Sold

When he looks, he sees cigarettes and rice beer, a new vest
for himself.

I see a tin roof.

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat.
Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not
worth crying over when it’s time to make a stew.

She unwinds the fabric at her waist and pulls out one of my
stepfather’s precious cigarettes, and I see, in that moment,
the mischievous girl she was at my age.

We sit together, each savoring our secret treats and dreaming
of the days after the monsoon.

Gita’s father did not
spend his afternoons in the tea shop; he spent his days
building paddy walls that could stand up to the monsoon.
Now he faces the swallow-tailed peak, his hands in a prayer
of gratitude. His rice plants bow to the sun, his little boy
splashes in the mud.

“Where I live,” she says, “the girls have sweet cakes every
day.”

This delicate stranger, it seems, is speaking to me.
I steal a sideways look at her.

She smiles, drawing her shawl to her lips with the dignity of
a queen.

“She has no hips,” I hear her say. “And she’s plain
as porridge. I’ll give you five hundred.”

I do not understand. I can carry a load of firewood so heavy
it would put a man to shame, and my legs are sturdy enough
to climb the mountain a dozen times in one day. What does
it matter that I have no hips yet?

He trains his eyes on me and my pink dress, and I imagine
that he can see right through it. I wrap my arms around
myself.
“How old are you?” he says in my language.
I tell him I am thirteen.

He wheels around and slaps Auntie across the face, and she
turns from a woman of queenly bearing to a frightened child.

“Don’t be frightened,” he says kindly. “It is a pretend game.
You like games, don’t you?”

I nod.

Gita and I used to play pretend games. When we played make-
believe, I sometimes had a husband. But it was Krishna, the
young goatherd with sleepy cat eyes, not an old, turnip-nose
man who doles out sweets and slaps with the same hand.

I am afraid of this city where the lying-down people look like
the dead. And the standing-up ones, like the walking dead.

I think of the aging bird girl and wonder why she is so skinny
if she eats sweet cakes and dates and oranges and mangoes
every day.

I think of the woman with the rolls of roti dough at her waist
and wonder why she lives in this darkened cave building if
she is so rich.

Mumtaz laughs. “Home?” she says. “And how would you get
there?”

I don’t know.

“Do you know the way home?” she says.
“Do you have money for the train?
Do you speak the language here?
Do you even have any idea where you are?”

Two schoolgirls in crisp blue uniforms skip by on the street
below, holding hands.

“I’ve been out there,” Shahanna says. “And I can tell you that
it’s not so bad here.”

I am wary, knowing now how these city people cannot be
believed.

I know this noise from somewhere.
I work very hard to make it out.
Finally, I identify it.
It is the muffled sound of sobbing.

Habib rolls off me.

Then I understand: I was the person crying.

“It’s The Bold and the Beautiful,” says Shahanna. “It’s from
America. It’s our favorite show.”

Inside the TV, a little pink-skinned man is talking to a woman
with hair the color of straw. She raises her hand to slap him
across the face, but he catches her wrist in his grip and stops
her. Then, without warning, they are kissing.

Before, when you were in the locked room, Shahanna says,
Mumtaz sent the customers to you. Now, if you want to pay
off your debt, you must do what it takes to make them
choose you.

Tell the customers that you are twelve, she says. Or Mumtaz
will beat you senseless.

I try to take in this idea—that Monica will soon be free—
when a man comes into the room. He has city shoes on his
feet and a gold chain around his neck. In an instant, Monica
is at his side, winding her arms around him, like a snake.

And then they are gone, and I am alone to consider an odd
and somewhat sour feeling: disappointment that the man did
not choose me.

And then he is gone. Leaving me to consider how long it has
been since a tomorrow meant anything to me.

He says the American lady is kind. He says Anita is wrong
about the Americans, that they do not shame the children
of the brothels. He says this is a story Mumtaz has told her
to keep her from running away.

His body warmed mine the way the
Himalayan sun warms the soil. His skin was soft—like the
velvet of Tali’s nose. And his contentment soaked through
to me like an evening rain shower.

And so I held him, too.

“There are men who would pay dearly,” Mumtaz says, “to be
with a pure one. Men who think it will cure their disease.”

She puts a hand on Pushpa’s slender shoulder and smiles.

Then comes an unearthly sound. It is a wild sound, an animal
sound, a howling, mournful, raging cry, as the sickly woman
on the floor claws at the skirts of the fat woman standing
over her.

And I understand then, somehow, that Monica, the thirsty
vine, Monica, the one with tricks to make the men pay extra,
sleeps with this tattered rag doll.

“Are you being kept here against your will?”

My will? This is something I lost long ago, I want to tell him.

I want to pummel this pink-skinned man with my fists.
I want to spit on this stranger with his eyes of cold pity,
his idiot way of speaking my language, and his bad-mannered
questions that make me look at the humiliation that is my life.

I rise, shaky, as Anita helps me to my feet. She puts her arm
around my waist and guides me toward the mirror. Then she
gets out her makeup brushes and lip colors and paints my
face with such tenderness that I think my heart will break.

“Bimla may have given your family a little sum when you
left home,” she says. “But the rest—the money from the
customers—goes to Mumtaz. Your family will never see
one rupee more.”

And so I am going to believe that this strange pink man is a
dream, a cruel trick of the mind. I am going to believe that
when I open my eyes he will be gone.

I count to 100.
Count to 100 again
and open my eyes.

He is still there, gripping his battered Nepali wordbook.

“The clean place,” I say. “I want to go there.”