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Sweets and tea are both luxuries that symbolize excess. Although Lakshmi is used to drinking tea before she leaves home, she is not used to eating sweets habitually because they’re too expensive and unnecessary. She savors the small treats her mother sometimes gives her, such as some popcorn one rainy night and a sweet cake at the Festival of Lights. Lakshmi tries to resist this gift of cake, saying she’s not a child anymore and it’s not a practical use of her mother’s money, but her mother insists, saying, “Tonight…you are a child” (42). Thus, at first, sweets are associated with childhood and with Lakshmi’s mother, an association that is rendered sinister when sweets suddenly become a method by which her captors bribe her into obedience during her journey to the brothel.

At the brothel itself, the associations shift yet again, for the women and girls use sweets and tea as small pleasures to ease their pain, or perhaps to indulge in something that a normal child would enjoy. Although these small pleasures bring them some relief, it’s also dangerous when they get too fixated on them and become appeased, content not to think about escaping as long as the TV works and they can afford a daily cup of tea. Tea and cakes are also associated with the addictive qualities of liquor, which poses a much stronger danger of the same type, allowing Shilpa to become completely numb, uncaring, and resigned as long as she can feed her addiction each day.

Like sweets and tea, Coca-Cola is another luxury that symbolizes excess, childhood, and small pleasures used as coping mechanisms. However, Coca-Cola is also a uniquely American drink that symbolizes Lakshmi’s conflicted feelings about America and Americans. At first, it is something unknown and magical to her. She has heard that drinking it is “like having tiny fireworks in your mouth” (55). She uses some of the money her stepfather gets from selling her to buy a Coca-Cola for Ama, showing her devotion to her mother as well as introducing her fascination with this product of a foreign land that by its very name connotes novelty and promise.

Later, Lakshmi receives a Coca-Cola as a gift from Street Boy and is delighted that the rumors about the fireworks are true. This confirmation of a rumor draws a philosophical connection to the idea that perhaps the rumors she’s heard about Americans rescuing children like her might also be true. However, after giving her the gift, Street Boy gets beaten up by his boss and then fired, which symbolizes the continuation of her conflicting feelings about Americans, for she knows from her own experiences that while some may wish to help her, others are complicit in the world of commercial sexual exploitation. Ultimately, however, it is the Americans who enable her rescue.

Lakshmi’s reflection changes in order to symbolize how she herself has changed, and also to symbolize how she doesn’t feel like herself in certain moments. Sometimes she refers to her reflection as a different “girl,” as if it’s not a mirror but a separate person looking through a window. This is especially true the first time she wears makeup, as well as after particularly abusive moments or excessive amounts of trauma. At one point she feels her reflection looks 100 years old, but she knows that she is actually 13 or 14, although she is not sure how much time has passed. This dynamic illustrates how much trauma she has experienced in such a short time. The mirror is also similar to the television screen, and sometimes Lakshmi pretends that what happens to her in reality is actually just a television show: a psychological tactic to disassociate from surroundings and create necessary distance from her trauma. This tactic also resembles how she treats her own reflection in the mirror: as if it belongs to someone else.