Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Before She Understood What Was Happening to Her
She had been happy that evening.
That was the thing that stayed with her afterward, through everything that came after — the specific, uncomplicated quality of her mood on the walk back from the library. Not the dramatic happiness of a good thing happening but the smaller kind, the kind you don't notice while you're in it: she had finished her notes, the library had been cool, the chai she'd bought from the stall outside was sweet in exactly the right way, and Misha had texted her three crying-laughing emojis about something ridiculous that had happened in her evening class, and Anika had been smiling at her phone when she turned into the lane.
That was the last ordinary moment she would have for a very long time.
Misha had been her best friend since the third week of their first year, when they had been assigned adjacent seats in a compulsory psychology tutorial and Misha had leaned over and whispered, I have no idea what he's talking about, do you? and Anika — who absolutely did know what he was talking about, because she had read the chapter twice — had said no without hesitation, because something in Misha's grin had made her want to be the kind of person who said no and laughed about it.
That was not something Anika had ever naturally been. She was the kind of person who sat in the back, who finished assignments early, who ate lunch alone and told herself she preferred it. She had grown up learning that the safest way to exist was quietly — no loud edges, nothing that drew attention, nothing that gave anyone a handhold. The years between twelve and eighteen had built that architecture into her so carefully that by the time she arrived at university she wore it like a second skin, and she had not expected anyone to see past it.
Misha saw past it in about four days. Not by asking — Misha never pressed, which was one of the things about her — but simply by assuming, with absolute cheerful confidence, that Anika was already her friend. She had texted, dropped by, brought extra food to lectures, complained about her family in long detailed monologues that somehow required nothing from Anika except her presence. And her presence, she had discovered, was something she could give.
In three years they had become the kind of friends who could sit in the same room for two hours saying nothing and leave feeling understood.
Earlier that day, Misha had come by Anika's hostel room before going home for the weekend. She'd been in a rush — coat half on, bag spilling — and had thrust a padded envelope at Anika with the casual urgency of someone remembering a small errand at the last second.
Can you drop this at the collection shop near Kamla Nagar? The one next to the tailor. Just put it on the counter, they'll know what it is. It's for my uncle — Papa asked me to send some cash and I completely forgot until now and my bus is in twenty minutes—
She had already been moving toward the door.
Misha, I don't even know which—
I'll send you the pin, it's literally five minutes from the library, you're going that way anyway, please, you're the best, I love you, okay, I have to run—
The door had swung shut behind her.
Anika had looked at the envelope. Padded, brown, taped closed. An address scrawled on the front in Misha's looping handwriting. Not particularly heavy.
She had put it in her tote bag and not thought about it again for the rest of the day, because it was Misha and there was nothing to think about.
The lane was a shortcut she had used a hundred times. Nothing special about it — one working streetlamp, a stretch of wall, the backs of buildings, the distant sound of traffic beyond. The rain had eased off to that fine persistent Delhi drizzle that wasn't quite enough to open an umbrella for and was more than enough to make your clothes feel heavy. She had dropped the envelope at the shop — the man behind the counter took it without looking at her, and she'd thought nothing of it, barely registered it — and she was on her way home, reading Misha's texts on her phone, when it happened.
She did not hear them.
She felt it first — a movement in the air beside her, the way a room changes when someone enters it — and then a hand was on her arm and the phone went flying from her hand and she had approximately one second of pure, total incomprehension before her body caught up and terror arrived in her all at once like a fuse going off.
She screamed.
She screamed with everything she had. She screamed and twisted and clawed and pulled because that was all she had — she was five-foot-three and eighty-eight pounds and there were two of them, she registered that much, two grown men with grips like iron, and she did not stop making noise because making noise was the only thing she could think of to do, because the lane wasn't empty, there were people within earshot, there had to be someone—
"Help me! Please — somebody — HELP—"
Her voice tore itself raw in her throat.
Someone looked. She saw it — a man at the mouth of the lane, turning toward the sound, and her heart lurched toward him with everything it had, every atom of hope she possessed in that moment — and then his gaze slid away. He kept walking. He put his head down and he kept walking and he was gone and the hope went out so fast it left something scorched behind it.
