SOLD

I'm wiping the makeup off my face when the dark-skinned girl comes in. "What do you think you're doing?" she says.

"I'm going home."

Her tear-shaped eyes grow dark.

"There is a mistake," I tell her. "I'm here to work as a maid for a rich lady."

"Is that what you were told?"

Then Mumtaz arrives at the door, huffing, her mango face pink with anger.

"What do you think you're doing?" she says.

"Leaving," I say. "I'm going home."

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?"

My heart is pounding like the drumming of a monsoon rain, and my shoulders are shaking as if I had a great chill.

"You ignorant hill girl," she says. "You don't know anything. Do you?"

I wrap my arms around myself and grip with all my might. But the trembling will not stop.

"Well, then," Mumtaz says, pulling her record book out from her waistcloth. "Let me explain it to you."

"You belong to me," she says. "And I paid a pretty sum for you, too." She opens to a page in her book and points to the notation for 10,000 rupees.

"You will take men to your room," she says. "And do whatever they ask of you. You will work here, like the other girls, until your debt is paid off."

My head is spinning now, but I see only one thing: the number in her book. It warps and blurs, then fractures into bits that swim before my eyes. I fight back tears and find my voice.

"But Auntie Bimla said -- "

"Your 'auntie,' " she scoffs, "works for me."

I understand it all now.

I blink back the tears in my eyes. I ball my hands into fists. I will not do this dirty business. I will wait until dark and escape from Mumtaz and her Happiness House.

"Shahanna!" Mumtaz snaps her fingers and the dark-skinned girl hands her a pair of scissors.

This Shahanna leans close and whispers to me, "It will go easier on you if you hold still."

There is a slicing sound, and a clump of my hair falls to the floor. I cry out and try to break free, but Shahanna has hold of me.

Mumtaz draws back, the jaw of the scissors poised at my neck. "Hold still," she says, her teeth clenched. "Or I'll slice your throat."

I look at Shahanna. Her eyes are wide with fear.

I stay very still, looking at the girl in the silver glass. Soon she has the shorn head of a disgraced woman and a face of stone.

"Try to escape with that head of hair," Mumtaz says, "and they'll bring you right back here."

And then they are gone, leaving me alone in the locked-in room.

I pound on the door.
I howl like an animal.
I pray.
I pace the room.
I kick the door.

But I do not cry.

THREE DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS

Each day, a thousand people pass below my window. Children on their way to school. Mothers hurrying home from the market. Rickshaw pullers, vegetable sellers, street sweepers and alms-seekers.

Not one looks up.

Each morning and evening Mumtaz comes, beats me with a leather strap, and locks the door behind her.

And each night, I dream that Ama and I are sitting outside our hut, looking down the mountain at the festival lights, and she is twining my hair into long dark braids.

WHAT'S LEFT

Tonight when Mumtaz comes to my room, she sees that her strap has left raw sores on my back and neck, my arms and legs.

So she hits me on the soles of my feet.

HUNGER

Tonight when Mumtaz comes and unlocks the door, she sees there is no part of me unmarked by her strap.

"Now will you agree to be with men?"

I shake my head.

And so she says that she will starve me until I submit.

What she does not realize is that I already know hunger.

I know how your stomach gnaws on itself searching for something to fill it. I know how your insides keep moving, unwilling to believe they're empty.

I also know how to swallow your spit and pretend that it is soup. How to close your nose to the scent of another family's supper fire. And how to tie your waistcloth so tight that, at least for a few hours, you can fool your belly into thinking it's full.

Mumtaz, with her doughy waist and fat mango face, doesn't know the match she's met in me.

WHAT I DON'T DO

I don't pay attention to cries of the peanut vendor under my window.

I don't let myself smell the onions frying in the kitchen below, or pay heed to the chatter of the girls as they head past my door to the midday meal.

I don't listen for the footsteps of the street boy who brings afternoon tea in a wire caddy.

I don't permit myself to smell the aroma of the bowl of curried rice that Mumtaz passes under my nose, or take notice of the churning of my stomach.

Even in my sleep, I don't allow myself to dream of even a single roti.

AFTER FIVE DAYS

After five days of no food and water I don't even dream.

Excerpted from SOLD © Copyright 2011 by Patricia Mccormick. Reprinted with permission by Hyperion Paperbacks for Children. All rights reserved