It was midnight, but Akhila was fully awake and agog with excitement. She was smiling to herself. Akhila was sixteen and was an extremely pretty girl. She looked up at the roof of the small hut in which she lived with her mother and stepfather. There was just one room in the hut. But her mother had used a piece of cloth to partition it into two. The smaller portion which was just one-fifth of the room served as the kitchen...