She kept fighting. She didn't know what else to do. She went limp for a moment the way she'd heard you were supposed to, to throw them off balance, and one of the men stumbled slightly — she felt it, felt his grip shift — and she wrenched her arm and got half free and screamed again, screamed his name without thinking: Misha — MISHA— as though her friend were somewhere near, as though any of this made sense.
And then the needle.
She barely felt it. A pressure at the side of her throat, professional and quick, and then warmth spreading outward from that point, immediate and wrong, and the world began to do something she had no framework for. It didn't go dark. It went sideways. Her legs stopped belonging to her. Her voice stopped working. She was aware of being caught — of not hitting the ground, of hands that shifted from restraint to support with a seamlessness that her dissolving brain noted and could not process — and then there was the car. Dark interior. The smell of synthetic seat covers and cold air conditioning.
No, she thought, or tried to think, but the word had nowhere to go.
Then there was nothing.
She woke up in pieces.
The first thing was cold. An air-conditioned cold that was too much, the kind that made her skin prickle. She registered it before she remembered anything else — before she remembered herself, her name, the lane, the needle. For approximately three seconds she was just a body, cold, and then consciousness returned with an awful crashing completeness and she jolted upright and had to grab the armrests to stop herself falling because the surface beneath her was moving. Vibrating. A sustained low hum she recognised, with a cold cascading horror, as an aircraft engine.
She was on a plane.
She was on a plane.
She looked around wildly — head jerking in every direction, hands gripping the armrests, breathing in ragged shallow pulls that weren't doing anything useful. The cabin was dim. Not a regular flight — the seats were wrong, too few, too wide, the configuration of a private aircraft, cream-coloured leather and soft overhead lighting turned low. Three or four men visible, spread through the rows, none of them looking at her. Not looking away, either — the specific studied indifference of people who were watching her peripherally and had been instructed to appear not to be.
Her tote bag was gone.
Her phone was gone.
Her dupatta—
She looked down at herself and stopped.
She was not wearing what she had been wearing.
She was wearing a salwar kameez she had never seen before. Clean, light blue, neatly fitted, the kind of thing you might buy from any decent market in any Indian city — anonymous, ordinary. Her own clothes — the yellow kurta, the jeans she'd pulled on that morning in a hostel room that now felt like it existed in another dimension — were simply gone. She was wearing a stranger's clothes on a private aircraft over a geography she could not identify and she could not breathe properly.
When, she thought, and the word was so terrible she couldn't finish it. When had they done that. While she was unconscious. Someone had — while she was unconscious and could not know and could not stop it—
She pressed both hands flat over her face and breathed into her palms. In. Out. In. Out. Slow. She was trying to stop herself from screaming the way she had in the lane, because some part of her that was still working understood that screaming in a sealed aircraft with multiple armed men was not going to help her.
She lowered her hands.
She pressed them flat on her thighs and looked up.
A woman.
There was a woman sitting in the aisle seat directly across from her. Not in a passenger configuration — she had turned to face Anika, deliberate, waiting. She was perhaps twenty-five, Thai, with a face that was composed and professional and entirely without warmth. She wore a plain dark shirt. Her hair was pulled back. She looked like a person who had been hired to deliver a message and intended to do so efficiently.
Anika stared at her.
The woman said, in clear, clipped English: "You should drink something. There is water in the seat pocket."
Anika said: "Who are you. Where am I. What is happening—"
"Drink the water first."
"I don't want the—" Her voice broke on it. She heard it break and couldn't stop it. She tried again. "I don't want water. I want to know what is happening. I am a student. I am a student at Delhi University and I haven't done anything and I don't know why I'm here and I need you to tell me—"
"Drink the water," the woman said again. Not unkind. Not kind. Simply factual, the way you speak to someone who needs to be managed through a process. "You will feel better for it. There is time before we land. We can talk, but you should drink first."
Anika's hands were shaking. She looked at the seat pocket. There was a bottle of water, sealed. She took it, because her mouth was ash and her head was a slow-boiling pain behind her eyes, and she opened it and drank half of it without stopping, and the shaking in her hands did not go away but the edge of the headache softened slightly.
