The Lost Daughter of India

by Sharon Maas

  When Naadiya first reported that Asha had not turned up, not rung her, had simply remained silent, Janiki had panicked. Something had gone terribly wrong and there was no way of finding out what. If only she herself were back in Madras – she would scour the city in search of her little sister; she could do absolutely nothing in Moti Khodayal. She would have to go there herself, now. Search for Asha herself; Naadiya meant well, but she had a job and neither the time nor the duty nor this air-sucking desperation to find Asha.

  However, there was a problem. To get back to Madras from Gujarat by train would take days, but was cheap. To fly back would take only a day, but cost more than Janiki’s entire budget for this trip. There was only one thing left to do; she’d do it reluctantly, for she hated to beg, but she’d do it for Asha. Rani Abishta was Asha’s great-granddaughter. She would help.

  And so Janiki had gone back to Rani Abishta and told her the new developments, confessed her fears to her. ‘I need to find her,’ she said. ‘She’d there somewhere, in danger; maybe a prisoner again. I don’t know. I came to you to find Kamal but only so that I can find Asha. Help me, please!’

  Rani Abishta had listened with great interest. Then she had said, ‘Kamal has left Dubai. After your telephone call to him I put my private investigator back on the job. It is my suspicion that he, too, is looking for Asha. She is the bait. Find her, and you will find Kamal. Find Kamal, and you will find her. You must go back to Madras. I will tell Lakshmi to give you the money. Stay the night and fly there tomorrow. Lakshmi will book the first flight out for you.’

  And so Janiki had stayed the night, and to pass the time she had returned to the computer and continued in her research of Asha’s captor’s – his name, she discovered, was Balram Ramcharran – emails. She dug deep into them and what she found there disgusted her to the core. How can men do this? she screamed to herself. How can they be so depraved, so utterly debauched? So cruel? These are young girls they are talking about – children!

  And so she had spent the night digging through the mails, starting as far back as possible. The first mails were in Hindi, which she couldn’t read. Then suddenly they switched to English; as if another non-Hindi speaker had joined the group. Sometimes broken English, sometimes fluent. The occasional Hindi, once Tamil, thoroughly protested by the others. They finally settled on English.

  The subject was girls. Girls were spoken of as if they were so many cattle being assessed and sent to market. Shunted here and there, priced at such-and-such. This customer would like this, and that customer would like that. Now and again there were attachments, attachments of young girls, children, really, dressed up like adult women in opulent red saris and fake jewels, their unsmiling faces giving the lie to the lavishness of their attire. Such despair, such abject hopelessness in those opaque eyes! Now and then the word Kamathipura fell, sometimes abbreviated to ‘K’, but that hellhole was a world away from Madras. Thank goodness.

  There was no mention of Asha. And then, in a recent mail:

  I have a new girl, very fair-skinned, twelve years old. Speaks English but not yet ready for trade. Virgin; I checked. Contact Sukhadan; this is one for Chaudhuri. I am keeping her as a maid in my home for the time being till we hear from Sukhadan. Problem is she does not speak at all. He likes them relaxed and chatty in English so we have to work on her. Will take photo soon and send; this one is superior, will bring a good price. She is wasted here in Madras.

  That could only be a reference to Asha: fair-skinned; a maid in Madras; speaks English. It had to be her.

  Janiki’s skin crawled. Nausea rose in her, and a creeping coldness that started in her stomach and spread everywhere, down to her fingertips. Everything churned within her. Why oh why had she asked Asha to search for information, for the password? That had cost Asha precious time. Get out Asha; run. Leave that place and run. Go to Naadiya. Get out. That’s what she should have said. Because Asha’s silence now could only mean trouble. Perhaps someone came back for her; obviously there was a gang involved and the very minute her captor was arrested Asha had been in jeopardy. She was ‘superior, would bring a good price’; someone must have gone back for her and poor little Asha had been trapped while she was at the computer looking for a bloody password. And it was all her, Janiki’s, fault.

  Where are you, Asha, where are you? Call out to me and I will find you! I promise!

