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Ulhasnagar, India, is in that part of the world where things are made. The city is known for making cheap knockoffs of American jeans, and babies are made here, too, by women who cannot read or write but can become pregnant and will do so for money, for clients they will meet once or twice, if at all. Until recently, these women bore children for foreigners who never saw this place.
Coming into the station from Mumbai, the train pulled up alongside a nullah—a broad, shallow, fouled river. On the shore, lines of cloth billowed in the hot, dry air. From the busy market in front of the station, we took a rickshaw to a street that was still being laid down and picked our way over the rubble. Sonali,* a widow of just six weeks when we met, in January 2014, stood in the doorway of her one-room house. She was slender, in a green kurta, and seemed watchful even as she smiled. Her mother-in-law was filling steel pots with the water that had just arrived, as it...