She looked at the woman. "Please," she said. "Please just tell me. Am I—" She couldn't get the word out. There were words she had been refusing to let herself think since she woke up and the clothes were wrong, words from news articles and awareness campaigns and a kind of distant horror she had always kept at a careful remove. She looked at the woman and she said: "What are you going to do with me."
Something moved through the woman's face. Not pity — not quite. More like the expression of someone who has been asked a question that lands closer to their conscience than they'd like.
"You are not going to be sold," she said. "You are not going to be hurt. If you cooperate."
Cooperate. The word was enormous and specific and landed in Anika's stomach like a stone.
"Cooperate with what," she said.
The woman reached into the bag at her feet and placed something on the armrest between them. A booklet, dark blue, official-looking. A passport.
"That is you," she said. "Different name. Different details. When we land, you will walk through immigration beside me. You will not speak unless they speak to you directly. If they ask a question, you answer with what is in there — your name, your purpose for visiting, your hotel. Nothing else. You keep your face calm." She paused. "If you try to tell them who you are, or if you create any problem — it is not only you who will be hurt. Do you understand what I'm telling you."
Anika looked at the passport.
"Your family in Punjab," the woman said, quietly. "Amritsar, yes? Your mother and your father. Your younger brother."
The cold that went through her then had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
She had left them. She had made a deliberate, painful choice to create distance, to move to Delhi for university and build a life that was separate and hers alone. She was estranged, in the soft complicated way of people who love each other and have nevertheless failed each other badly. She called her mother sometimes. She did not call her father. She did not think about her uncle and had not for years, not directly, not with the full weight of what she knew.
But they were alive. Her mother was alive. Her brother Rohan was fourteen now and probably taller than her, she thought sometimes, she wondered sometimes—
"I understand," she said.
She said it without drama, without fight. It came out flat and certain and it was the most frightening thing she had heard herself say.
The woman nodded. Reached into her bag again and produced a small package — a sealed plastic case, the kind a jewellery store might use. She opened it. Inside: small gold earrings, a thin gold chain, a bindi.
"Put these on," she said. "You need to look like someone who has come to visit family. Like someone who is comfortable traveling. Not like—" She gestured briefly at Anika's face.
Anika looked down at herself. She could imagine what her face was doing. She could imagine the swollen eyes and the tear-tracked skin and whatever particular expression prolonged animal terror left on a person's features.
"There is a bathroom," the woman said. "Behind you. You can wash your face and put these on. I will come with you."
"I'm not going to run," Anika said. "We're on a plane."
"I know," the woman said. "But I will come with you."
The bathroom was the size of a closet and smelled of recycled air and plastic. There was a mirror above the tiny sink, and Anika looked into it and saw herself, and for a moment she could not connect the person in the mirror to the person who had been walking home an hour or two or however many hours ago reading Misha's texts and thinking about nothing at all.
Her face was wrecked. The mascara she occasionally wore — it was Thursday, she'd had a presentation in the morning, she'd made a small effort — had tracked dark lines down her cheeks. Her eyes were swollen into something specific and incriminating. Her hair had come mostly loose from its plait.
She ran cold water into her palms and pressed them against her face. Again. Again. The water on her closed eyelids was the most concrete thing she had felt since waking up on the plane and she stood there with her hands pressed over her face for as long as she thought she could afford.
She thought about her mother.
She thought about Rohan, who was fourteen and annoying and had called her last Diwali to ask if she was coming home and she had said maybe, and she had not.
She thought: they know where my family lives. Someone, somewhere in this apparatus, has a file with an address in Amritsar.
She looked at her reflection.
Do what they tell you, she thought. Do what they tell you until you understand enough to know what else to do. Don't make them use the thing they're holding over you. Buy time. Stay alive.
She did not know where this instruction came from. It did not feel like bravery. It felt like the same thing she had done at twelve, at fourteen, at sixteen — that particular economy of the self that kicks in when there are no good options and survival requires the temporary surrender of everything except the will to survive.
