The Day of the Slaves is the visit Lin makes with Prabaker to a child-trafficking market in Bombay. The encounter turns Prabaker’s tour of the city’s hidden districts into a confrontation with organized exploitation and with the limits of Lin’s ability to act. Lin sees children who have been brought from places struck by disaster, and men who bargain over them. He leaves without stopping the trade, troubled by his helplessness and by the possibility that an intervention could make the children’s circumstances worse.

The journey into the market

The visit follows a violent taxi incident that has already altered Lin’s understanding of what it means to remain in Bombay. Whereas Prabaker treats the city’s sudden violence as commonplace, Lin recognizes that he cannot stay an aloof observer: to belong in the city, he will eventually have to accept being drawn into its conflicts. With that realization still fresh, the tour continues toward a slave market near Dongri.

The route itself marks a departure from ordinary city space. Main roads narrow into streets and then lanes too tight for the taxi, so Lin and Prabaker continue on foot. As they enter the crowded inner passages, motor traffic falls away, and the surroundings seem increasingly removed from the time and pace of the modern city. Children recite verses from the Koran in a courtyard; women grind spices in doorways; hawkers call out their services. Bicycles give way to goods carried by people, and the buildings press close enough to reduce the visible sky to a narrow strip. This changing setting leads Lin from the city’s public thoroughfares into a concealed market embedded within its crowded blocks.

The courtyard and the trade

After paying a policeman one hundred rupees to enter, Lin and Prabaker pass through a narrow corridor into a makeshift courtyard. Men sit or stand in small groups, including Arab visitors dressed in loose robes and kaffiyehs. An Indian boy serves tea. Beneath a ragged canvas awning, children sit together on a wooden bench, while the adults largely appear to attend to their own conversations. The space is not a purpose-built marketplace: patched coverings screen out much of the sky, windows are boarded, and the tiled ground has been assembled from salvaged flooring. Its improvised, enclosed character makes the market seem less like a formal institution than a hidden activity sustained within the surrounding congestion.

Prabaker explains quietly that the children are enslaved and that the apparently indifferent men are purchasers or agents. Bargaining is already taking place while the visitors watch, though its restrained manner makes the transactions easy to miss. The children have come from calamities in West Bengal, Orissa, Haryana, and Punjab: a cyclone, drought, cholera, and secessionist fighting. Recruiters find them amid these emergencies, and the children travel by train to Bombay, often alone and over hundreds of kilometres.

Prabaker also explains the chain that brings them there. Professional recruiters move from one disaster to another, while parents facing starvation may believe that selling one child gives that child a chance to survive. The account complicates any simple distinction between rescue and exploitation: the market takes children from catastrophe, but their survival is made conditional on being bought and assigned to work. That the adults’ negotiations proceed quietly, without a visible commotion, does not make the transactions any less consequential.

The children’s futures and Lin’s response

The children’s expected destinations expose the different forms their exploitation may take. Boys are destined for work as camel jockeys in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf States; some may be injured or die in races, and those who grow too tall to ride may be abandoned. Girls are to work in households across the Middle East, with some at risk of sexual exploitation. Prabaker calls the children who reach the market lucky in comparison with the many others who die of starvation before they can be brought there. The market is thus shown not as an isolated scandal but as one part of a wider landscape of disaster, recruitment, trafficking, and death.

Lin’s response is shaped by several constraints. He is a wanted criminal living on the run, so contacting the police or government authorities is not a practical option. He is also a foreigner who does not yet know the language or culture well enough, in his view, to presume that he understands how to intervene. Most importantly, he fears that using force to close this particular market would merely cause it to reappear elsewhere, perhaps in a more dangerous form. His restraint does not mean that he regards the trade as acceptable: he is appalled by what he sees, but cannot identify an intervention likely to protect the children rather than displace the harm.

The children’s presence also connects the scene to Lin’s earlier experience of prison. Much later, he understands that his ability to endure the sight without being emotionally overwhelmed was connected to men he had known in an Australian prison. Some had entered reform schools when they were as young as the children in the courtyard and had endured abuse and deprivation within institutions meant to administer justice. That history gives the scene a further consequence: Lin’s capacity to remain present is not presented simply as strength, but as a hardness shaped by prior exposure to institutional cruelty.

The scene’s lasting significance

A ten-year-old girl stands and sings and dances to a popular Hindi film song. Lin remembers her voice and the moment when the purchasers and agents begin paying her renewed attention. Her performance is an individual episode within the market’s transactions, not an escape from them; it makes the children’s treatment more visible even as it draws adult interest. The incident remains with Lin, who recalls hearing the song many times in the years that follow and associates it with the girl.

The visit also deepens Lin’s bond with Prabaker as a guide to realities that Lin could not have read from the city’s surface. Prabaker explains what Lin sees, including the quiet negotiations and the children’s likely futures, while Lin must reckon with the distance between witnessing injustice and being able to stop it. The narration returns to the cost of knowing: understanding the scene does not produce an easy solution, and good intentions alone cannot ensure a good outcome. The Day of the Slaves therefore stands as both a revelation of child trafficking and a turning point in Lin’s developing responsibility to the city—not a moment of rescue, but a lasting encounter with the consequences of looking closely and being unable to make the harm disappear.