A Harvest of Thorns Read online

  DEDICATION

  For the women of Tazreen,

  whose stories will never leave me.

  On behalf of a forgetful world,

  let me say I am sorry.

  EPIGRAPH

  What is done in our name must not remain invisible to us.

  We are responsible for all the workers who make our goods.

  —Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, Inc.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Interlogue

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Interlogue

  Part Five

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Six

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Seven

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Eight

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Acclaim for Corban Addison

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Bangladesh

  November 2013

  MILLENNIUM FASHIONS FACTORY

  DHAKA, BANGLADESH

  NOVEMBER 4, 2013

  8:53 P.M.

  The sparks danced like fireflies in the semidarkness of the storeroom. They emerged from the wall outlet in a shower of white-gold radiance, casting a flickering glow across the concrete slab beneath them. The sounds they made, the snapping and crackling of suddenly electrified air, were drowned out by the rattling of three generators across the room, whose whirling magnetic coils were straining to satisfy the demand of hundreds of lightbulbs and ceiling fans and sewing machines on the floors above.

  The cause was elementary, as the investigators from Dhaka would later discover—an aging circuit, copper wire exposed through melted sheathing, a worn-out breaker box, a peak load the factory’s designers had never anticipated, and the gentle, inexorable persuasion of time. A short, the investigators would say. A common fault in a building so poorly maintained.

  But what happened next was far from commonplace. The fire that started to burn in sacks of cotton jute—the leftover cuttings of T-shirts, sweatpants, and children’s apparel destined for Chittagong piers and American closets—would sweep farther and faster than any fire before it.

  This fire would ignite the world.

  MILLENNIUM FASHIONS FACTORY

  FIVE FLOORS ABOVE

  Nasima’s hands moved swiftly over the fabric before her, wasting neither motion nor strength. Her fingers joined textured labels to stretchy waistbands and fed them through her plain machine with a pianist’s precision, her foot caressing the pedal in time—on, stitch, off, rest, on, stitch, off, rest. After she completed each piece, she swept it aside for a helper to deliver to packaging, then took another set of pants and Piccola labels from the hands of her fourteen-year-old sister, Sonia.

  Nasima and Sonia were the fastest finishing team at Millennium, a relentless symbiosis of diligence and productivity. They communicated with looks and gestures, seldom with words. Their bond was a matter of blood and history. At the age of ten, Nasima had attended Sonia’s birth. She had been the first in her family to witness the crowning of Sonia’s head, the first to look into her sister’s dark eyes, brown as river-fed soil. She had bathed Sonia, and changed her, and soothed her, and raised her like a surrogate, not because their mother, Joya, lacked devotion, but because she had four rowdy sons and a job on the sewing line that sequestered her from dawn to dark every day but Friday.

  The Hassan family had come to Dhaka from Kalma, their native village, when Nasima was a toddler, after the great cyclone of 1991 washed away their fields and reshaped the land beneath their feet. The bustling city had offered them refuge and the chance of employment in garment factories springing up everywhere in the suburbs, fueled by the frenzy of globalization. Joya had started at Millennium as a helper, but with training, determination, and patience, she had worked her way up to sample sewing operator in the pattern room—a specialist in charge of translating designs conveyed by the clothing brands into samples that won contracts and set the standard for everyone else.

  Nasima had followed her mother into the factory as soon as Sonia was old enough to attend school. Sonia had joined them when she was thirteen, though her employment documents recorded her age as fifteen, the legal minimum in Bangladesh. The hours were brutal, the influx of overseas orders relentless, and the wages subsistence level and often paid late. But it was honest work, steady work, and with three of them collecting paychecks, the money had multiplied, allowing the boys to stay in school. It was Joya’s hope—and Ashik’s, her rickshaw-driving husband—that their eldest son would be the first in the family to attend college. Nasima’s dream was simpler. She wanted to get married and have children of her own.

  “Ēţā ki?” Sonia asked in Bengali. “What is that?”

  The question caught Nasima off guard. She pulled her fingers back from the plunging needle just in time. “What is what?”

  Then Nasima heard it—the sound of shouting carrying over the clatter of machines and the whirring of fans. She looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. There were two hundred sewing stations in the cavernous room, four lines of fifty, each with an operator and a helper, along with ten supervisors and four line chiefs. Most of the workers were on task. A few, however, were glancing about with concern.

  “Get back to work,” barked her supervisor. “No delays. The order must go out tonight.”

