Excerpt from Flash House by Aimee E. Liu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The scraping when I pushed seemed as loud as a tonga horn, but gradually, bit by bit, I forced the gap wider. The dark morning air rushed through like water. I could hear the chug and shuffle of women rising to their chores, the wooden creak of bullock carts on their way to the river. Birdsong.

Fortunately, I was as narrow and light as I was weak. I felt for a chink in the wall with my toes and stretched my arms out and over the top. The sun was just coming up. A twist of smoke leaked from the stovepipe at the other end of the roof. That would be Bharati, starting a fire to cook breakfast for Shanta. Quickly, silently, I slithered down the outside wall until I hung from my fingers, then dropped the remaining distance to the ground. As I began to run I heard Indrani screeching for her tea.

Looking back, I realize that the only reason I was able to escape was the time of day. A few hours earlier or later, every doorway along the lane would have bristled with arms reaching out to catch me--friends of Indrani's, thugs visiting the brothels, babus trying to be helpful. As it was, the merchants who operated the ground-floor shops that fronted on G. B. Road were opening for business, and I could hear the grind of buses and horns barking from that direction. But most of the residents of this alley slept until late morning. Only Surie and his mother caught sight of me as I raced away, and they were not yet sufficiently recovered from their burns to give chase. Soon I was running along streets I had never seen before.

I had no plan, you see, no sense of the city. Although I had traveled hundreds, even thousands of miles to get here, in Delhi I was not allowed to leave our lane. You will be kidnapped. You will be raped. The police will arrest you. Beggars will attack you. These were the dire threats with which Indrani had kept me close. But now all but the last of these things had been done to me, and if I was myself a beggar, then why should other beggars attack me? The only fear I felt now was of Indrani and the goondas I was sure she would soon enlist to find me. There was a girl I had known from another flash house who was caught trying to escape, and when the goondas brought her back, the flesh from inside her body was hanging between her legs. I needed to get away from the red-light district as quickly as possible, but where would I go to?

The general flow of carts and bicycles led me first to the banks of the Yamuna River, where I found throngs of dhobis doing their morning wash. I was so tired and weak that the motion of the laundrymen's arms, the long white sausages of cloth arcing high and then smashing down on the wet stones, mesmerized me. The rhythmic sound, the unison, made me think of a flock of cranes, though I could not have named them as cranes but as birds I dimly recalled from a river buried in my childhood. Coming back to myself, I bathed and drank. I loosened my hair until it streamed about me in the water. I was free, yet this freedom was meaningless. I could beg, but as a beggar without protection, I would soon end up in another flash house or worse, one of the cage brothels I'd been told of, where girls were penned like animals. I could apply for work as a maid, but who would hire a scrawny child? The same for factory work. And in every case I would be at the mercy of men, though I no longer believed men had any mercy. Mira had mercy, but no power. Only Mrs. Shaw possessed both.

I asked the dhobis if they knew where the firenghi lived and worked. They told me to go to New Delhi, on the other side of the city. By bicycle or bus only half an hour away. I had no bicycle or money for the bus, so I set off on foot. By day's end I had made my way to the white colonnades of Connaught Place. I had discovered the broad, tree-lined avenues designed in the time of the British. I had even tasted firenghi food, in the form of a sandwich dropped on the pavement by a small yellow-haired boy. That sandwich was all I had to eat until late that night, when I heard a commotion down an alley and found a group of street children scavenging scraps from behind a restaurant. I joined the group--four boys and two other girls about my age--and they led me to a park where the shrubbery was dense enough to conceal us as we slept. But when I woke, the others had left, and I was as lost as ever.

Copyright © 2003 by Aimee E. Liu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.