She washed her face. She fixed her hair into a neater plait, fingers working automatically. She put the gold earrings in — small, appropriate, anonymous. The chain. The bindi, pressed onto her forehead with the tip of her finger, and she looked again at her reflection.
A different girl. Not different enough to fool anyone who knew her, but different enough for a photograph in a passport. Different enough for an immigration desk at whatever airport they were approaching.
She thought: I don't even know what country.
The woman knocked on the door. "Two minutes."
"I'm coming," Anika said.
She went back to her seat. The woman sat across from her. Neither of them spoke.
Anika looked out the window. Black below, the vast formless dark of being above clouds at night, and then as the plane began its descent — she felt it, the change in pressure, the nose tipping down — the clouds broke open and below was a carpet of lights. A city, large, gridded with gold and orange, haloed at its edges by unlit darkness that looked like jungle.
Not India. Something in the shape of the light, the density of it, the geography of how it was arranged — not India.
She thought about what she knew about private aircraft, about what countries bordered what, about what direction they might have flown from Delhi. She knew almost nothing practical about any of this. She was a psychology student from Amritsar via a Delhi hostel and the furthest she had ever been from home was a college trip to Jaipur.
The plane banked. The city below turned, resettled. She could see, at the edge of the light, mountains — dark shapes, enormous, swallowing the stars.
Southeast, she thought. They had gone southeast.
She held the thought because having any thought was better than having none.
The woman reached over and touched her arm. Briefly, professional. "Remember," she said. "Calm. You are visiting. Your name is in the passport. You have been here before. If they ask — once, twice, maybe a third time. You will be fine."
Anika looked at her. She wanted, very much, to ask this woman her name. To ask if she had a family. To ask how she had ended up in this small aircraft bathroom-lit cabin, ferrying frightened girls through foreign immigration. She wanted to say: you are a person. I am a person. Can't you—
She didn't say any of it.
"Okay," she said.
The immigration hall was cool and white and humming with that international airport stillness that is the same at three in the morning in every country in the world. Most of the desks were staffed by officers in khaki uniforms. There were signs in Thai and English. The floor was a pale stone. There were other passengers, a commercial flight that had landed ahead of them apparently, a queue of tired people dragging wheelie bags, and Anika walked among them with the woman's hand on her elbow — not gripping, not forcing, just there, a guidance she could not misinterpret.
Her heart was going at a speed she thought could not be sustainable.
She thought about every film she had ever seen in which someone crossed a border with false documents. She thought about what happened to people in those films. She thought about Rohan, fourteen and probably taller than her, and she breathed.
The officer at their desk was a young man with a tired face. He looked at the passport. Looked at her. Looked at the passport again. Said something in Thai that the woman translated in a murmur: purpose of visit, tourist, yes, the hotel name, you've been here before?
Anika said: "Yes. My third time. I love Chiang Mai."
She did not know where that came from. She had never been to Chiang Mai or Thailand or anywhere outside India. The name was on the visa stamp in the false passport and she had glanced at it and it had gone in.
The officer stamped the page. Slid it back. Looked at the next person.
And they walked through.
Outside, in the warm thick night air of what she now understood to be Chiang Mai, a black SUV was waiting. Of course it was.
There were two men standing beside it who had been leaning against the car in an attitude of waiting that would have looked, to anyone who wasn't paying close attention, like boredom. But Anika, walking toward them with the woman's hand still at her elbow, noticed the way they straightened. She noticed the shape of the jacket on the one nearest the car — the specific way fabric moved differently when it was covering something underneath.
He had a gun.
She had never been near a gun in her life. She had seen them on police officers at protests and in old films her father watched, and she had never thought about them as real, present, applicable-to-her objects. The knowledge that there was a gun within ten metres of her body sat in her chest like a stone.
She got into the car.
The drive was long and dark and the woman did not speak and Anika did not ask her to. She watched through the window: a city at night, sleeping, neon in Thai script above closed shopfronts, the dark mouth of a highway, green walls rising on both sides as they went higher. Jungle. Dense and black and total.
