In a filthy room in Mumbai's Kamathipura red-light district, Divya Gurung is stripped and beaten for refusing to service his clients. Numbed by pain after weeks of sustained physical abuse, the 15-year-old Nepalese boy eventually resigns himself to his fate.
He is duly sodomised by three middle-aged men, the first of the dozen or so clients he will see each day for the next seven years. Or, put another way, the first of the 40,000 clients he will entertain.
Having been brought to Mumbai by a close friend in the belief they were to find steady work in a hotel, Divya has been delivered to a brothel and told that his companion sold him as a hijra, a transvestite.
As a virgin, his initial worth is high. Sushila, the madam who bought him for the equivalent of US$2,000 from the trafficker, has charged each of the three men who gang-rape him US$10 for the privilege - in India, intercourse with a virgin is still widely thought of as a cure for HIV/Aids. Needless to say, few of his gentleman callers will use condoms, and the only lubricant offered is a pessary the madam orders him to use.
NOW 25 AND HAVING escaped the brothel, Gurung is back in Kathmandu. He is HIV positive and his story, although unusual because of his gender, is all too common. An estimated 10,000 women and children are trafficked each year from Nepal, predominantly to India and the Middle East, while potentially hundreds of thousands of vulnerable individuals are trafficked internally to the Nepalese capital's booming massage-parlour industry and partitioned restaurants, where male Indian tourists head in their droves after visiting the city's casinos.
'It doesn't matter where these women and children end up; whether they are forced into the sex industry, domestic service or some other form of indentured labour. What the developed world needs to know is slavery - trafficking and child labour - is alive and well in the third millennium,' says Sita Ghimire, of the Norwegian Save the Children office, in Kathmandu.