Sold Setting

Nepal and India

Setting is hugely important in Sold, mostly because of what the setting represents to Lakshmi and what each change in setting brings to the story. When we trace what happens to Lakshmi, we realize that setting helps drive the plot and how she changes throughout the novel.

The Swallow-tailed Peak in Nepal

This is Home with a capital "H" for Lakshmi. Yes she has dreams of what lies beyond her life in the village, but she appreciates the simplicity of daily living. She carries water to her cucumbers and rice paddy, she walks up and down the hill many times each day, and she lives in a decrepit thatched hut—but she also sees the beauty in her environment. In "Beyond the Himalays," Lakshmi describes each time of day, ending with nights when the moon is full:

On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. (6.BeyondtheHimalayas.5)

Her descriptions of her difficult life have a lush lyricism, despite the harshness of the environment. And the harshness of the environment on the mountain-top is what causes Lakshmi to have to leave the village—the dry season threatens to destroy her family's rice paddy, and then the monsoon rains wash the rice paddy down the mountain-top, leaving her family without food and destitute.

Even though Lakshmi leaves her home, she takes bits of it with her on her journey. She keeps a few belongings, and when she's stuck in the small room at Happiness House—being violated and beaten into submission—she takes out her old skirt and shawl and smells them:

drinking in the scent of mountain sunshine, a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun. I breathe in a cool Himalayan breeze, and the woodsy tang of a cooking fire. (84.BetweenTwilights.2)

For Lakshmi, the swallow-tailed peak will always be tied to innocence, purity, and simplicity.

The Journey from Nepal to India

Most journeys in literature indicate some sort of transformation, and the journey Lakshmi takes is no different. Along the way though, Lakshmi remains much of the child she has been on the mountain—she approaches the new sights with wide-eyed curiosity, taking in as much as she can, writing down new words, trying to become accustomed to the new world she's experiencing

The journey is full of both hope and fear—on one hand she's delighted to ride in a truck—but some of the things she sees terrify her, too: two busses look like they're about to collide, and the truck scares her half to death when she's bouncing around in the back.

As she approaches her final destination, the tone of the journey changes. Lakshmi sees a disgraced woman shamed by men, and she sees hundreds of homeless people:

Outside, the air is warm and heavy, thick with the smoke of a hundred cooking fires. The sky is so choked with dust that the light from the electric suns on poles disappears in the haze. All around us, people shuffle along, heads down, eyes empty, as the dust churns at their feet. (61.ACityoftheDead.7)

And the environment itself could not be more different than her rural mountaintop. (Which implies that her life is about to change drastically as well.)

Happiness House

Boy, can we talk about the irony of the name? The only happy people at Happiness House are Mumtaz and the men who pay her to violate the girls—no one else is happy.

Happiness House becomes Lakshmi's whole world. First she's locked in a small room where she is beaten and starved to get her to comply with Mumtaz's demands that she have sex with men. And when Lakshmi fails to do this, she's drugged and raped repeatedly until she learns to bow before Mumtaz's leather strap and wishes.

Then Lakshmi has relatively free reign of the house. But she can't leave it—remember, the girls are locked in during the day and watched by Mumtaz and the goondas while they work.

The house itself has a few different places. There is the small room where new girls like Lakshmi are taken until they submit to Mumtaz's wishes. There is the room Lakshmi shares with the other girls of the house—it has four beds, and when a girl has a customer she draws a dirty curtain around her bed to close it off. Then there is the common living space where the girls talk and watch TV, and the kitchen where the girls eat and gossip.

Finally there's Mumtaz's counting room, which is off-limits to everyone except Mumtaz and Shilpa. This is where they bribe police officers and count the profits of the brothel.

Since almost two-thirds of the book takes place at Happiness House, we would think that the locations of key scenes are important. But they don't seem to be. We don't really know where Harish teaches Lakshmi the words she learns, and it seems like Lakshmi learns from Shahanna in multiple rooms. Of more importance than location is the time of day:

There is a moment, between the light and the dark, when the smell of frying onions blows in through the windows. All over the city, the cooking hour has begun. This is the saddest smell in the world because it means that here at Mumtaz's house the men will start to arrive. (139.ASecret.1)

Mornings and afternoons are the best of times for Lakshmi, because this is when she is able to learn from Harish and spend time with Shahanna. So even though Happiness House has its separate rooms, the setting is really the whole house.

The Clean Place

What's most important about the clean place is that Lakshmi—and we—never get there. It remains out of reach for us in the text of the story, and is only implied as the place she is headed to when the book ends.

And there's a reason that we never get to see Lakshmi come to that closure of transitioning to the clean place; McCormick doesn't want to end the book on an unrealistically hopeful note. More than that though, the recovery that Lakshmi seeks in the clean place will most likely be just as complex and tangled as her journey through Nepal, India, and Happiness House has been.