Lakshmi’s Story 1

Namaste, my name is Lakshmi.

My parents named me after one of the gods that they worship, the goddess of good fortune, in hope that my life would bring them good fortune also. But the few years that I’ve been alive, have been anything but good fortune.

Life here in my little tribal village in the Eastern Mountains of Andhra Pradesh India, was seemingly so peaceful as a small girl. Until I was 5 years old, I played like all the other little girls and I helped my mother with the simple house tasks of collecting water from the well, feeding our goat and collecting the eggs from the chickens. I had no brothers or sisters. My father worked long days, from sun up to sun down. He worked in the coconut groves planting, tending and harvesting coconuts for the towns in the lower valleys.

Life was good until my father became angry at mother for not giving him a son. He started to come home form work drunk on alcohol made from palm oil, called toddy. He became very mean, often hurting mother and making us so scared that we would cry.

He didn’t like it when I would cry, so he would hit me to make me stop. He would yell at mother, saying how his long hours of work for barely more than a dollar a day, was not enough. Then he would leave the hut for a few hours and come home even more drunk and more scary, and with no food for us. I think he liked toddy more than he liked mother and I.

One night he took the food money again, left angrily after hitting both of us, and disappeared into the night.

Father never came back.

Our neighbours found him face down in a mud puddle near our house.

He was never going to hurt mother and I again.

I was glad for that, but my belly hurt so much with hunger – what would we do now?

Mother was such a small frail woman, never well and always coughing. People in our tribe no longer wanted to visit mother. No one shared rice with us anymore. My friends were told: “Stay away from Lakshmi, she is a bad omen.” I didn’t know what the word “omen” meant, but I knew I wasn’t bad because I would help my mother. I would wipe her feverish wet face with cool rags and I would clean up the blood after her coughing fits.

One very wet and muddy day during monsoon season, a man in fancy trousers came to visit mother. He said that if she would like some food and medicine to get better, that he would buy me.

How could he buy me? I’m not for sale!

He promised mother that I would be living with a family in the city who really needed a “pretty little girl” like me, to help wash their clothes and to help with cooking their meals. In return, each month, mother would get the medicine and food she needed.

It was nice to be called “pretty,” but I told him I needed to stay with mother and that I didn’t know how to cook meals, as I was only 6 years old.

He didn’t listen to me – neither did mother.

But mother, she did listen to him.

I cried when he put me in the truck, and we drove away from my sick mother. I wanted to stay with her and help her. He told me, that by me being a “good pretty little girl” and by helping my new family, that I was being the best help my mother could have. I tried to be brave, but I still cried.

The truck drive was very long. During that day we stopped in six other remote mountain villages, until there were ten of us “pretty little girls” squashed and crying in the truck. We didn’t speak the same dialect, so we couldn’t really talk with each other. So we just held on to each other and cried.

I think the truck driver forgot to bring us food, because by the time we got to the city it was dark and we were very hungry. I asked him to take me back to my mother and our hut, and that I didn’t know how to cook. He slapped my face, making it sting, and angrily told me to stay silent.

My face stung.

I cried more.

He kept hitting me, and I fell to the floor. When I woke up sore, it was dawn, and I was in a tiny room with the other girls from the truck.

We were all very scared.

I was very scared.  Where were our new families?

The truck driver came back to the room around the middle of the day with three other men and a very ugly smelly lady with mean eyes. She hit us with a thick stick to make us follow her. She kept shouting angrily at us, but she spoke using a different language, so we couldn’t understand her words. Another truck ride with our bellies in pain, took us to our new home. It was in a filthy part of town, on the outskirts of the city.

There were open sewage trenches along the side of the dark narrow alleys. It smelled disgusting and I saw many rats. I also saw many young sad girls everywhere, not much older than me, standing in lines along the ally walls. They had very little cloth on their bodies and lots of bright make up, but I saw that the makeup made their eyes look even more sad.

The truck stopped and with her stick, the lady hit us until we followed her to the back of a dirty house and up to the 3^rd floor. She forced us into a room that had painted windows to darken the room. The air was hot and stale, and there was nothing but a hard concrete floor. She kept hitting us with her stick, forcing us to stop crying and demanded that we say, “Yes madam, yes madam.”  I think her name must have been Madam.

The men left, then she left, leaving us with nothing but her laughing like a sick donkey as she locked the door behind her. Madam left us in there for two days. No food, no water and no bucket. All we were left with were our bruised bodies clutching on to one another. Our room was filled every minute with screams and shouts from the rooms next door, the rooms below us and the rooms above us.

Over the months that passed after our first nights of being locked in, we came to know what all the screams and shouts were about.

It became our life.
We never got to the families needing us “pretty little girls” to help them.
We were given to Madam. Madam gave us to many men.
We were the ones soon to be screaming and shouting day in, day out.
Our new home was a brothel.

On my 7^th birthday, no one cared. I didn’t care.

The twenty or more men who hurt me that day, didn’t care. That night of my birthday, once the sun had long gone to bed and the bar was wild and rowdy, I silently cried as I put on my dirty dress and bowed to the man who had finished hurting me. Madam grabbed me by my hair and shoved me back in the room with the other girls.
Soon after her leaving, we heard loud voices below us, and banging noises were coming up the stairs toward our room, sending Madam into a frenzy of screams.

We were so scared. Our little group of 10 girls had become sisters, so we held tightly to one another, not sure of what was happening. We all screamed as people burst into our foul dark room with lights, shining them on our frightened faces. Gentle, but urgent arms, scooped us up, and before we could do anything, we were in a van driving away, listening to the fading screaming from Madam being left behind in the ally. Too weak from months of men hurting our little hungry and bruised bodies, we soon collapsed in exhausted sleep.

A few hours later, then van stopped and as the door opened, peering into our exhausted and frightened faces, were eyes and smiles that seemed to us like a warm meal on a cold night. Eyes that didn’t look hungrily at our bodies with an evil gleam. Smiles that didn’t gnarl with licking lips of what they would do to us.

We still didn’t really understand each others words, and not the words of these new people either, but we knew that they weren’t going to make us do the painful things that had been our life in the brothel.

It’s been a whole year since we left Madam. It’s been a whole year since we had to have evil men hurt us each day and night. It’s been a whole year since I finally got to the family that that was waiting for their “pretty little girl”. A family that didn’t want me and my nine little sisters to cook, or wash for them.

They were wanting just us.

They were wanting me.

These smiling people treat me like mother used to before father became angry, and before she was sick. These people feed us, smile at us, brush my hair, let us get dressed alone, help us learn their words and sentences, and they let us draw pictures with coloured pencils. They tell us “little sisters” about a special person named Jesus. He hasn’t come to visit us yet here at our little safe house, but if He is like my new small family, I think I will like Him very much.

Maybe this Jesus will be new friend who will love me in a real way.

And maybe my name Lakshmi, isn’t so bad after all.

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