  Nasima gave her sister a reassuring look and slid another waistband and label into the machine. The pants were bright red and sized to fit a girl about six years old. How much would the child’s parents pay in America? Five dollars? Ten? Fifteen? It was a guessing game she sometimes played to break the monotony. The fabric was nice. Twelve, she guessed. At her current wage of forty-two cents an hour, Nasima had to work four days to earn such a sum, but she felt no bitterness. Nor did she wonder—as she had when she was younger—how Americans could afford such luxuries. The West had grown
rich, while much of the world remained poor. The ways of Allah were mysterious. It was not for her to question them.

  Minutes passed. Piece after piece went through the machine. Nasima fought to maintain concentration, but the distant shouting did not subside. More operators looked up from their work, searching for an explanation. Supervisors began to stomp about, chastising the laggards for their indolence, but the ranks of the curious swelled. Finally, the line chiefs intervened. They marched brusquely up and down the lines, issuing orders and threats. Nasima hunched over her machine and picked up her pace. The supervisors were harmless. They had no power to hire or fire. The line chiefs, however, could dismiss workers at whim.

  Then came the first explosion.

  Nasima heard it and felt it simultaneously—a rumbling like thunder rising from deep inside the building. The floor trembled. The walls shuddered. The lights flickered and swayed. Workers cried out as the sound reached a throaty pitch and then died away. The fire alarm began to ring. Nasima sat transfixed, clutching the pants she had just finished. In a glance she saw Sonia’s fright and the fright of the workers around her. She turned toward the nearest line chief and saw him shouting into a radio. The worry in his eyes convinced her to move.

  She stood up and took her sister’s hand, walking briskly toward the central stairwell—the only way out of the factory. Her supervisor shouted at her to sit down, but she ignored him. Other workers left their stations, stepping over piles of fabric in their quest for the exit. They made it halfway to the stairs before one of the line chiefs placed his body in front of the door. He waved his arms wildly and yelled over the bleating of the alarm.

  “Go back to your stations! Your work is not done! If you leave, you will be fired!”

  Nasima hesitated, as did the rest of the workers. The crowd stewed about in confusion.

  “Why is the alarm still going off?” a male sewing operator shouted.

  “A generator malfunctioned!” the line chief yelled. “It is a mistake! Go back to your—”

  He was interrupted by the second explosion. It was louder and more violent than the first and rocked the factory to its foundations. As the building quaked, Nasima’s stomach twisted with dread. She pulled Sonia toward her, certain the factory was about to collapse. But the floor did not give way. Instead, the lights went out.

  The workers began to scream. A great wave of bodies pressed against Nasima and Sonia, jostling them toward the now invisible door. Hands shoved. Elbows flew. One collided with Nasima’s forehead. Stars swam in her vision. She clutched Sonia’s hand and dragged her away from the crowd. It was there that she caught her first whiff of smoke. It was pungent, revolting. She coughed and turned back toward the stairwell. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw a mass of moving shadows and heard hysterical shouts.

  “Open the door!”

  “Get out of the way!”

  At last, Nasima saw a wedge of rose-gray light along the doorframe. The crowd swarmed toward the opening, and Nasima and Sonia followed. For a few beats in time they made progress. Then the crowd stopped. The workers at the rear shouted in anger and dismay.

  “Go! Move! Get to the door!”

  Suddenly, a new kind of scream erupted from the crowd. It was more like a shriek, really, a crystalline expression of terror. The shrieks coalesced around a single word.

  “Fire!”

  The workers backed away from the door, then pirouetted and began to stampede. Nasima yanked Sonia out of their path, her mind spinning. The factory had no fire escape. The only extinguishers were on the first and second floors. The stairwell was blocked. In a moment of terrible clarity, she knew the windows were their only hope.

  She pulled Sonia toward the outer wall of the room, covering her mouth to ward off the acrid smoke. The windows were not glassed in, but they were enclosed by iron bars and webbed netting—the owner’s attempt to prevent workers from stealing clothing by throwing it down to friends on the ground. The only way out was to sever the netting and dislodge the bars.

  Sonia began to cough. Nasima pulled her into a crouch and told her to cover her mouth with her arm. It was then that she remembered the pants in her hands. “Use this as a mask!” she cried, pulling Sonia’s head toward her. She placed the crotch of the pants over her sister’s nose and mouth and cinched the legs behind her head. “Lie down!” she ordered. “The air is better!”

  Nasima glanced toward the stairwell and saw an orange glow beneath the door. She covered her mouth with her headscarf and peeked over the windowsill toward the cinderblock dwellings where her family and most of the workers lived. On evenings when the neighborhood had power, lamps illumined windows and bulbs lit footpaths. But the power was out. All light had vanished from the night.

  Her eyes began to burn from the smoke. She coughed once, twice, then dropped to her knees, retching until her chest ached. At last, the paroxysm passed. She lay down beside Sonia, struggling to make out the contours of her sister’s face.

