Emma Burtt Post #3

The tone that I keep seeing popping up in the book Sold, is innocence. Lakshmi is told that she is going to the city to work as a maid for a rich family. No one tells her that she is actually going to be forced into prostitution, only to be freed by paying her way out by going through men. In the chapter titled, The City Girl, Lakshmi is punished by having her skin above her eye twisted. She does not understand the importance of this, and then the girls crowd around her and put make up on her and brush her hair.

Lakshmi asks them, "What is happening?" (page 101), but the other girls do not respond. Lakshmi thinks that she look pretty, but doesn't understand why she needs, "Black-rimmed tiger eyes, a mouth as red as a pomegranate, and flowing hair," (page 101) when all she thinks she is going to do is clean the house. None of the other girls in the Happiness House are brave enough to tell Lakshmi what her new fate is, and what she has actually been sold into. Until she has her first customer, she is innocent to the fact that she is about to have her life flipped up-side down.