  Janiki read on. There had been several new emails since that one, all cc’d to her due to Asha’s intervention, but apart from all-round approval by the other recipients no further reference was made to ‘the maid in Madras’. Other girls were discussed; sometimes photos were attached.

  Then, soon after the reference to Asha, a flurry of anxious exchanges:

  URGENT. Balram arrested this morning in raid. Tried to defraud Mr K. and Mr K. of course is the wrong one to vex. Idiot. Got the police to go after him.

  Damn! What about the computer? The girl?

  Don’t think they got those. My source didn’t mention them.

  Need to get them. Too many big names on the computer. And the girl too valuable to lose.

  Don’t worry, got someone dealing with it. Can get the computer def., most probably the girl ran away after the arrest.

  Damn!

  After that last Damn! the language reverted to Hindi, to Janiki’s frustration. But, she thought, I can get Vasanthi to translate. Just when they began to talk about Asha! Damn, indeed!

  Half an hour later it was over. She knew the worst and it was worse than her worst nightmare.

  ‘They are sending her to Bombay,’ said Vasanthi. ‘She is to be sold as a child prostitute to the highest bidder. At the moment it is a man called Chaudhuri.’

  Asha was no longer in Madras. Asha was in Bombay. In Kamathipura.

  And then, one last mail, in both Hindi and English:

  Who is jiyeng@grit.com?

  And then silence. Janiki, cold enough before with the tension of it all, now felt her blood turn to ice. She had been exposed, discovered, and even though the discovery was all in virtual space, in the ether, it was as if she stood there naked before a host of leering criminals. And after that, silence.

  ‘They’ve found me out,’ she said. ‘No more emails.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Vasanthi said.

  ‘I’ll have to go to Kamathipura,’ Janiki said.

  ‘Talk to Rani Abishta,’ said Vasanthi. ‘She can help. It’s her great-granddaughter, after all. She has detectives working for her; that’s how she tracks Kamal. And she has money. She will help. She will. She may appear hard but her heart is soft. She can help find Asha and Kamal and she will finance it. I know her; I am her closest confidante. You need her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janiki. ‘I’ll do that. This is too big for me alone. Thanks, Vasanthi.’

  She was just about to shut down the computer when a new mail popped into her in-box.

  She stared, numb, at the sender before moving a shaking finger to open it.

  From: Kamal Bhandari.

  She opened the mail.

  Where are you, Janiki? Daav says you came back to India to look for Asha? Have you found her? Do you have any news at all? Caroline and I are both here in Madras and the place she was staying, it is empty, seems it was raided by police. But the police know nothing about her. Desperate to find her. Fingers crossed she’s safely with you!

  Janiki’s fingers flitted over the keyboard.

  Come to Bombay immediately. I’ll meet you there.

  And now she, Janiki, was here; Kamal and Caroline would be arriving early the next morning; and she was making her acquaintance with the snakepit that had stolen her little girl.

  * * *

  The moment Janiki left the security of the hotel and set foot on that pavement, the city simply gobbled her up. It roared on around her, oblivious to her presence and her shock and her call. It sucked her into the stinking, churning mess of its bowels. She wished, for a moment, that she had accepted Rani Abishta’s offer to put her
up in luxury in a nice area of town. But she had refused; she wanted to be as near as possible to Janiki, share her fate as much as possible. She had chosen a hotel in a run-down area near the red light district, and now here she was, in this hulking gargoyle of a neighborhood, monstrously ugly, wearing nothing but a black patina of filth. She had no idea where she was, just that it was Kamathipura, and it didn’t matter. She was near Asha. She was sure of it. This mess harboured innocence and purity; she had to endure it, because Asha had to. She walked for a while, every step a new assault to her senses, an offensive medley of sound and smell and sight that made her cringe backwards, into herself, into the safety of an inner refuge. Asha: where are you? Call to me! I will hear you, and I will come!

  Somewhere, in one of those dark buildings, cowered Asha. Get a grip, Janiki, she told herself sternly, and straightened her back. Be strong. This is not the time for emotion. You are here as a detective; you cannot be judgemental. This is not the time for delicate aesthetics. Toughen up. Grow some inner muscles. You’re going to need them.

