(RNS) — Ruchira Gupta’s new young reader novel, “The Freedom Seeker,” tells the story of Simi, a 12-year-old girl from Chandigarh, India, whose family is forced to flee to the United States after her parents, a Hindu-Sikh father and Muslim mother, are attacked by intolerant neighbors. 

But the author, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and social justice activist, said the themes in Simi’s story, published Aug. 5, are anything but fictional. Her family represents thousands of marginalized people who endure treacherous journeys and the labyrinth of the U.S. immigration system in search of refuge, safety and a place to call home. 

RNS spoke with Gupta, who is the founder-president of anti-sex trafficking organization Apne Aap Women Worldwide. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you leave journalism and become an activist?

I (was) walking in the hills of Nepal, and I came across these villages with missing girls. I followed the trail, and I found little girls locked up in cages in Mumbai’s brothels. I couldn’t believe that in my country, in my lifetime, something like that still existed. I decided to tell the story to break the silence, and in the process of making the documentary, “The Selling of Innocents,” I became really close to the women I was interviewing. 

When I won the Emmy and I’m on stage in New York, and I’m looking at the bright lights and the audience, all I could see were the eyes of the mothers. So I decided I would use my Emmy and my documentary not to build a career in journalism, but to make a difference. I was able to leverage the documentary and contributed to the drafting and passage of the U.N. protocol and the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. But at the same time, I couldn’t forget the women.

When I went back to Mumbai, they said, we want to help our daughters. So we created Apne Aap. Our main aim was to break the cycle of intergenerational prostitution by getting the girls into school. We found a room in an abandoned municipal school in Mumbai, put a straw mat on the floor, hired a teacher, and the kids would come there and we would bathe, feed and teach them. That led to us to the first batch of children getting into school, and today, they’re animation artists, managers at department stores, nurses and doctors.

I made my movie in 1996. At that time, no one called it sex trafficking, and there were no laws. Now, 140 countries have signed on to the U.N. protocol and made laws according to that. We’ve helped girl by girl and law by law, and that’s how I became an activist from a journalist. The stories got under my skin and I couldn’t walk away. 

How much of Simi’s story came from people you’ve met?

For 30 years, I’ve been working with young girls, motivating them to go to school and helping them imagine a future. I worked with the U.N. for more than a decade in different parts of the world ridden by conflict, like Kosovo, Tanzania, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq. I’ve talked to girls and understood their trauma, their sense of loss and fear and longing for home and safety. I teach them how to have trust not just in me, but also in their own future. Simi is a composite character of all those girls I met.

Many of the girls I met are spunky, mischievous, and they have a sense of humor. Simi is all three. When men throw a rock through her window because her family is interfaith, she, of course, wants to shout or do something nasty to them, but her maternal grandfather tells her, “You have to learn how to challenge people and show the best parts of you to them, not the worst part of you.” So, she buys a lot of jalebis (Indian sweets) and feeds that to the men. After they’ve eaten the jalebi, she gives them a note saying, “Do you know that this jalebi recipe comes from people who are Muslim?” It’s converting with kindness. 

As criminalization and deportation of migrants and asylum-seekers have increased in the U.S., what does this story say about the moment we live in?

There are 18 million children who are living in America with one immigrant parent. So they’re living in fear that either they or their loved one will be deported. That’s 1 in 4 children in America. Think about what that child is going through, the fear and terror that they’re experiencing (about) what will happen to them. I think the child migrant crisis is huge, and on top of that, we have children who are missing who were never entered into databases when they were separated from their parents. 

Storytelling like this helps me remember feelings, sounds, textures, emotions, which humanize the person beyond the data. Millions of girls are trapped in prostitution, but you won’t see the girls that easily. If I tell you there’s a little girl who wants to go to school and she’s scared the traffickers will kidnap her on the way, you can see her and you will immediately feel a sense of empathy. 

How did your own faith identity and experiences help characterize Simi’s?

My book is grounded in three religions: Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. In the India I grew up in, there was fluidity between cultures, between religions, because we were creating this modern, independent new India. I was born into a Hindu family, but my family was very influenced by Gandhi. When anything important happened, my family would make a donation to Mother Teresa: No one thought of her as a Christian nun; she was just someone who did good. I went to an all-girls school where our morning prayer was that we should follow the Eightfold Path of the Buddha. We didn’t see differences. We saw commonality in religions, and that has changed in the world. 

Now, everything is so flashpoint and polarizing. That’s the India I’m describing in my book: Here are these grandparents who are perfectly accepting of the (interfaith) marriage, but it’s the younger generation who are opposing it because they’re being groomed into believing something else. We need more thinkers to write stories which will enlighten people’s minds and make us go in a different direction.

In my book, I give Simi a name which is Arabic, Hindu and Sikh. It’s in all religions, but it can mean different things. My book is exploring how borders and boundaries are just manmade, and how we can cross them in many different ways.

Can you talk about lesser-known immigration stories from India? 

When I began writing this book, I’d read a few articles about Indians coming to America and the hardships they faced. One was about a mother and daughter crossing the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, and they were Sikhs. The father was a taxi driver in Queens. His wife and daughter were not given political asylum, so they paid these smugglers called coyotes to bring them. The mother went looking for water in the desert and got separated from her daughter, and later the border guard found the kid’s remains. She was just 6. 

Indians are (in the top three) largest number of migrants to the U.S., and many of them are seeking political asylum. They’re fleeing economic hardship and discrimination.

When people want to criminalize and propagandize, my story will humanize because it will show things from the eyes of a 12-year-old girl and her family. I’m hoping that it will educate and inspire people to understand that so many Indians are coming here and they’re invisible. For Sikhs and Gujaratis, I don’t know where they can go to if they want services. There’s a dearth of lawyers who can help them. There’s a dearth of shelters which can look after them in their own cultural milieu, with their kind of food, community. Everyone here thinks only about the rich Indian — the techies, doctors and lawyers — and nobody wants to talk about the majority of Indians, who are porters, cleaning ladies, construction workers and nannies. We somehow don’t talk enough about them and what their needs are, and I think that’s really important to do that. 

When a young reader picks up this book, what do you hope they understand?

I think discrimination comes from fear. I want to dispel the fear and show her just like any other 12-year-old kid: She is the captain of her hockey team, she has loving grandparents, they celebrate their festivals with a lot of food. That’s the first thing I want to do, to humanize Simi and her family and show them like a family anywhere in the U.S., who are challenged by difficult circumstances all of a sudden.

I’m trying to show that when people come here, they miss their family, and so they need a little bit more community support. Little acts of kindness can make such a big difference. In “The Freedom Seeker,” nobody except the coyotes are really bad people. They are capable of small acts of kindness that keep Simi going till she finds home and safety. Even a border guard thinks about his own child and plays a board game with Simi, and that keeps her happy inside detention camp. There’s an immigration officer who lets her keep a leaf from a tree back home. The people they think are going to be villains, they’re not really. 

I walked along the barbed wire on the Arizona-Mexico border and I saw families, homes facing each other. I saw people exchanging food and flowers through the barbed wire. I saw the human connection. And when I walked the desert, I saw Catholic missionaries leaving water behind so if a migrant was dehydrated, they could find it. And I met townspeople in Tucson and other places who welcome migrants and let them take a shower in their house or give them a change of clothes to get the sand off their bodies. So, small acts of kindness. We don’t have to think about what we can do, we should do what we can.