"What better evidence do you want?"
"Keep your voice down, Ucchal!"
"You pretend to run an organization? You're anything but organized!"
"We must be practical here."
"Girls throughout India! Abducted in their thousands! Say it with me! Abducted! Not merely inconvenienced, no! Abducted! Girls, some as young as seven or eight, their identities changed so often they forget who they are! Abducted! What about 'practical'? Save the girls! Save them!"
"Ucchal, I beg you. Keep your voice down. We are handling the abductions."
"And the customers who play along like it's a game to keep the fun going? And the police bribed to turn a blind eye? Are you handling that, Detective Ahuja? India's epidemic, its exploiters, its crime lords, its pedophiles? Are you handling any of them?" Ucchal turns dreadfully pale, battling a persistent virus. She practiced her speech fifteen times in the women's washroom prior to stepping into Detective Kristi Ahuja's office.
Ucchal lowers herself to her seat. "Forgive me."
Detective Ahuja slouches over her desk, appearing merged with it, her posture blunted by sedentary tasks. "You're passionate. Don't apologize for passion."
Ucchal coughs into a napkin. "There are fates worse than death, and one of them is living unfree."
The desk creature vanishes beneath her desk to sort through a box of files. She resurfaces with a beige folder. "Just a bit more paperwork."
Ucchal opens the folder in her lap, finding a form nine pages in length: questions about credentials, health information, work experience. "When does protocol become prevention, Detective Ahuja?" She fills the form out in a half-conscious, automatic fashion.
"Do you," asks the desk creature, "have endurance, Ucchal."
"I'd say so."
"And stamina?"
"I stave off my illnesses however possible."
"What about humility?"
"Not if I answer yes."
Detective Ahuja pokes her head out her office door and scans the hall outside. "Decent answers, decent answers."
"Answers are meaningless. I want action."
"Well, misguided action can be worse than doing nothing at all." The detective eases her office door closed with the utmost tact, cringing at the inevitable sound of its closing click. "We have to do this intelligently. As a unit. This is bigger than you or I. If we don't work together, we will be ineffectual. Now, let's keep our voices down, Ucchal, so my colleagues can do their jobs. You gave us your evidence on Prithviraj Natarajan. If it's good evidence, we could be looking hope straight in the invisible heart."
Prisha never has to change her name, because she never gets caught working the streets. Yashvi was Hruthi when she first met Prisha, who introduced her to opium, ketamine, and ecstasy.
"Once you're high," Prisha told Yashvi, "you won't care about what's happening to your body."
Yashvi had just met with the slippery-fingered doctor who comes to the Labyrinth to, after much (procedural?) fondling, administer contraceptives. He sticks the girls with a long needle that keeps them from ovulating.
Prisha asked her first "How many?" when she felt close enough to chat with Yashvi.
At first Yashvi wasn't sure what the question meant, but Prisha's fidgeting granted clarity.
Sexual intercourse.
Customers.
How many?
"Ten." Yashvi glanced up quickly, feeling vulnerable. "What about you?"
Prisha shook her head. "More than ten."
"What happened to your ear?" Laksh traces Yashvi's stitches with his thumb.
Bottles discarded by some drunk bob in the pool under the bridge. Yashvi grasps Laksh's chin and concentrates on his eyes as though feeding them with her own.
He says, "Is it bad, Yashvi, what happened?"
She says, "Yes. Terrible."
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
"I . . . I will tell you. . ."
It happened when Yashvi was Radnya.
She clutched a small ticket, TO MEERUT, between her fingers.
Meerut was full of surprises, street music, parades, protests. Perhaps all this also exists back in Delhi, but she would not know it, since she only knows the caverns of the Labyrinth, or "brothel," as she once overheard two mothers refer to it in the shallow pool under the bridge.
Brothel. Weird name, she thought. Sounds like "broth." Are we scallops in a soup or something? Madam's soup of girls.
Yashvi laughed, imagining herself, Prisha, and the others floating in a giant bowl as a giant Madam stirred them with a giant spoon.
Yashvi was bumped from the side, engulfed then in a flurry of papers. A textbook hit the floor. It rolled, wings aflutter, like a panicking pigeon. "I am so sorry!" somebody cried. "Are you all right? Please forgive me!"
Yashvi watched a hand gently lift the book off the porous concrete. The student was about her age, lightweight, well-dressed, a heavy knapsack flopping as he scrambled after his disobedient papers. She did what she could to assist him, the wind causing this to spiral, that to take flight. She managed to retrieve four wayward sheets, one gone for good, blown to the heavens. He took what she had salvaged and he grinned nervously, his teeth intensely white. "So sorry, miss. Thank you so much."
The trees overhead roared and let their dry leaves come sailing down. He rubbed his nape, seeming somehow both in a rush and not. "I haven't seen you before, miss. Are you new?"
She raised her eyes from his shiny teeth, then shrugged.
"Oh," he said. "Well, you have a lovely day."
She nodded.
"Okay, miss. Thanks again! Thanks so much!" He hurried away and she hadn't even spoken a word.
Don't go, she wanted to say. Take me where you're headed. And we can be each other's.