  She took a deep breath and strode on, into the heart of the red light district. And so she wandered the streets, turning into this back alley and that, ignoring her own aversion, recording, memorising, making inner notes, standing back from the chaos and the scum as a neutral, dispassionate observer. The professional; interested but unaffected. Kamathipura left her no choice: it was hell on earth, but she must walk through.

  There were relatively few people on the streets; this was a city of the night, and the days left it deserted. A woman in a doorway washing her long hair over a bucket; two young men hand-in-hand. Children playing in the streets, an old woman squatting on a cracked pavement sifting through rice for weevils and stones. People stared at her; nobody smiled. She was a tourist, and they didn’t like tourists.

  After four hours of this she returned to her hotel and threw herself onto the bed, exhausted, drained of optimism, her heart weeping. It was impossible. Even if Asha were here she’d never find her. Her only hope was a computer; perhaps there’d be information in an email: She still had Ramcharran’s login details, and all the past mails. But the hotel had no computer room, and she wouldn’t be able to read all of the old mails anyway, as so many were in Hindi.

  But Kamal knew Hindi. She longed for Kamal. And Caroline. Someone to share this desperate and futile search.

  Opposite the hotel she had noticed a small shop tucked between a sari shop and a restaurant, on which hung a sign, in English: STD/ISD Fax International Calls Internet.

  She walked in, spoke to a young man at a desk, and a moment later her fingers were clattering over the tired, faded keys of an ancient computer.

  She spent two, or maybe three, hours on the computer, searching, researching, digging. Everything that could count as a clue, she wrote down in her notebook. There wasn’t much, but still.

  Just as she was about to close down and go to have a bite to eat there was a ping as a new email slid into her in-box.

  It was from Gridihar. She opened it, and read it. She gasped. And then she sighed and pressed the button to close down.

  Indian men, she said to herself. I might have known. So that’s that. Back on the marriage market.

  Chapter 29

  Janiki. Mumbai, 2000

  The sign on the gate read Tulasa Nilayam in washed-out red paint. It was a crumbling grey building a stone’s throw from the sea, protected from the street by a man-high hibiscus hedge. A forbidding metal gate, bars pointing skywards in rusty spikes, delayed her entry by some five minutes, as a thick chain bound the two wings together, tied in a complex knot that had to be unravelled. Janiki undid the chain, swung open the gate. She entered.

  A few yards down the drive a man stepped into her path. He wore a khaki uniform.

  ‘Good morning,’ Janiki said. ‘I have an appointment with Dr Ganotra.’ She repeated the words in broken Hindi; she knew barely enough to get by.

  Several mails had awaited her in the Internet shop she had found last night, but the news was bleak and Kamal could offer little support at present. He and Caroline could not arrive until tomorrow, he said, on the earliest available flight from Madras to Bombay.

  After checking her mail Janiki, with nothing left to do, took to Yahoo to find out all she could about the industry that had trapped her little sister. Her search had led her to this Dr Ganotra, who, apparently, ran an NGO, the Bombay Safe Haven, whose main focus was underaged prostitutes in the city. She had emailed Dr Ganotra; he had replied almost immediately; he would help. She was to come to this place, this Tulasa House. ‘I’ll meet you there when I have time,’ he’d said, and that was the last she heard from him. He was her only contact in this behemoth of a city; a starting point through a dark labyrinth that terrified her, the very thought of which caused her to shiver with anxiety for Asha, caused her mouth to dry up and her stomach to churn. This Dr Ganotra, though – he would help.

  So here she was. The guard shrugged and replied in rapid Hindi.

  ‘Dr Ganotra.’ Janiki spoke louder this time, as if it was volume that prevented the guard from understanding.

  He frowned, looked threateningly at her and said something that she interpreted as ‘Stay here, don’t move, or I’ll shoot.’ He turned away, walked up the steps leading to the front door and disappeared.

