Early on in “A Walk Across the Sun,” a character witnesses the kidnapping of a young girl in broad daylight in a public park in Charleston, N.C. Trying to make sense of what he’s seen, he challenges the local detective, who treats the abduction as if it’s not unusual: “You’re telling me this was an ordinary crime? This is North Carolina, not Mexico City.”
In his capable debut novel, Virginia writer Corban Addison shows us how naïve we are to think that “it couldn’t happen here,” with a chillingly realistic story of children trapped in the global slave trade and the people who fight to rescue them.
Thomas Clarke, a D.C. lawyer strolling through Charleston’s Cape Fear Botanical Gardens, idly watches a woman and her daughter — “a girl about ten years old” — on the path in front of him disappear around a bend of trees.
Moments later, he hears screams, races to the source, and finds the mother alone and distraught: A couple appearing to be tourists snatched her child and have already vanished.
The kidnapping haunts Thomas and fuels his decision to hunt for two of the millions of girls who are disappearing every day into one of the fastest-growing criminal industries in the world: Human trafficking.
The book begins on the day Ahalya Ghai, 17, and her 15-year-old sister Sita are ripped from their sheltered, comfortable existence in coastal India by a deadly tsunami.
Orphaned and homeless in the chaotic aftermath of the storm, they’re abducted, shuffled from one secret location to another, handed off from seller to buyer for gradually increasing prices, and finally sold to a Bombay brothel.
At first, it looks as if they’ll be forced to accept what the more experienced prostitutes call their karma, but far away in Washington, D.C., a ray of hope is building.
A grieving father who recently lost his infant daughter to SIDS, Thomas has also lost his wife, Priya, now back home with her parents in Mumbai.
When his law firm suggests Thomas take a sabbatical, he joins an organization called CASE — the Coalition Against Sexual Exploitation, a legal aid organization that combats forced prostitution in the developing world — that just happens to have an office in Priya’s hometown.
When a raid conducted by CASE on the brothel where Ahalya and Sita are being held ends in Ahalya’s rescue, Thomas makes it his mission to track down her sister, who has disappeared, soon to be whisked out of the country. With Sita’s captors always one jump ahead of the authorities, Thomas pursues her from India to France to the United States, and finally, to a suburban neighborhood in north Atlanta, where only the faintest clues offer a chance at freedom.
A weaker — but useful — subplot follows Thomas and Priya’s attempts to repair their marriage.
The loss of their child is poignantly echoed by the missing girls, driving Thomas’ mission to reunite the sisters and offering hope for the future of their relationship when Priya begins to thaw toward him.
The main story toggles between Sita and Thomas, alternating her take on the dismal and ever-changing new world she inhabits with Thomas’s introduction to the sickening realities of the modern-day slave trade.
His first day out, a CASE worker takes him to the sprawling red-light district, pointing out the dilapidated, multistory brothels where “underage girls” are hidden away “in attic rooms — invisible ... thousands of them, some as young as twelve or thirteen.”
Sita’s encounters with girls like herself — locked away in private homes and the squalid back rooms of strip-mall clubs, caravanned from truck stop to truck stop — fill in the picture from the inside.
The girls she meets tell her about the lies that lured them from their homes and the abductions that have stranded them in places where they don’t speak the language. She befriends the “Natashas” — a steady stream of vulnerable young women “hemorrhaging” from the former Soviet bloc — and is herself a victim of the strategies used to minimize resistance.
Daily progress reports from the field — new leads, ongoing trials, the status of rescued girls — by CASE investigators, Thomas discovers, present the grim and unadorned truth: “The CASE directors had no patience for sensationalism or spin. No punches were pulled, no rosy pictures painted.”
The novel wisely follows suit in its depiction of the casual brutality practiced by the men who sell children and, in turn, the men who pay to have sex with them. Addison has researched his subject deeply — he spent time with experts and activists in the field and went undercover into the brothels of Mumbai to meet trafficking victims firsthand.
His reticence for graphic details leads to scenes that almost look the other way — doors close on the violence, cries are muffled, threats of more sinister punishment remain threats — but he is understandably gentle: These are children, even after they’ve been introduced to X-rated lives.
“We’re taught in history class that slavery ended with the Civil War,” Addison says; “A Walk Across the Sun” reveals not only that it has survived, but flourished, and not just in India — at one point, Thomas tells his father-in-law, “What is broken here is broken everywhere.”
Atlanta is no exception, as the novel’s climactic scenes make all too clear. In his afterword, Addison lists extra resources and ways readers can help influence policy to combat this real and growing crisis.
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Fiction
“A Walk Across the Sun”
By Corban Addison
Silver Oak; 384 pages; $24.95
About the Author
