Her wrinkles, stories in skin, travel her smile. She wears a koti splashed with floral design. A brooch on her lapel says "liberate" in Hindi.

"Radnya." Her voice is lavender. "Honesty is important today. Other days the truth might not seem so important, but today it is very important."

Walls appear to loom higher than they should. The ceiling hums with rectangles of light flashing back at themselves, replicated in a floor glossier than china.

"Radnya," she commands again, does not relent.

Her brow remembers her choice expressions in its lines. She agonizes after the downtrodden, and empathy marks her appearance down to her very posture, always open, never cross-armed.

On the window glisten dots of rain like baby marbles. Noon is bipolar and dwindles between temperatures. It may even rain again before the heat returns to collect its hourly fee, blazing so fanatically the rocks begin to fry and humidity threatens to smother whoever is not in the shade. Pariah dogs pant, their bubblegum tongues dangling as the mongrels scurry from the underside of one parked car to that of another. Rainwater sizzles on the concrete.

Across from the woman with the wrinkles, the koti, and the brooch, there sits a girl of nineteen. The girl holds her head low, her wrists crossed over her lap. She raises her eyes but not her chin.

Twenty hours earlier, this girl—sandwiched between two persons much larger than she—rode the train alone. She picked at a dark scab on her elbow. You are not supposed to pester a wound, she remembered, yet her thumbnail persisted.

Her silky jet-black curls, her personal midnight, hid her from assessment. Passengers joggled because the line of rails must have gone askew, knobbed like ancient vertebrae that connected terminals to districts. She touched her right ear and whimpered, twisting her shoeless toes. She had felt her helix and found it moist, her fingers returning with some blood but mostly clear fluid.

Men hung onto each side of the train. She could see them through every window, their hair flurrying, and she was happy to be in her seat. The tracks whined, perhaps bending from the sheer weight of the railroad cars. Would the train burst from so many inside?

It wheezed to a crawl, and she exited after all others had exited so she could know she was not being followed. The crowd was vibrant—a panorama of jade, orange, pink. Schoolchildren studied while they walked, notebooks flapping like brisk birds, textbooks tucked variously into armpits and necks, papers overflowing from bags. Two boys with knapsacks nearly their size and shiny slender arms peddled miscellaneous items: picture frames, disposable cameras, smartphone cases, Ethernet cables, key chains, cap guns.

Prithviraj waited for the girl.

She sensed him before she saw him, the laser beams of his eyes scanning face after face to find hers, and she knew she shall move toward his eyes, though she thought it might be possible to run from them. She had been the fastest in her village once, not many years ago, could outpace even joggers. Now it seems every day she is reminding herself that she must never run from anyone, no matter how badly the bones in her legs plead with her. Legs cannot in fact plead. They are only legs and haven't minds of their own.

She fussed and fretted, but as she drew nearer to Prithviraj her anxiety cooled and her brain stopped clicking. He loitered near the payphone, where he often stands to yell at the coin-slot or to glance at investigators while whispering, covertly, to whoever babbles on the other line.

Prithviraj is like a spirit; he does not come and go as most do. He is omnipresent, the girl has concluded. When not seen, he is closest.

He reached out his hand when she was still far enough to run. The crowd seemed to disappear and it was only she and him, everything becoming familiar.

His watch shimmered on the wrist of his outstretched hand.

He kept a knuckle on the small of her back while he walked her down the street where signs advertized foreign companies such as Nikon, Verizon, and Calvin Klein along webs of wires strung from buildings. So densely interlaced were these webs, so often these wires intersected, one would expect giant spiders to scamper across.

The girl made brief eye contact with a gentleman wearing a beige turban as he pedaled past her on his bicycle. Five rainclouds merged in the center of the sky to form a tarp over Delhi, and when the girl looked up, a raindrop flecked her nose and trickled down her cheek like a tear.

There were many shops and many people, and all were vibrant, but she was not vibrant.

She tripped over a hog's carcass which had been slashed to expose its innards. She gagged in beholding it. The streets were hazardous, a lack of sidewalks resulting in a disarray of automobiles, of pedestrians. Mopeds zipped dangerously between bodies; minibuses sputtered and tooted, centimeters from sending somebody hurtling through the air. Buildings sat close together and everything in the slum seemed linked somehow. If anything, Delhi could have been woven together in metal and hope.

The girl recalled her name: a collection of funny, arbitrary letters forgotten if she grew careless. She ascribed it a color, a mood. Red: the color of her shift. Angry: something she strove to not be. Raad-ny-uh, the girl memorized. Raad. Ny. Uh.

"Who are you?" Prithviraj tested her.

"Radnya," she said.

"Who are you?" he repeated.

"Radnya," she told him plain.

You might guess justice had gone stiff with decay, and you might think virtue a yellow bone in a skeleton partially buried—not by shovels but by wind—where a child had fallen pale yet nobody had come to collect him until he rotted soft and brittle. Radnya understood what you might guess or think. She understood because she had watched the children fall and could have been one of them.

Garage doors cranked up and down throughout the day, opening and closing for business, shops adazzle with feast-your-eyes-on-this trinkets and treasures. A kneeling man blew into his flute, and the hooded head of a cobra poked out from a basket at his knees. A bald child levitated over the street, his ashy hand gripping the bulb atop his staff, his supposed only contact with the dirt. Cars would not let each other breathe and Radnya palmed her ears at the beeps, the shouting, the hysteria.

Amongst the nauseating sweetness of motor oil, she could smell something being fried—potatoes, aloo tikki. Her stomach whined, weakness spread over her, she peered shyly into the black eyes of the man leading her, and at length her mouth said . . . "Hungry."

Prithviraj is three heads taller than she. He has strong arms, his shirt always discolored by sweat, accentuating his muscles. She noticed for the first time that his hairline is receding. He bought her four gol gappe in a tinfoil bowl the diameter of a CD. Pressure built in her chest when before she ate she asked, her voice a mouse's squeak: "Must I repay you for this?"

Prithviraj told her not to worry and the pressure emptied out of her like snake venom.

She resolved to finish eating before she arrived at his dwelling—should she call it hers? It is a maze of alleys and doors and apparel. A few of these garments are very beautiful. They depend from clotheslines strung overhead and sometimes the breeze causes the skirts to twirl.

Prithviraj took the empty bowl from her. She had licked clean the crumbs. Two pariah dogs wandered by an open door, their tails wagging between their legs. Prisha, a girl who has aged herself twenty-five, leaned against the doorframe. She wore green eye shadow, crimson lipstick, and a purple shift, and her skin twinkled with aromatic oils, her jhumkas pinging as she moved her head to one side.

You can get lost in the networks of the Labyrinth, as it is rightfully called. It is where the girls live, however many girls there are, a dozen or countless hundreds. Why then do there seem to be mostly men roaming any given alley? These stragglers passed Radnya, some shirtless, the hair on their shoulders silver in the sunlight or moonlight or whatever light always seems strangely pallid here and nowhere else.

Here the men who look at her somehow always manage to steal something: happiness, innocence, the worst is she can never determine which or what. With every gander from their disoriented eyes she feels something deep within her being stripped away like layers of clothing, and when the last layer is gone how truly exposed will she feel, and then will the men move beyond that, unclothing her very skeleton of skin? What will she be able to cover herself with and what terrible nakedness lies underneath the underneath?

You do not get clothes in the Labyrinth, or what clothes you get are for being taken off.