” I launched into the whole story, giving him the blow-by-blow of my conversation with Uncle Ishat, leading him through article after article about the commercial sexual exploitation of children in India, illuminating Dathi’s fate if we ignored the golden opportunity of flight Chali had so painstakingly arranged for her beloved daughter.

“We have no choice,” I told him.

“We?” He ground his jaw in the way I hated; it meant he was angry, felt cornered, and I’d hear more about it later. “I’m not part of this.”

“Mac—”

“It’s kidnapping.”

“You’re wrong. Chali arranged everything. It’s perfectly legal.”

“Until Dathi steps off that plane in New York. Does she even know her mother’s dead? Did anyone tell her?”

I didn’t know.

“What happens after she gets here? We take her home and keep her—like a pet?”

I couldn’t answer.

“They’re all waiting for you down at the beach,” he said. “Everyone’s hungry. They seem to think you came back to the house to pack a picnic lunch.”

“I did.”

He stared at me a moment. “She won’t be ours, Karin. She won’t be yours. You can’t replace . . .” But he trailed off before he said it: Cece. Audra or Tara or Lily.

I stood up and reached for him but he turned abruptly and left the den. Moments later, I heard the clank of plumbing again, this time from the first-floor bathroom down the hall.

“Well, screw that,” I said aloud to no one. To myself. Because I was on a quest now, this was something I had to do because it had to be done. I would have saved all the children in the entire world if I’d had the money.

But I didn’t. I only had the power to save one: Arundathi Das.

Chali’s only child, her one hope for a redeemable future.

Dathi: a girl I didn’t know, but had to help.

In my mind, at that point, it was simple.

And I would not turn away.

I replied a second time to her last e-mail:

Dathi, I just spoke with your uncle. Everything’s been arranged. He’s going to look for you and put you on the plane to New York, as planned. Let him find you, or just return to his house. Trust us, please. Trust me.

But was it true? Would Uncle Ishat follow through with his end of our agreement? Or would he keep my money and still sell her to the agent? Increase his profits? Never answer another call from me? Write off his young niece as a spoiled asset and move on with his life?

A wave of cold passed through me.

I pressed send.

During the next four days, until we flew home on Thursday, every time my phone vibrated with a new e-mail I rushed to check it but it was never from her. I didn’t know if she ever read my last e-mail. All I knew for sure, via a confirmation from Western Union, was that Uncle Ishat got his money.

W
e arrived back in Brooklyn late Sunday afternoon, into a twilit world that felt vastly different than the warm, sunny coast we’d left behind. I helped my mother into her apartment, then returned to the taxi and headed home. Another snow had frosted the brownstones and our block looked like a row of gingerbread houses festooned with colorful lights. The deep post-holiday quiet betrayed that strange, sad pause between Christmas and New Year’s. Tired from all the fuss, you rested; but there was still more to come.

Released from the taxi, Ben raced up the nearest snowbank and slid down to the sidewalk, where fresh snow had accumulated sometime that day. He was about to mount the icy stoop when Mac dropped his suitcase, grabbed Ben’s hood, and steered him toward the ground-floor entrance. I followed with my backpack and the other suitcase, hoisting it above the snow to the door. Over the past few days Mac’s and my disagreement over Dathi had calcified into the worst kind of polite silence. He picked up his suitcase, deposited it inside the front hall, fetched a shovel from the vestibule, and started clearing a path along the sidewalk. I closed the door but didn’t lock it, and followed Ben inside.

The thing about East Coast winters is that it turns the inside of a house into a warm paradise. All the sunshine California has to offer will never compare to that blast of gratitude you feel when you come inside from the cold. I was glad to be back.

Liberated from his slushy sneakers and jacket, Ben ran to his room to greet his toys. I went upstairs to sort through mail that had accumulated below the slot in the front door. Outside, I could hear the scrape of Mac’s shovel, steadily clearing snow from the cement sidewalk. How could I convince him that rescuing Dathi was an imperative, not a whim? I wanted him on my side. Even though I figured that the chances she’d actually turn up at the airport on New Year’s Day were slim, if she
did
arrive I wanted her to feel welcomed by the entire family, not just Ben and me. I had decided not to worry in advance about the legal implications of bringing her over using the prearranged paperwork of a mother who no longer existed. I was focused on getting her out of India. Nothing else. I hoped that Mac would come around to seeing the simplicity, the urgency—the
humanity
of my quest.