  Taking his warning literally, Janiki waited, using the time to inspect her surroundings. The house before her was more in the category of villa – large and rambling, built of stone that must once have been red, since this was the colour that here and there showed through the layer of black mould growing up the walls, enclosing the building in a patina of neglect and dereliction. Wooden shutters hung from all the windows, awry where a hinge was broken, the paint peeling away, almost all with one or more louvres missing. Looking up, Janiki thought she saw a face at one of the windows, but she couldn’t be sure – her uncertainty sent a shiver up her spine.

  The guard’s voice broke the chill. He was standing at the top of the entrance stairs, gesturing for her to come. She did so, stepping up the wide, crumbling stone staircase. The guard stood in an open doorway, speaking again in Hindi and emphasising his words with gestures.

  Janiki followed him into the house, stepping over a threshold, a line across the floorboards where darkness sliced through the sunlight. A cloak of musty gloom closed in and wrapped itself around her, cool and dismal. After the glare she could see only blackness. Seconds later her eyes had adjusted and she made out a wooden staircase against the wall of a long, narrow lobby.

  Several doors left and right suggested that the lobby cut the house into two halves. The doors, the walls, the staircase, the floor: all was of unadorned wood, not a carpet under their feet, no pictures on the walls, and the paint so old it peeled. A faint background smell, pungent and familiar, told Janiki that somewhere termites were at work, building their underground tunnels, hollowing out the boards.

  She gathered these impressions in a matter of seconds, following the guard along the corridor to the last door on the right. He knocked curtly, called something and gestured to her to follow, all simultaneously.

  It was a large kitchen, sparsely equipped. A two-burner kerosene stove stood on a stone counter along one side, and an old green refrigerator, patched with rust in the shape of a giraffe, rattled noisily beside a dirty-paned window. There were lines of shelves with cooking utensils below and above the counter, and foodstuffs – large jars of rice and dhal, smaller jars containing spices, a battered pot of limes – stood on shelves on the other side of the refrigerator. A line of half-green tomatoes basked in the sun on a windowsill, above the dripping tap of a rusty sink. A branch of green bananas hung from the ceiling.

  In the middle of the kitchen stood an oblong table with two straight-backed chairs. Against another wall was a planked bed-frame, like a long, low table. At the foot end of it sat a woman, cross-legged; she was stringing beans. She looked up as they entered, and smiled. At the other end of the bed-frame l
ay a heap of sundry articles: a pile of folded towels, a basket of onions, two coconuts, several chilli peppers and, somewhat incongruously, a battered alarm clock and a rusty saw.

  The woman was stout, in her mid-forties. She wore a faded, threadbare red sari, and under it a blouse, which looked painfully tight, pinched in at the waist and at the sleeves, where tyres of fat bulged out. Her smile was warm, welcoming, echoed by her eyes. She spoke, but in rapid Hindi, too advanced for Janiki. She shrugged and spread her hands, showing that she didn’t understand. ‘Do you speak English?’ she asked. The woman shrugged.

  ‘I want to see Dr Ganotra,’ Janiki said. This was ridiculous. What would she even say to this Dr Ganotra, should she be fortunate enough to meet him? She felt a fraud. ‘Dr Ganotra?’ she repeated, and made a questioning gesture.

  The woman seemed to understand. She spoke several words, gesturing and pointing outside the house. She repeated some of the words, and Janiki guessed at their meaning.

  ‘He’s not at home?’

  But the woman did not understand. Janiki could only surmise that this was the case: that Dr Ganotra was out; but when or if he would be back could not be ascertained. The woman laid down her knife beside the heap of unstrung beans and, with some effort and deep breathing, rose from the bed-frame, talking all the while.

  She pulled out one of the chairs, dusted some crumbs from its seat with the end of her sari, rattled it, verified that one of the legs was loose and would fall off at the slightest weight, pointed to this flaw so as to excuse her lack of seating arrangements and cleared a place at the other end of the bed-frame: she placed the heap of towels on the floor, the onions, the peppers and the coconuts on the table, the alarm clock on a shelf next to a jar of rice and the saw on the fridge. With a damp rag she wiped once over the bare planks, dried the area with the end of her sari and gestured with her open palm for Janiki to take a seat. She did so.