Maya

In 1986, Maya left her mountain village in Nepal for a city just outside of Kathmandu. Six months later, she and her friend thought that they were following a woman from their village to Bombay in search of a fortune. Instead, the woman sold the girls for Rs25,000 to a brothel in Calcutta. The two were now lost in one of the largest red light districts in the world.

After two years, Maya and her friend believed they had been rescued when two regular customers purchased and married the girls. Instead, the husbands began to bring home clients of their own. He soon sold her yet again to a brothel on Bombay's Kamathipura, the "street of cages," rows of brothels enclosed by bars. Here Maya received an average of four or five customers per day. She was held for more than two years in her cell where she was forced to see people from schoolboys to old men. She received two meals a day.

Maya had contracted several sexually transmitted diseases over her years of work. After over three months in the hospital for treatment, a concerned doctor rescued her; she returned to her village, where her friends and family consoled her. She died soon thereafter.

-Omar Sattaur, Child Labor in Nepal

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