She covers her mouth when she laughs. She is learning not to.

Her mother arranged the placement when Hira was ten. She did not explain how she found the family. After she dropped her off at the house in the Cantt area, she did not come back. The Bureau has been looking for five years. They have not found anyone. Hira does not know where she lives. Her brother was an infant when she left. She does not know what he looks like now.

She worked alone in that house — no other domestic worker, no peer. She woke at 5am and worked until 10 or 11 at night. She was never taken outside. When visitors came, she was hidden from them. She was allegedly never paid. Not once, across the whole time she was there. She was not a worker. She was a kept secret.

When she finally ran, she ran into a city she did not recognise and could not name. She could not tell the police where the house was because she had never been taken outside of it. The people who employed her were never identified. They faced no consequence.

That was five years ago. She was ten years old.

She is sixteen now, and the shyness is still there but it is looser than it was. In the five years since she arrived here, something has slowly been coming back — not loudness, not a sudden confidence, but the small incremental willingness to take up a little more room. She covers her mouth when she laughs but she laughs. She starts sentences softly but she finishes them. She makes dry observations about things that happen in the Bureau and then looks at you sideways to see if you caught it.

She is doing a fashion design course. She is the only girl in this study in a vocational track — something real, with a direction, something she chose. When I ask what she would do if she ever found the people from that house, she stops being shy. She says she would hand them to the police. She says it quietly, the way she says everything, but without hesitation, and without covering her mouth.

She has been waiting five years to say that to someone who wrote it down.