Why Didn't You Come Sooner? Compassion in Action : Speaking Tiger Books : 9789354475979 : 9354475973 : 20 Sep 2023 : The work of rescuing children from slavery is not for the faint of heart, as the twelve gut-wrenching accounts in this book will show. Harder still is to give them their life back, after they've been kidnapped, trafficked, sold, abused and made to work in horrific conditions, often for as long as they can remember. Pradeep was offered up for human sacrifice by his family, thought to be a bad omen; Devli was a third-generation slave in a stone quarry in Haryana, who had never seen a banana before her rescue; Ashraf, a domestic child labourer at a senior civil servant's house, was starved and scalded as punishment; Sahiba was trafficked from Assam to be someone's wife against her will; Kalu was abducted and made to weave carpets all day long, his injuries cauterized with phosphorus scraped off matchsticks; Bhavna was trapped in a circus, sexually abused for year