Sold Post #2: Ashley Garriott

     The second third of Sold is focused on survival and how Lakshmi has to adapt to her new life style. Asking for anyone to step into the restrictions and rules of this lifestyle is cruel, Lakshmi at age thirteen was put into this kind of living, worst of all she was tricked by someone in her own family to be treated this way. As a reader, what makes Lakshmi's story so touching is the pure innocence of her intentions, she was only in agreement to leave her home so that she could send her hard earned money home to pay for the tin roof over her family's head. However there comes a point when Lakshmi becomes naive along her journey, maybe because it is at a young age. However it become blatantly obvious that she is not on her way to becoming a maid at some point in her journey. Once she becomes aware of this it is already too late. Now put into these unimaginable conditions Lakshmi desperately tries to focus her mind back onto the world she used to know for example school. She does this with the limited resources she has. In one scene she was caught by the "David Beckham boy" while trying to read one of his storybooks. At first she prepares herself for the heavy weight of his hand, but he does nothing and instead: "he holds it out in my direction... I hate him more than ever now. For catching me at my make-believe game. For seeing that I want his own life for mine..." (pg. 158). Lakshmi is not proud that this is the way she has resulted to relating to her old life, let alone the fact that someone caught her doing it. She has always been strong in supporting her family, but now she is that who needs help, she is weak and she was caught in a weak moment; resulting in a reaction like most: hatred and embarrassment. Without the hope that she will one day return to her family and be able to enjoy the simplest things for example reading a storybook or studying for school, she would give up. A life like hers right now is not worth living, hope is keeping her alive, being caught reading a storybook was really an act of survival.