The final portion of the book portrays the numbness and emptiness that accompanies what happened to Lakshmi. After an amount of time that is too long for Lakshmi to keep track of she begins to recognize the change around her and how different the "Happiness House" is from when she arrived. "The first one is sitting in Monica's old seat, the second in Shahanna's. The third is sitting where Pushpa used to sit. It occurs to me that, except for Anita, I have been here the longest,"(243). Lakshmi learned well how to suppress the feelings of sorrow and loneliness and shame. "I learned ways to be with men. I learned how to forget what was happening to me even as it was happening,"(254). What Lakshmi is being forced to do is degrading and humiliating and that is why she is having these deep feelings of neglect and emptiness. What is happening to her is making her feel like she is less than human because she is being treated like an object for the man's gratification and that is not what she was meant for.
On the day when Harish makes a rag doll for someone, he takes time out of his day and uses his own money to give Lakshmi a new pencil. "I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy will a yellow pencil,"(182). That section showed me how much Lakshmi and girls like her desire and yearn for acceptance and love and meaning. There is a void in all of them that love and fulfillment should go and that is how Lakshmi is so easily undone by a simple act of kindness.
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