The children were thin, vulnerable, and small. Two of them sat with their four hands bunched together in a beehive-ball. One child embraced another within the huddle of a protective arm. All of them stared out at the well-fed, well-clothed purchasers and agents, following every change of expression or emphatic gesture of their bejewelled hands. And the eyes of those children were like the black gleam at the bottom of a sweetwater well.
What does it take to harden a man’s heart? How could I see that place, look at those children, and not put a stop to it? Why didn’t I contact the authorities? Why didn’t I get a gun, and put a stop to it myself? The answer to that, like the answers to all the big questions, came in many parts. I was a wanted man, a hunted criminal, living on the run. Contacting police or government authorities wasn’t an option for me. I was a stranger in that strange land: it wasn’t my country, and it wasn’t my culture. I had to know more. I had to know the language that was spoken, at the very least, before I could presume to interfere. And I’d learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. If I came back with a gun and stopped the slave market there, in that crooked concrete maze, it would start up again somewhere else. Stranger that I was, I knew that much. And maybe the new slave market, in a different place, would be worse. I was helpless to stop it, and I knew it.
What I didn’t know then, and what troubled me for a long time after that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it. I realised, much later, that a part of the answer lay in the Australian prison, and the men I’d met there. Some of those men, too many of them, were serving their fourth or fifth prison sentences. Many of them had begun their imprisonment in reform schools-Boys’ Homes, they were called, and Youth Training Centres-when they were no older than those Indian slave children. Some of them had been beaten, starved, and locked in solitary confinement. Some of them, too many of them, had been sexually abused. Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice.
And strange and shameful as it is to admit it, I was glad that something, someone, some experience had flinted my heart. That hard stone within my chest was all that protected me from those first sounds and images of Prabaker’s dark tour of the city.
Hands clapped in brittle echoes, and a little girl stood up from the bench to sing and dance. It was a love song from a popular Hindi movie. I heard it many times, hundreds of times, during the following years, and it always reminded me of that child, ten years old, and her surprisingly strong, high, thin voice. She swayed her hips, pushing up her non-existent breasts in a child’s imitation of a temptress burlesque, and new interest quirked the heads of the purchasers and agents.
Prabaker played the Virgil. His soft voice was ceaseless, explaining all that we saw, and all that he knew. He told me that the children would’ve died, if they hadn’t found their way to the people-market. Professional recruiters, known as talent scouts, roamed from one catastrophe to another, from drought to earthquake to flood. Starving parents, who’d already watched one or more of their children sicken, and die, blessed the scouts, kneeling to touch their feet. They begged them to buy a son or a daughter, so that at least that one child would live.
The boys on sale there were destined to work as camel jockeys in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf States. Some would be maimed in the camel races that provided afternoon entertainment for the rich sheiks, Prabaker said. Some would die. The survivors, grown too tall to ride in the races, were often abandoned to fend for themselves. The girls would work in households throughout the Middle East. Some of them would be used for sex.
But they were alive, Prabaker said, those boys and girls. They were the lucky ones. For every child who passed through the people-market there were a hundred others, or more, who’d starved in unutterable agonies, and were dead.
The starving, the dead, the slaves. And through it all, the purr and rustle of Prabaker’s voice. There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now.
