Driving I-5

Text by Summer Brenner

Listen to an excerpt from I-5 read by author, Summer Brenner:

A decade ago in Berkeley California, a teenage girl, Laxmi Patati, returned late at night to her apartment and found her two roommates unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning. Laxmi did not call 911. She called her “owner,” Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who quickly arrived with helpers and a van. They proceeded to carry the pair of sisters (Chanti Prattipati, 17, and Lalitha Prattipati, 15) from the apartment to the vehicle. They also attempted to force Laxmi to go with them.

A passing motorist stopped to ask if she could help, then to intervene, and finally to implore another motorist to call 911. When emergency crews arrived, Reddy offered a reasonable explanation and handily translated Laxmi’s responses to the police. Chanti died at the hospital. An autopsy revealed she was pregnant. Lalitha survived. The police ruled Chanti’s death as accidental, the result of negligence from a faulty gas pipe. Case closed.

An investigative article by two Berkeley High journalists, Meg Greenwell and Illiana Montauk, questioned why these girls worked instead of attending school, prompting police to reexamine Reddy’s network of relationships. At the time, Reddy was a restauranteur, night-club owner, and the largest private landlord in Berkeley, with over a thousand rental units. To run his enterprises, he employed falsely documented immigrants from his native village in India. Among these immigrants were the Patati and Prattipati girls. Brought to the United States when they were twelve and fourteen, they served Reddy, family members, and friends with sexual favors.

Fiction? In 1999, this was my neighborhood news story.

Conservative estimates report thirty million people currently live as slaves, forced into factories, farms, labor camps, domestic servitude, prostitution and organ donation. The scale is nearly unfathomable, exacerbated by desperate poverty and unprecedented global migration. The profits are equally staggering. More than forty billion dollars annually are generated from human trafficking with revenues that rival illegal drugs and weapons in profitability.

For several years, the subject of sex trafficking simmered in my mind. I read Kevin Bales’ book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, State Department papers and personal

testimonials available from abolitionist organizations.

Although trivial in comparison to victims of trafficking, I also drew from experience. What of my own illusions of freedom, my own captivity to circumstances, my own humiliations and betrayal? “Wage slaves,” we are called. We are paid and if fortunate, receive insurance, sick leave, vacation. If fortunate, the demands are reasonable. But often, the work is neither meaningful nor fulfilling. However, we do whatever to hold on. I held on, thinking, “This is how the world works.” And told myself to grow up.

An earlier experience, a small childhood recollection called forward by I-5’s protagonist: I am four years old. My mother has taken me to a doctor. Except for a pair of cotton briefs, I am naked on the table. The stranger taps. He pokes. He pinches. And at the end of the visit, he lifts my arm. “It’s perfect,” he mutters.

How I traveled from memory fragments to the brutality of Anya’s torment along I-5 is part of the mystery of writing, but I know I was driven to write this by two key observations: the terrible waste of life and the incredible will to survive.

Summer Brenner's I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex and other novels are published by PM Press.