Here to There and In Between - PART 1

My name is Jyoti Lama, I am now 18 years old and I have a story to tell you. Some say it is a brave one; others think it was an adventure, while others yet believe I made it up. But I say it was hell. Let me tell you about my story of here to there and in between.

My feet were sore as the ice-flecked pebbles beneath them attempted to pierce the skin as I walked back to my hut.

 The wood forest nearby had nearly died out, but there was nothing we could have done as our cooking fire within our hut needed to be fuelled somehow. The solution to this problem was... well I don’t know. We would probably have had to move our house to live somewhere else than the small plateau on the majestically snow capped mountain.

With the splinter filled wood in my hands and the sun setting behind me, I crunched my way back to the gaping hole that was our door and walked inside. Mama was sleeping in the nearby corner as I stoked the central fire and adjusted her woven blankets. Our house may have been one roomed and had a dirt floor; but to me, it was home. The smoke began to curl out the holes in the roof as I heard the unmistakeable footsteps of my father coming home from the hunt. He told me from outside that he had luck that day finding several rabbits and began to skin them. I eagerly waited for my first meal of the day.

After we had eaten, I laid down and gazed at the stars that peeped through our thatched roof and thought of how magnificent Nepal was and how just a few kilometres away from our nearby village of Kodari was the magnificent Everest. ‘The stars are so beautiful tonight. I may have an empty stomach most of the time but to me that doesn’t matter. Life is life and though I have not travelled out of the village, I live with a peaceful life.’ This last thought floated through my consciousness as I drifted off to sleep.

That night was what started it all. I have no idea who they were or why they did what they did but they changed my life forever. While I was asleep, bandits of a foreign tongue crept up outside the hut. Their crunching footsteps woke me from my slumber as I sat bolt upright and looked at our door. Darkness had enveloped my home and I instantly knew something was not right. Usually you could see around you from the holes in the walls and roof and the moonlight that came through the door. But on that night all I saw was complete and utter darkness that leered at me with four harrowing globes. Eyes – that’s what they were and as soon as I had taken my first gulp of air to alert my parents, they covered my mouth with some sort of fragrant fabric. The next thing I knew I was breathing in copious amounts of fumes and struggling to keep my eyes open. Before I knew it, all was as dark as the insides of a black heart that was struggling under the influence of guilty actions to beat its pulse.

I woke up in the back of a moving platform. Juggling and bumping and jigging as the light coming from the slits in the walls flashed and sputtered. At first I thought I had fallen into the book Mama once read me and was on a flying carpet soaring through the night sky but soon the drug wore off and my mind once again came into sharp focus. As I peered around me I saw other girls around my age group either waking up or huddling in corners of the box. Swaying, I worked my way over to a girl with striking eyes and dark hair. If it wasn’t for the horror in her eyes, I would have said she was remarkably beautiful.

“E-excuse me? Where are we?” I asked with hesitation at the way her eyes were darting between me and the walls around her.

“We... we.... we are on our way to be sold.” She shakily replied as the box juddered over a large rock.

“S-s-old? What for?”

“To be slaves. We must honour our buyers- I mean husbands.”

“Husbands? I am only 15. I’m too young to marry anyone! What are we in?”

“Well you’ve got no choice, we’ve all been stolen you see. There’s no way out of it.” A sob escaped the girl as she admitted their fate. “And we are in what those filthy foreign men call an au-auto-tomo-moh-beele.” A large pot hole in the unsealed road beneath us caused the entire group of girls to be thrown into the roof and slammed back down again. Crying erupted around me as many of the younger-looking girls broke their resolve.

“Well we have to get out of here.” I said to her as we picked ourselves up. “My name is Jyoti by the way.”

“Mine’s Anya and it’s impossible to escape from this tomb!”

“Nothing is impossible,” I snappily replied as I got up shakily and placed my hands on the wall. They were made of wood which is what I was hoping for. I pried my hands in between the cracks in the walls and saw the slit of light become enlarged. “Alright,” I turned around and said to the girls, “we are all in this together. Now to get out, we all need to pull our own weight.”

“We can’t escape! They’ll find us and track us down!” screamed a terrified little girl at me. God, they’ve stolen eight year olds as well? What is this nightmare? I thought to myself as I suppress my own fear and summed up the courage to continue.

“We can at least try. Oh and my name is Jyoti. I’ll get to know yours once we get out of this hell box.” With that, I began to explain the plan that had formed in my head.

Everyone was to get their fingers in the slits of light within one wall between the wooden boards. On the count of three, I told them that they would have to pry the boards apart as best they could until the boards (hopefully) snapped off. After my little speech everyone tentatively and with a lot of swaying, took up their spots around one wall in the black box. I was in the middle and began the chant. “Ok everyone, ONE... TWO... THREE!” and with that, the wall gave an almighty creak before the girls and I ripped a large hole in the centre of it.

Light poured into the box as we saw a vast field of strange bright green leafy plants. Just before this field and running next to the box was a wide river slowly making its way South. I did not know where we were but a plan instantly came to mind. They are not going to like this. Glancing at Anya, I saw that she knew the same thought I was thinking and with a quick nod, we both made a decision. Hope had come into the eyes of all of the beaten girls as they looked at me standing in front of them.

“Alright,” I said, “I have an idea but you are not going to like it. We have to jump out of that hole and fall into the water. That way, we’ll escape and land safely as well.” There were different reactions between the girls. The younger ones looked mortified and the older ones looked fierce and confident. Although I appeared to be younger than a few of the older girls, it seemed that I had taken leadership of this group.

“It’s the only way,” Anya said beside me, “we can escape and we WILL escape girls!” Suddenly, with a stroke of sudden confidence, Anya turned to me and declared that she would go first so as to demonstrate it was safe. A worried look must have passed my face for she soon scowled at me. “I am going; you can’t stop me. I will never forgive myself if I don’t do this now.” Then with a fierce look of determination at me and a wandering look of reassurance at the rest of the girls; Anya jumped.

It was like watching a graceful fish jump and dive back into the aquamarine depths it came from as Anya jumped from the hole and landed in a perfect dive within the water. Screams came from the girls behind me as I sat in awe of her escape. I turned and saw the angry face of a driver peering into the back of the box through a previously hidden window. With a foreign tongue he screamed at us. The foreigners had seen Anya escape.

The box began to swerve and tilt as the men tried to veer away from the river. The girls in the back fell the floor with the violent tilting of the machine. An oncoming box or whatever-they-were-called forced ours to dart closer to the river. I took the chance and picked up the two unsuspecting eight year olds and threw them out the hole and into the river. At least their safe now, I thought to myself as the box once again moved away from the river.

“EVERYONE MOVE TO THE HOLE-SIDE OF THE BOX!” I screamed as the floor threw us up against the roof again, “when we next go to the river, JUMP!” The girls then scrambled over to the left-hand side of the floor causing it to tilt that way. As the path the box was travelling on became thinner, the river wound itself closer. The girl behind me panicked and ran back to the other side of the box as the one in front jumped with a scream. She had grabbed onto me in her delirium and pulled me out with her. Two SLAP!s against the water told me that we had both made it but that no others had. 

As soon as I got my water-wings I looked up and saw that our box had travelled a little further down the river and had suddenly turned an abrupt right down a side path. A sickening feeling filled my stomach as I realised that the rest of the girls had no longer any soft landing to place their hopes of escape on. They were headed for the markets and there was nothing I could do about them. They would have to fend for themselves.

(To Be Continued...)