Yet she, like all of India , is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel. Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well.
And M. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for middle-class children outside the red-light district. This country almost certainly has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today. Decisions about using a condom are made by the customer or the brothel owner, not by the girl.
In one brothel I slipped into to conduct some interviews, there was not a single condom available. The police make more effort to help girls like M. Now at age 10, M. Her parents have pulled her out of her school in Kolkata and are sending her back to their native village hundreds of miles to the west. This leaves Basu and me with an extremely bad feeling, fearing that once she is back in the village and away from her protectors at the New Light shelter, her grandfather could sell her to a trafficker for transfer to a red-light district anywhere in India.
When we ask M. View all New York Times newsletters. Then again, she is unlikely to be consulted. And traffickers offer families hundreds of dollars for a pretty girl.
Ferrera fell in love with M. It would be heartbreaking to lose such a beautiful spirit to a life of violence and prostitution. Ferrera, Basu and I jammed into M. We got nowhere. Her parents have bought M. Ferrera said she will be writing letters to M. And Basu is counseling M. What I do know is that it is surreal that these scenes are unfolding in the 21st century.
