Ishaq Kala laughs nonchalantly. 'Give us 5,000 rupees ($878) and we can get you a girl,' he says. Then he giggles to his friend and nods his head. The young bride of 32-year-old Ishaq cost him a little more - 6,000 rupees - and now he smiles with the confidence of a newly-wed.
His wife, 15-year-old Memoona, a tiny figure, sits nervously on a charpoy on the rooftop terrace of their home in the village of Jogipur in Haryana. She refuses to look up, fiddling with her fingernails and bright green salwar kameez - another silent victim in India's flourishing trade in human chattel. Her feet dangle, not quite touching the floor, while her mother-in-law Shubani sits next to her.
When the teenager finally speaks, she does so in her native tongue of Assamese - a region more than 1,200km from Haryana which straddles India's northeastern border with Bangladesh.
'I was brought here from Assam a month ago by a woman called Amina,' she says. 'I was told I would be married in Haryana ... I did not know what my husband's name would be. When I came here I was sold to a man called Kala for 6,000 rupees, my rate was fixed. Since then I have been here. There has been no wedding ceremony.'
Her story - that of a young girl lured into marriage with promises of wealth and a kind husband - is not unusual. Memoona is one of thousands of women who are trafficked to address India's acute shortage of women - a result of the alarming increase in female feticide.
The births of 10 million girls in India may have been stopped through abortion and sex selection in the last two decades, research published by the Lancet medical journal last week reveals. The shortage of women in India has risen tenfold from 3.5 million in 1901 to 35 million in 2001, according to the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.