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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A young girl's journey across the US-Mexico border after her family is forced to flee India is the plot of the book titled The Freedom Seeker. We're introduced to Simi, a bright, caring 12-year-old girl with many friends. Also, she's on the school's hockey team. She's the captain. At home in her Punjab, India, she's surrounded by a host of loving family members, including a Sikh father who, affectionately, she calls Abu, and a Muslim mother, who she calls Ami, and both sets of grandparents.

At first glance, Simi's life is good, but tensions in India are rising, and a group of political vigilantes who are against mixed-faith marriages are threatening her family's well-being. After her father is beaten, her family is forced to flee to the United States for safety. However, Simi and her mother face danger along the way. The Freedom Seeker is on shelves now. Author Ruchira Gupta joins us to discuss. She is the founder and a journalist turned activist, and is the founder of the Apne Aap. Did I say that correct?

Ruchira Gupta: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes. An anti-trafficking organization that supports women and girls exiting systems of prostitution. She's also an occasional teacher at NYU Center for Global Affairs, and she lives between New York and India, and she's sitting right across from me. Welcome.

Ruchira Gupta: Hi, Alison, and hi to everyone listening in.

Alison Stewart: How did the character of Simi come to you?

Ruchira Gupta: I have been dealing with young girls for about 30 years now, as an anti-trafficking activist, and trying to get kids who are in red light areas born inside brothels to go to school. I have seen their trauma, but I've also seen their courage and resilience. The character of Simi is sometimes based on those girls who have courage and resilience against all odds. Also, I have myself been part of a very loving family influenced by Gandhi, and I was taught to be spunky and fight for whatever I believed in. Nobody said no. Simi is a composite character of the girls that I've dealt with, overcoming big odds, and also, I think, some things from my own childhood.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. This is a middle-grade novel, and I didn't say that in the beginning because I think anybody could read this book, to be honest.

Ruchira Gupta: 8 to 800.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] 8 to 800. Love that. Why was it important for you to tell this from a 12-year-old girl's perspective?

Ruchira Gupta: There are 18 million children in the United States right now who are living with one immigrant parent, and they're really scared because they think either they will be deported or a loved one will be deported because of them, or somehow. Because of the fear, they're either not going to play in parks or even not going to school. This is terrible because this is a quarter of American children, one in four children. They are scared.

Then their friends watch them; they know they are scared. Nobody quite knows what's going on. They're too young to understand. I felt that we need something to talk to kids about what's going on, to kids their age. Therefore, I published the novel with Scholastic, and I wrote it for middle-grade kids just to humanize and build empathy, and also share information and knowledge, because I truly believe that secrets are not good for kids. People can prey upon their lack of knowledge.

Of course, it has to be told in a very accessible way, based on truth, but hopeful, which is what I've done with my novel. I call it a social justice adventure because there are-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Ruchira Gupta: -cliffhangers and page turners and kids are involved, but they get information as they go through it.

Alison Stewart: It seems at first that Simi has a pretty good life in India. It's certainly one she doesn't want to leave behind. However, the nation is facing challenging times. Would you tell us about the climate that she's living in and what makes her know she's got to go?

Ruchira Gupta: India is going through a period of depolarization. What's happening is, there are fault lines now, which are being exploited by political parties. Between North and South India, between upper caste and lower caste, Hindu and Muslim, and even Hindus and Christians. There are lots of divisions, which were normal when we were growing up. Our motto, when we were growing up, was unity in diversity.

In Kolkata, I was born in a Hindu family, but my school prayer was Buddhist. When my family had to mark a milestone to celebrate something, we would send a check to Mother Teresa. We didn't think she was a Christian nun, but somebody just doing good. I grew up when there was fluidity between identities of religion, of caste, and many things. Now, even different regions of India, Punjabi, Bengali, all of that, now you're being forced to stick to your lane. The idea of shared spaces is disappearing.

