Sir Camden Clement Dowd's Final Post...Number Five.

There are millions of stories told every day around the world. They are a common pastime, used to soak up time and entertain. Some are real, some are made up, some are improvised, and some have been passed along from father to child for many generations. But, these millions of stories thought up over the years aren’t only for passing the time. They are for inspiration, influencing and most importantly for teaching people. You can learn a lot from a story. You can learn life lessons, knowledge, and learn about the past. You can even learn about something completely random that you never you about. Stories are something that are in everybody’s life. Dreams tell a story, past events tell a story, books tell stories, and stories are evident in many other aspects in our life. They are something we cannot live without. No matter how hard we try, stories will be everywhere, and we will not be able to get rid of them.

In Sold, stories are one of the only things that Lakshmi has. When she is living in her hut in the mountains she doesn’t do much. She goes to school, works, and listens to advice and stories that she is told. These stories are all that she has to believe in. One of the main and most important stories that she heard was the story about the city. She heard that she could be a maid and work for a family, cleaning and making money. She also heard that all the roofs were made of gold, and that everybody was rich. She had never seen the city, so she believed this story. When she got sold into being what she thought was a maid, she kept expecting to see the city that she imagined from the stories. But she was wrong; she was sold into sexual slavery. While in the Happiness House, she ended up living with a few other girls. The only thing that the girls had was stories. Whether they were told out loud, watched on the T.V. or had in a dream. This is all that they had to do, besides sleep with men and socialize, which Lakshmi rarely did. One of the main ways that she spent her time was learning through a story. Whenever one of the girls child came home from school he would sit down with Lakshmi and teach her how to speak English or Indian through a story book. Without stories, Lakshmi would have been worse off and had an even worse time in the Happiness House.