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

Indrani said nothing, did nothing to stop them. Mira cried out and Bharati cursed them. I struggled, but the two men holding my arms lifted me so that my chappals fell right off my feet, and my wails became whispers beneath the Hindi movie music squawking from loud-speakers at the back of their jeep. As we jerked forward I looked back at the many clusters of women watching along the lane. I remember so clearly, as if I'd never noticed and never would again, the glitter of the tinseled brothel lights, the brilliant colors those women wore, the casual relief with which they resumed their suggestive, welcoming poses. But most of all I remember the hot black silence of their knowing eyes.

The men took me straight to the police station and pushed me in through a back entrance. They marked me down as sixteen years old, though I was not yet near puberty. One of them joked they would call me China Blue--for my eyes.

I said nothing. Their talk was full of a swagger and heat that I knew full well from the brothel, but also from some more distant place buried deep within me. There were three of them. They placed me in a cell by myself. They bound my hands. Then they left me. I was too frightened to call out. The men's hard taunts echoed in my ears. Not by way of the flash house now. No. Through a nightmare perhaps. Or a time long ago. The sliver of recall gnawed at me, filled me with dread.

I forced myself to push the voices away, to listen to the lizards tsk, tsking across the ceiling. A scorpion dropped on my arm, but it did not sting me, and I was grateful, told myself this was a sign that I would be forgotten. I slept, but soon woke to the rattle of the door, the stamp of boots, grunting, and a new smell over me, of police sweat and breath like rotten fish.

They yanked at the drawstring of my kameez trousers. The bars of the cell's single high window divided the night into four flat blue-gray strips of sky encased in black. A crescent moon clung to one of these strips. By its light I could just make out the shadow shapes of three men leaning, heard the slap as they loosened their belts. One by one they pried my legs open and, wordless, shoved themselves inside me.

No recall now. No sweet dread. Only this. I felt my flesh tearing, burning, weeping as they pounded deeper. I did not mean to scream, for I knew it would do no good, but somehow the horror, not at the pain or even the raw physical invasion, but that sensation of their hot, sticky spill pouring over and out of me unleashed such revulsion that I did not hear myself. China Blue sings, they howled back, mocking before they gagged me.

When at last they left me alone, I thought, this is what it means to be rescued by Mrs. Shaw.


As she woke to the second week of Aidan's absence, Joanna realized she was beginning to enjoy the slower pace of these mornings. Her husband had a habit of lurching out of bed the instant he opened his eyes, and if that didn't rouse her, the arthritic squeal of the plumbing as he showered and brushed his teeth surely would. Before her own eyes opened she could all but hear the roar of ideas, problems, assignments cramming Aidan's overactive skull, and by the time he emerged in one of his immaculate seersucker or white linen suits, she might have managed to sit up, might even have her robe on, but he would already have set his day's game plan. This inner momentum and discipline, the sheer volume of purpose in his life were among the many qualities that Joanna admired in her husband, yet try as she might to keep up, she found his early rising a particularly hard act to follow in India's grueling heat.

She crossed the room and raised the grass blinds--khas-khas tati, she corrected herself, silently crisping the syllables in her mouth, or tats, as the British and Indians both called them for short--and stepped out onto the balcony. Their house was at the end of Ratendone Road, on the city's fringe. In the two years since India's Independence, Delhi had been expanding rapidly and this part of town would doubtless soon be swallowed by development, but for the moment, it enjoyed a curious double identity. At night, the quiet of the nearby wild lands lent an aura of isolation, yet by seven in the morning the street already was seething with tonga wagons, bullocks, rickshaw and bicycle traffic. A sadhu covered in ash squatted with his begging bowl on one side of the road. A belled elephant, draped in mirrored embroidery, lumbered along the other, while overhead a kite stretched its wings, riding the morning heat currents. Even after living here five months Joanna still marveled at the adventure of it all.

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.