Simi is growing up in Chandigarh in Punjab, just in that period when vigilantes are attacking people who are of interfaith marriages, they have a campaign against interfaith marriages. Simi's father is Sikh, her mother is Muslim. She's the captain of a hockey team, doing really well in school. She's looking forward to a championship match. Then she's celebrating a festival with her family: her four grandparents and her parents, with lots of food and music, and a rock comes flying through. The rock is really attached to a note with a warning that marriage should not happen between a Hindu Sikh man and a Muslim woman.

Then ultimately, things become so bad that her father has to flee India. He's beaten up, and then he has to flee India. He gets political asylum and becomes a taxi driver in Queens in New York. By the time he applies for a visa for his wife and daughter, it's rejected. Chain migration, zero tolerance, all that.

Alison Stewart: Yes, all that.

Ruchira Gupta: Then they pay coyotes to bring them inside the country.

Alison Stewart: I want to go back to when she's in India. A boy calls her a slur, calls her a name, and he's bullying her. What do these moments of bullying mean to her? What did you want those moments to mean to us, the reader?

Ruchira Gupta: All good literature always universalizes things, but it's also very local. In this case, Simi is going to school. A class friend bullies her because she's half Muslim. He says that, "You belong to a different country, Pakistan." She says, "No, my family has lived here for seven generations from both sides, so how does that make me less of an Indian than you?"

The idea that a religion should belong to only one country is something foreign to Simi, who's growing up in this very secular, plural household. The boy doesn't know better because of the political climate around him. He's told that everybody who's Muslim belongs to a different country. This is what Simi's caught in between. This is the climate in India right now, because there's a new kind of education going on of the masses through political campaigns, so they don't know the India we grew up in about unity and diversity.

Alison Stewart: How much of her innocence did you want to keep as a writer? Did you want to protect her, or did you want her to experience all the problems?

Ruchira Gupta: I wanted to keep her innocence because I think it's a whole generation of us who are now watching what's going on with bated breath and wide eyes, that how did this happen? I feel we were kind of innocent. We were sheltered from the harsh realities of these divisions and these vigilantes and all of that. Suddenly, now we are faced with it, and we don't know what to do about it.

For me, Simi embodies all of us in a way that she doesn't even imagine that something like this can happen. She's growing up in a very loving family from all sides, so I did want to keep her innocence. Of course, her innocence makes the stakes higher because when you have to walk through the desert in the blazing sun with no water, you are separated from your mother, and you don't know where she is. You have to find courage and resilience in spite of the innocence to survive. Simi does exactly that.

Her time as a hockey captain, probably her leadership ability, her love from her grandparents teaches her about community and forming alliances and trust. She makes friends with this boy called Jose, who's from Honduras, and he's fleeing gang warfare from there. Together, they trek the desert and take on the border detention camps and the shelters to reunite with their families.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about a new novel, which follows a 12-year-old Indian girl whose family is forced to flee to America due to religious intolerance. Author, social justice activist, and journalist Ruchira Gupta is here to join us to discuss her book, The Freedom Seeker. You have a clip you're going to read from the book. Could you set this up a little bit?

Ruchira Gupta: Yes. I'm writing about the time when Simi and Jose have both been put into a border detention camp.

Alison Stewart: They've tried to cross, yes.

Ruchira Gupta: They've tried to cross. The border guards have found them. They are in a detention camp. They don't know if their mothers are alive or not, where their mothers are. No contact with anyone in their families. They are in separate cages, as they call them. Many of the migrants call these cages ice boxes. Some even call them kennels because 40, 50 people are stuffed into a place with barbed wires, full air conditioning, no daylight, no access to showers, only occasional access, food just thrown at you, to sleep on the floor, aluminium sheets given, so not even the warmth of a blanket. Simi is in that situation. That's where I'm going to read from, Chapter 18.

Another 18 hours pass. I have been here for nearly two days when a lice infestation breaks out among the girls in our cage. All the children are scratching madly. Somehow, it hasn't made its way to me, but when I notice that the girls who came down with lice are taken to the infirmary, I get an idea. To get to the infirmary, you have to pass the boys' cell. It may be my only chance to talk to Jose.

