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Corban Addison’s dark novel about sex trafficking in India has a quiet beginning in a village on Tamil Nadu’s Coromandel coast: “The sea was quiet at first light on the morning their world fell apart. They were sisters — Ahalya the older at 17 and Sita two years her junior.”
But shortly before nine ’clock, the story continues, Ahalya noticed “something strange” about the sea . “She studied the waterline, and the sea seemed to retreat before her eyes. Soon 50 feet of sodden sand lay exposed... In less than 10 seconds, the line expanded and became a roiling surge of water...”
She was not to know this was a tsunami which leaves behind the floating bodies of her parents. And that the nightmare is only beginning.
A Walk Across the Sun, just published in the US, the UK and by Penguin in India, is a novel based on real life. “We have sold the book in 15 translation markets, so it will be out in Brazil in August, Norway in September,” says its 32-year-old American author, Corban Addison, who has flown to London from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It is a fine spring-like morning in London and Addison, who has a few hours in hand before he flies back home, chooses to sit outside in a pavement cafe. In contrast, the subject matter of his novel could not be darker.
The book traces the orphaned sisters’ journey to Mumbai, as a taxi driver who promises to take them to relatives delivers them instead to ruthless sex traffickers. Ahalya is “broken in” by one of her handlers, while “Sita sat in the darkness of the stairwell, weeping at the sounds of her sister’s violation...”
Meanwhile, far away in Washington DC, lawyer Thomas Clarke, whose marriage to his Indian wife, Priya, is going through a rough patch following the death of their baby daughter, decides to take a sabbatical and work with a human rights organisation in Mumbai. It is intended in the novel, which twists and turns through Chennai, Mumbai, Paris and Washington, that Thomas’s path and those of Ahalya and Sita and their traffickers should cross.
Addison may have put something of himself into the character of Thomas. Like him, Addison is a lawyer who took time off from work — but to write his novel, which appears to have struck a chord not only in the US but in countries across the world.
“One reason is that the world is becoming more and more aware of sex trafficking as a significant human rights issue and the fact is that it touches everywhere,” he says.
He states in a precise way what made him write the book, why he chose to put his findings into a novel rather than a work of non-fiction, why he decided to set his tale in India and what he hopes will be the outcome.
Trafficking is not just a Third World problem, he stresses. “Far too many people in the West think of it as a developing world problem when in reality it is a human problem. And I wanted to do right by India and make sure that people see India as a beautiful place with this underside — and see the same thing about the West.”
His interest in sex trafficking is relatively recent. Right from a young age, “I have always had a passion for justice. As I travelled I became more aware of global issues — the trafficking problem was sort of on my radar screen but it had not penetrated deeply until my wife and I saw a film in the spring of 2008. It was a feature film, German actually.”
He and his wife, Marcy — the couple have a son, Samuel, aged 4, and daughter, Kalia, 2 — were disturbed and moved by Trade which stars actor Kevin Kline. It narrates the harrowing story of Adriana, a 13-year-old girl kidnapped by sex traffickers from her home in Mexico City, and the efforts of her brother, Jorge, 17, to save her.
It was Marcy who put the idea of a novel into his head. “Corban, I know you are working on some other manuscripts but I really think you need to write a novel on human trafficking.”
The story would be set in India since he already had links with an organisation in Mumbai called the International Justice Mission, which “rescues victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression”.
Addison acknowledges there already exist many factual books on sex trafficking, the best of which he considers to be Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery by Siddharth Kara of Harvard. But Addison chose to write a novel.
“A story has that unique ability to pierce the defences of the mind and reach down into the place where we feel,” he remarks.
A friend, Ash Singh, who had settled in the US after marrying an American girl, suggested a reading list.
Addison recounts the reading he did and the films that he saw before going to India. “My friend told me about Jhumpa Lahiri, her short stories and, of course, I had seen The Namesake. I read Interpreter of Maladies. There were a number of stories about Bombay — Maximum City I read. I read that while I was in the city and, goodness, Suketu Mehta’s description is not only eloquent but so insightful.”
Next, he watched several Bollywood films — among them Jodhaa Akbar, Om Shanti Om and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.
Most significantly, he devoured the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and English-language retellings of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
“In fact, I took the names of my two major Indian characters — Sita and Ahalya — from the Ramayana,” confirms Addison. “Ahalya (married to the sage Gautama) was the woman who was seduced by Indra — she was saved when Rama came along on his quest to recover Sita. In my book, Ahalya is a girl who is innocent but defiled in the brothels by a power outside her control. But she was ultimately rescued by Thomas.”
Addison flew to India, spending five days in Chennai and a month in Mumbai. On the long train journey between Chennai and Mumbai, he enjoyed what would be one of many “fabulous conversations with Indians”.
In Mumbai, where he was told there are 1,00,000 prostitutes, he found the problem of trafficking to be “massive”. “It is actually incredibly easy to arrange young virgin girls for sex parties. In fact, the rate to arrange a sex party of three virgin girls was something like Rs 2 lakh.”
He also encountered the new phenomenon of East European women who he suspected had been trafficked. He believes “many Indian girls are trafficked out of the country to work for little or no pay in restaurants and cheap labour conditions”.
Rescuing the girls from the clutches of traffickers and brothel keepers, who are often protected by corrupt policemen and politicians, is very difficult. The girls themselves have no concept that there can be another life.
“The average age to enter prostitution around the world is 13,” he reveals. “And by definition, according to international standards, if you are under age and you enter prostitution, you never do it on your own. There is always somebody involved, always a man older.”
It is also distressing that “most women who end up in prostitution start as minors and many of them have been sexually abused by their fathers or their uncles or their grandfathers. Sex has been perverted for them — it has been stolen from them from a very early age.”
Addison is not glib enough to offer a solution for India. “No, I don’t have any panacea to offer — the one thing that does need to happen around the world is that the solution will have to be both national and local. On the national level there needs to be a political will and that political will often comes from the people — an awareness saying we actually need to make sure there are good laws in place. Punishments are appropriately doled out not just to the traffickers but also to the customers whose money is fuelling the trade. That is something that a lot of countries have struggled to do because there are historical perceptions that the women are the problem, not the men.”
In his novel, Corban Addison sees to it that Ahalya and Sita are rescued by Thomas but in real life such happy endings are rare.