She thought about her phone lying on the ground in that lane in Delhi. She thought about whether Misha would have tried to call yet. Whether the warden would notice her bed unslept in. Whether anyone would think to call the police, and whether the police would think to look beyond the city, and how long any of that would take.
She thought about how many hours might pass before anyone understood she was missing. She thought about whether missing would even be the conclusion, or whether they might think she had simply—
She didn't finish that thought.
She looked at her hands in her lap. The small gold earrings. The borrowed chain. She was wearing a stranger's clothes and a stranger's name and she was being driven through a Thai jungle in the middle of the night and she was twenty-two years old and she had never done anything. She had never done anything worth this. She had grown up in a house where she learned to make herself small and she had come to Delhi and she had made herself small there too and she had been careful and quiet and she had worked hard and she had not made enemies and she had not taken risks and none of it — none of it had protected her from the moment in the lane, the hand on her arm, the needle.
She felt the tears coming and she could not stop them. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and turned her face to the window so the men in front could not see it in the mirror, and she cried silently in the back of the car while the jungle moved past and the city fell away behind them and the darkness became complete.
The woman across from her said nothing. But after a moment, she reached into her bag and held out a small packet of tissues without looking at Anika, the gesture precise and impersonal, and Anika took it, and she thought that this might be the smallest possible mercy and she was pathetically grateful for it.
The gates opened on a villa.
Even through the fog of everything she was feeling, it registered as beautiful in the specific unsettling way of beautiful things in the wrong context. Stone walls pale in the dark, lit from below by garden lights. Trees like sentinels, lush and enormous. A garden immaculate enough to have been tended daily by multiple people. And the house itself — low, wide, with verandas and dark wood shutters and the warm yellow light visible through a few windows at this late hour.
This was not what she had imagined. She could not have told you what she had imagined, because she had been keeping the imagination at bay, but it had not been this. The villa looked like a place that existed in a different life. A life she had seen in magazines in the dentist's waiting room. A life that had nothing to do with her.
She was walked inside by the two men and the woman, through high ceilings and marble underfoot and the smell of fresh flowers — flowers, there were flowers in a vase the size of a child — and up a staircase and along a corridor and through a door.
The room was large and clean and furnished and it locked behind her.
She stood in the middle of it. She was wearing someone else's clothes and someone else's earrings and her face felt raw and her throat hurt from all the screaming she'd done in a Delhi lane that felt now like it had happened to someone else, in another country, on another planet.
The window showed a garden and a strip of pool and a sky beginning, at its far eastern edge, to consider the possibility of morning.
Anika sat on the floor. Not on the bed, not on the chair — the floor, with her back against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest, because the floor was solid and the wall was solid and she needed solid things right now.
She thought about every theory she could construct for why she was here.
The internet post she had shared six months ago, the one about the government's handling of student grants — it had gotten three hundred shares and then nothing. People did not get kidnapped across international borders for a shared post with three hundred shares.
Her psychology professor, who had given her a B-minus last semester when she felt she deserved better — she thought about this for approximately three seconds and almost laughed, which would have been hysteria, so she stopped.
A case of mistaken identity. She kept coming back to this. She was twenty-two years old and she had no money and no connections and no reason to be of interest to men with private aircraft and forged passports. There was a version of this that was a mistake. A terrible, catastrophic mistake, but a mistake.
She thought of the envelope she had dropped on the counter on Misha's behalf. The man who took it without looking at her.
She was too frightened to follow that thought to wherever it went, and besides, she didn't have enough pieces to build anything coherent from it. She set it aside.
She sat on the floor as the sky outside turned from black to grey to the pale gold of a Thai morning she had not asked to see, and she did not sleep, and she did not figure anything out, and eventually the light came fully and a bird somewhere outside the window made a sound she didn't recognise and she thought:
I am alive.
She thought: I was alive yesterday morning and I am alive right now.
She thought: Whatever this is, however it ends — I am alive right now.
It was not a brave thought. It was not a strong thought. It was the smallest, most essential thought she had ever had, and she held it like a lamp in both hands and it was the only thing that got her through until the door eventually opened and everything that came next began.
— End of Chapter One —