[(from The Protection Project)
"My name is Anita Sharma Bhattarai. I am 28 years old. I am from Nepal. …On November 22, last year, I boarded the bus in order to go pay for my vegetables. I sat next to a Nepali man and woman. They offered me a banana to eat and I took it. Soon after I ate the banana, while I was still on the bus, I got a very bad headache. I told the man and woman that I had a headache and they offered me a pill and a bottle of mineral water to help me swallow the medicine. Immediately, I felt myself becoming groggy and then I fell unconscious.The next thing that I remember is waking up in the train station in Gorakhpur, India.
...The man told me not to cry out. He informed me that there were drugs (hashish) tied around my waist and that I had just smuggled them across an international border. He told me that if I brought the attention of the police, I would be in trouble …I could feel plastic bags under my dress.
…When we got to Bombay, he told …that I would have to go to his friend’s house and wait while he got us some money. She was a Nepali woman. She said her name was Renu Lama. I left the train station with Renu Lama.
…When we arrived at her house, Renu Lama told me that I should take a bath…[she] gave me some of her old clothes to wear... I felt very scared that evening and I refused to eat anything. I soon noticed that many men were coming in and out of the house and I realized it was a brothel. I began howling and shouting. I said that I wanted to leave. Renu Lama…said that I had been bought and I would have to work as a prostitute in order to pay them back… I cried a lot…
The next day, though, I insisted that I wanted to leave. The women began to slap me on the face. They cut off my hair. It was shoulder length in the back with short bangs in the front. Now that I had short hair, I knew that I could not leave the brothel without everyone identifying me as a prostitute. In my culture, short hair is the sign of a wild woman.