She said she had never visited the psychology department. She had been three times.

A neighbour told Maryam's mother to send her for work. Her mother agreed. Her father drives a rickshaw and uses drugs. All four of her siblings also work in other people's homes. Not one child in that family was sent to school. This is not a sequence of individual failures. This is a household that had no resource except its children, and it used them accordingly.

She worked fifteen hours a day in a house in Wapda Town. She was beaten with a stick. During one beating, the employer locked the door from inside. She screamed until she could leave. She ran. A police officer found her on the street. That was six years ago. She was about twelve.

She is eighteen now. When I ask if she has visited the psychology department before, she says no. Her file says she has been three times. She is not lying in any ordinary sense. The appointments happened and nothing changed, so gradually they stopped being real — the way things that do not help you eventually stop existing in the account you keep of your own life.

She covers her face when she talks to strangers. In our interview, she gave almost nothing. When I asked if there was anything she would like to change about the Bureau, she said no.

Not because she is satisfied. You can feel the difference between satisfaction and exhaustion when you are sitting across from someone. She has stopped expecting things to change. That is not the same as being okay with how they are. It is what happens when expecting things became a form of pain she could no longer afford to keep paying.

She will leave the Bureau soon. She will leave at eighteen, in Class 3 — roughly the academic level of an eight-year-old — with no qualification, no vocational skill, and no family to return to. She will go back to the same world that produced her exploitation. Six years of institutional care and none of the structural conditions that made her available for this in the first place will have changed.

A girl who covers her face in an interview and says she has never been to a department she has visited three times is not confused. She is telling you that the truth stopped being worth the effort of getting right.