Publisher's Synopsis
Batuk is a fifteen-year-old girl from rural India. When she was recovering from TB in hospital she learned to read. Her only possessions are a pencil and a blue notebook in which she writes her journal... She records that her father sold her into sexual slavery when she was nine. And how, as she navigates the grim realities of the Common Street - a street of prostitution in Mumbai where children are kept in cages as they wait for customers - she manages to put pen to paper. Her private thoughts and stories are all put down. Through the words that Batuk writes in her journal, she finds hope and beauty in the bleakest of situations.