  “I’m afraid,” Sonia said, her voice barely audible above the chaos of screams and pulsing of the alarm. “What are we going to do?”

  Before Nasima could respond, someone kicked her in the head. She cried out in pain, but the man made no attempt to apologize. Instead, he yelled, “The bars are not secure! Help me!”

  In the shadows behind him, Nasima saw the outline of a table. She ordered Sonia not to move and rolled into a sitting position, breathing through the fabric of her scarf. She blinked her eyes rapidly, disregarding the sting of smoke, and took hold of a table leg. She helped the man pull the table toward the window. When it was flush with the sill, he climbed onto it, drew a knife from his pocket, and attacked the netting with all of his strength.

  Nasima lay down again and placed a hand on Sonia’s shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” she said despite the doubt in her gut. “The fire service is coming.”

  Even as she spoke, Nasima knew it was a false hope. The closest fire station was half an hour away, and the lanes around the factory were too narrow for large trucks. The firefighters would find a way to get their hoses through. But they would almost certainly be too late.

  By the time the netting fell to the ground, the temperature in the room had passed the point of discomfort. Sweat coated Nasima’s skin, and her backside prickled from the heat. For the first time since the explosions, she thought of her mother two floors below them. Was she still alive? She had to be alive.

  Suddenly, she saw the man’s face in front of her. “Help me lift the table!” he shouted. “We need to dislodge the bars!”

  Nasima blinked away burning tears. Behind the man stood a cluster of human shadows. They helped her to her feet, and together they picked up the table and threw it against the bars. The iron groaned, and mortar fell away into the night.

  “Again!” the man commanded.

  On the second try, all but one of the bars came loose. The man levered himself onto the windowsill and wrested iron from crumbling mortar, tossing it into the dark. He turned toward them for an instant, but Nasima couldn’t see his face.

  Then he jumped.

  Nasima stared at the empty window in shock. It was not as if the thought had never occurred to her, but the sheer brutality of watching it happen shook her to the core. Five floors. Sixty feet to the ground. A fall like that was suicide.

  But the man was not alone. Two women climbed onto the sill and leapt into the abyss.

  Madness! Nasima thought, glancing at Sonia. There had to be another way.

  She looked into the smoke-filled gloom of the factory. There were hundreds of unfinished pants at the sewing stations. If she could make a rope long enough to halve the distance to the ground, she and Sonia could survive the drop.

  She crouched beside her sister and asked, “Are you okay?”

  Sonia coughed once, then nodded.

  “Stay here. I’ll just be a minute.”

  Nasima crawled slowly across the floor, keeping her mouth low to the ground. When she reach
ed the nearest sewing line, she gathered an armful of pants and returned to the window. She tied legs together one by one, tugging at them fiercely until she detected no slippage. She didn’t know if the pants could bear the weight of a body, but she knew her knots would hold.

  While she worked, more workers jumped from windows all around. She heard their screams as they faded into silence. She felt the waves of heat coming from the stairwell. Smoke billowed around her, choking her with stench and soot. Her lungs burned and her eyes ran with tears. Still, she pressed on.

  Five pants became eight, then twelve. By the time she reached fifteen, she could no longer keep her eyes open. Her mind was slipping gears. She wanted nothing more than to sleep. But something in her resisted. Something made her rise up one last time.

  She nudged Sonia. “Come, Khamjana,” she said, using her sister’s nickname—hummingbird. “It’s time for us to go.”

  She helped Sonia to her feet and held her protectively. At the age of fourteen, Sonia still had the diminutive build of a preadolescent girl. She had been born six weeks prematurely, and her growth had never caught up with her peers. In the schoolyard and among her brothers, her slight stature had brought her much shame. Now, though, it was a gift.

  They stood before the window, the night beckoning from beyond. Those who would jump had already jumped. The rest were shadows on the floor, some groaning, others still. Nasima looped the makeshift rope around a table leg and tied it securely. Then she threw the remainder out the window. She placed her forehead against her sister’s and spoke words that belied her fear.

  “You can do this. You must climb down and then drop to the ground. The rope will hold, but you must be quick. There is no time to waste.”

  “It’s too far,” Sonia replied weakly. “I can’t.”

  Nasima looked into the dark wells of her sister’s eyes and her heart began to break. It came to her that she might never see Sonia again. “You can,” she said emphatically. “You must.” She forced the rope into Sonia’s hands and nudged her toward the window. “Go now.”

  Sonia hesitated a moment longer, then swung her legs over the sill, one after the other. She clutched the rope tightly and began to slide down.