Rape, abduction, murder: The fate of an Indian family who dared to challenge human trafficking

Girls and women who are sold into slavery lead torturous lives of rape and abuse, while those who attempt to rescue them risk their own and their families’ lives in doing so, as Leslie Absher discovers I don’t know the whole story. All I know is that I’m going to meet a woman named Mukta* whose husband was killed saving girls from sex trafficking. She survived but her husband – a pastor and part of India’s Christian minority, a man who ran a home for children, many of whom were rescued from the gangs – did not. Ayush*, another Christian Indian pastor who runs an orphanage I donate $35 (£26) to every month, sits beside me as we rock along a dirt road lined with sugar cane fields. He talks in hushed tones into his phone while the driver watches the road behind dark glasses. We pull up to a small collection of cement buildings. Scrubby trees wave to us from the side of the road. “Wait here,” Ayush says. He gets out and disappears inside a small house. A moment later, he opens the door and says, “You can come.” I climb out into a dry, hot day and walk to the front of the car. Ayush moves toward the doorway of a low ceilinged house, pushes back a cloth curtain and motions for me to follow. I try to ready myself to meet someone who has just lost their husband, a man who was killed for trying to save girls. I tell myself I won’t stay long, just long enough to greet her, ask if she has anything she’d like to share. I imagine we’ll sit around a small table in plastic chairs and she’ll offer snacks or a soft drink. Then I’ll leave. After all, what can one say to a woman who has lost her husband, the father of four daughters, in such a violent way? I step into a shaded room. It is empty except for a narrow cot. I see a woman lying on the cot beneath a single, floral sheet. Her face is turned toward the wall. I immediately want to back out of the room. This is a mistake. This woman is sick. This is a house with a very sick person. But I know it’s her – Mukta, the pastor’s wife. Suddenly the room feels crowded with people staring down on her. There is no air. Ayush motions for me to move toward the head of the cot. Mukta turns her gaze from the wall, sees us, shakes her head and murmurs, “No, no, no.” Her hair is limp, plastered against her head, fragile, the bones of her face so thin. Her lips are chapped. Flies sputter around the room oblivious. Did she know we were coming? Did she have any say in this visit? Her eyes seem fixed on something I can’t see, something beyond this small, dark room. I’m not at all sure she can hear or see us. “These are visitors from America,” Ayush tells her. “They are here to see you.” I have no smile or appropriate facial expression to offer. I sit down beside her and stumble through a few words. “I am sorry for your pain,” I say. They are useless words, irrelevant. My lungs tighten while she stares toward the ceiling. A few minutes later, Ayush signals it’s time to go. We move out to the road and back into the car. The village shrinks behind us. Everyone in the car is silent. I don’t ask what happened to her, why she is in this condition. I take my cue from the mood in the car, from the silence. In the months I’ve been traveling the world, I’ve learned to be patient, to not always look for explanations. “She was taken after he was shot,” Ayush says later. We are back in his home, and his children are lounging on a blanket in the common room. “They put her into prostitution. Then they took her somewhere and many men rape her,” he says this in a low voice, while his children are distracted, playing with my smart phone. My breath catches in my throat. He says acid was thrown onto her vagina and then she was thrown off a wall into the jungle. Discarded. Later, she was found and brought to a hospital.