That night, I pretend to get itchy. I scratch and scratch behind my ears, just like the stray cats who live in our garden at home. It's not long before a woman in a blue uniform leads me past a converted loading area where dozens of boys are huddled. It is the middle of the night, so they are asleep beneath the aluminum blankets. I try to walk as slowly as possible as I peer through the fencing, searching for Jose, but the woman in the blue uniform ushers me along. "You are contagious," she says. I pray that I will get another chance on the walk back.

At the infirmary, she cleans my face and puts in some ointment. Even though I'm not actually infected, it makes me feel better. Everything looks dilapidated and moldy in the infirmary, but it has a window. For the first time in 36 hours, I finally see natural light. It nearly burned my skin off in the desert, but after so long without sunlight, I'm ready to forgive it.

A plump, black-haired woman in a gray smock does a full medical checkup. She doesn't find lice, but my skin is red where I have been scratching myself, and the woman determines that it must be an allergy. She gives me some ointment. Then she gives me a smock to change into and takes me to a bed with clean sheets. Despite her no-nonsense air, she seems caring. "Shouldn't I go back to my cell now?" I ask, hoping to pass Jose's cell again. "You need to make sure you're not contagious first," she says. "You'll sleep here tonight. Tomorrow, someone will escort you back after the itching stops."

She has begun to remind me of my Grandmother Dadi. "Will you take me?" I ask. The woman sighs. "I'm not sure I'll be here tomorrow. We are volunteers, Coast Guard officers, just helping out." She's about to leave when I decide to take my shot. "I am not an unaccompanied miner," I say in one breath. "My mother was with me. She was separated from me in the desert by some bad men. She might be here if the coyotes haven't taken her away," I tell her.

Her head falls, and she turns around and sits at the edge of my bed. "Have you heard of the zero-tolerance policy?" "I think I have, but I can't recall. Vaguely, but I'm not sure what it means. I wish I had paid more attention to the conversation at the Hotel Hacienda." "It means that the US Government will have zero tolerance for parents migrating with their children to the US." My brow furrows. This means nothing to me. She continues. "Children who cross the border into the US will be separated from their parents and kept in different places. Eventually, both will be sent back to their country," she explains. "It is supposed to be a deterrent," she adds offhandedly.

"What's a deterrent?" I ask. I can feel the heat of her eyes on me. She sighs. "It's to keep foreigners out of America." I think she's trying to warn me not to tell the officers that I have come with Ami. I meet her eyes. I can see how upset she is, how mad this rule makes her, just as it makes me. As politely as I can, I say, "I don't care if Ami and I are sent back to India. All I want to know is if she's alive. I just need someone to help me look her up." She glances at me hard, then nods and gets up. "Give me her name and I will try my best to find out about your mother."

She does not know Gandhi-ji's wisdom that my Grandfather Nana-ji once shared with me. Gandhi-ji had said an unjust law is itself a species of violence, and that it should be resisted by non-violent, gentle acts. She is standing up for right and justice in her small way. Perhaps she has heard of Gandhi-ji after all.

Alison Stewart: That is Ruchira Gupta reading from her book, The Freedom Seeker. You wrote an op-ed for Time Magazine, criticizing US policy, saying they are not just shaping borders, they are shaping childhood itself. What does that mean?

Ruchira Gupta: It means that if one in four children are living in fear that they might be deported or their parents are being deported, and they are scared that they cannot play in a park or go to school, can you imagine the mental health consequences on those children? Also, how it impacts their future if they don't go to school, if they don't play in sunlight? Plus, not just are those children affected, the ecosystem they inhabit is also affected. Other children who are in school with them, their playmates, their classmates, their teachers, the wider community is also ridden with anxiety because human beings care for each other. We are all part of a community, so other children are also living in fear and anxiety.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Freedom Seeker. It is by Ruchira Gupta. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Ruchira Gupta: Thank you, Alison. This was wonderful.