I told her: “You are beautiful, you are smart, you are special, you are worthy. The world is a better place because you are in it. Your body is sacred and you have the right to be autonomous with the god of your understanding.”

I cried like a child myself when I left her, haunted not so much by her past, but by the prospect of her future. Nasreen is exactly the type of child who gets trafficked. Perhaps it will be a poor neighbor trying to raise a dowry for a marriageable daughter who snatches her to sell her to a trolling pimp. Perhaps it will be traffickers who stake out the rail stations who abduct her. In fact, when I worked with Anubhav in Dehli, they said they have never once in their history rescued a girl from the rail stations in India. They have only been able to help boys, as the traffickers beat them to the girls, every time. Perhaps a prostituted sex worker who has moved into a madame position will, through the elaborate systems of contacts between buyers and sellers, lure her into a brothel on Falkand Road.

I know a Nepalese woman who had a few drinks one night with some intriguing new friends. When she woke up, she was Karza in India, a trapped, level-one sex worker, kept in a small, squalid room behind a chained door for three years. Her only movement outside the room was to use the rudimentary latrine at the end of the hall.

I know children born in that brothel, whom I watched as they burrowed in inconceivably cramped places, hiding under beds where their mothers are subjected to the most degraded life. I saw them play on the dangerous rooftop of a building that, in the United States, would be a condemned site, briefly escaping the horror and sounds of brothel life. Some wrote their names on pieces of paper for me. I smiled widely, I hugged them each dearly; I played with them, marveling at, as always, children’s impossible resilience, and then I rushed to my hotel and one by one laid those piece of paper out on the floor, sobbing. Children are the collateral damage of human trafficking.

I know a man in Dharavi who came there from his distant rural village, looking for a life of improvement. Instead, he found Asia’s largest slum. He lives with three other men in a 20-by-20 room where they embroider fabric in a slave labor galley. Squatting, he showed me his work with great gentleness. In a survival adaption that was heartbreaking to me, he takes great pride in his work. “I like to think about sending something beautiful out into the world,” he said. A world he will never see. He showed me how they do their living in the small space, where they lie on the floor to sleep, where they cook with a kerosene fire, where they look in a sliver of jagged mirror to shave with water they carry in from far away. In front of the mirror, my eye caught his. I was standing behind him. I put my hands on his shoulders and said, “You know what, Mohammad? When I see you, I see a precious child of God. “So do I,” he said.