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I spent time in a secretive brothel in Kamathipura, where cotton cloth covered the entry to each room. These are girls and women who are truly sex slaves, unable to physically leave their rooms, even to go to the health clinic. They do not see the outdoors for years; their only walking is to the toilet at the end of the hall. They are in the karza or indentured servitude phase of sex slavery. They have been brought in against their will, tricked by someone they knew in their home village, purchased by a madam for as little as $100 U.S. Each slave has to “earn” back her money, in addition to whatever the madam spends housing and feeding her. They are young, rural, terrified, and unable to speak the local dialect, which intensifies their helpless isolation. If they do dare to flee, heavies are stationed at obvious places such as rail and bus stations to bring them straight back.

The women I met in this human storehouse were actually from Nepal, which has seen tens of thousands of its young stolen for Mumbai’s sex trade. Their poverty is so bad, their desperation so intense, that they are often forced to work here with an impossible number of clients per day. They even offer anal sex for a modestly higher fee (about 100 rupees more, about $2 U.S.). It’s hard to know the exact HIV rate of trafficked women, as those who are karza can’t be tested. However, in 2007 the HIV rate of women tested at the Falkland Road Clinic was 37 percent.

This obscene situation was brought to the attention of both the Indian and Nepalese governments by health workers from NGOs who were finding alarming rates of infection in the brothels. The result is that trafficking from Nepal to India has been significantly reduced—an exception being, of course, the women I met today.

It was a relief to leave that stifling room and climb up to the roof of the brothel for some air. I found about ten children there and a woman washing her dishes while rotten food floated in a growing puddle. They were dusty, filthy, but playful and animated by having a foreigner visit. I asked their names, but they wanted to go further, and those who could wrote their names for me on scraps of paper, so I would remember them. The whole life of a child, scrawled in a name. Against the plastic wall of a makeshift room on torn, small pieces of paper, they wrote:

Aadarshini

Yamuna

Nabhendu

Asiya

Aarti

I put the damp, dirty scraps carefully into my tote, and when I returned to the hotel, the instant I hit the door of my room, something exploded in my chest. I was suddenly clawing at my tote, dropping to my knees, nearly vomiting up grief as I crawled to the coffee table, where I laid out each child’s piece of paper, looking at their names, seeing the uniqueness of each one’s writing, imagining a bit of their essence on the paper from where their hands had touched it.

I thought of their lives—born and raised in brothels, and likely condemned to brothels as adults; the boys were already doing chores to keep things running, and the girls were often sold to men as early as age eight. It was too much for me to reconcile, their free-spirited joy on the roof in spite of the odious reality in the crowded rooms below. Why? How? What was I supposed to do now that I knew this, now that I knew them?

I called Tennie in Texas, described the brothel, and told her of the children I had met on the roof, how they played using that small bit of elevated space to escape their mothers’ sex acts and the equal dangers of the streets below.

“How do I pray for these children?” I asked, sobbing. “I don’t know how to begin, if I am not supposed to pray for specific outcomes.”

In her gentle voice, strong with experience and made gentle with empathy, Tennie began to tell me about her daughter, Kim, and the years Kim lived on the streets, in active addiction and anorexia. Tennie relied on Twelve Step programs as well as professional help to learn how not to enable, how to detach with love from a person’s problems and