All That Is Bitter and Sweet (55 page)

I spent time in a secretive brothel in Kamathipura, where cotton cloth covered the entry to each room. These are girls and women who are truly sex slaves, unable to physically leave their rooms, even to go to the health clinic. They do not see the outdoors for years; their only walking is to the toilet at the end of the hall. They are in the
karza
or indentured servitude phase of sex slavery. They have been brought in against their will, tricked by someone they knew in their home village, purchased by a madam for as little as $100 U.S. Each slave has to “earn” back her money, in addition to whatever the madam spends housing and feeding her. They are young, rural, terrified, and unable to speak the local dialect, which intensifies their helpless isolation. If they do dare to flee, heavies are stationed at obvious places such as rail and bus stations to bring them straight back.

The women I met in this human storehouse were actually from Nepal, which has seen tens of thousands of its young stolen for Mumbai’s sex trade. Their poverty is so bad, their desperation so intense, that they are often forced to work here with an impossible number of clients per day. They even offer anal sex for a modestly higher fee (about 100 rupees more, about $2 U.S.). It’s hard to know the exact HIV rate of trafficked women, as those who are
karza
can’t be tested. However, in 2007 the HIV rate of women tested at the Falkland Road Clinic was 37 percent.

This obscene situation was brought to the attention of both the Indian and Nepalese governments by health workers from NGOs who were finding alarming rates of infection in the brothels. The result is that trafficking from Nepal to India has been significantly reduced—an exception being, of course, the women I met today.

It was a relief to leave that stifling room and climb up to the roof of the brothel for some air. I found about ten children there and a woman washing her dishes while rotten food floated in a growing puddle. They were dusty, filthy, but playful and animated by having a foreigner visit. I asked their names, but they wanted to go further, and those who could wrote their names for me on scraps of paper, so I would remember them. The whole life of a child, scrawled in a name. Against the plastic wall of a makeshift room on torn, small pieces of paper, they wrote:

Aadarshini

Yamuna

Nabhendu

Asiya

Aarti

I put the damp, dirty scraps carefully into my tote, and when I returned to the hotel, the instant I hit the door of my room, something exploded in my chest. I was suddenly clawing at my tote, dropping to my knees, nearly vomiting up grief as I crawled to the coffee table, where I laid out each child’s piece of paper, looking at their names, seeing the uniqueness of each one’s writing, imagining a bit of their essence on the paper from where their hands had touched it.

I thought of their lives—born and raised in brothels, and likely condemned to brothels as adults; the boys were already doing chores to keep things running, and the girls were often sold to men as early as age eight. It was too much for me to reconcile, their free-spirited joy on the roof in spite of the odious reality in the crowded rooms below. Why? How? What was I supposed to do now that I knew this, now that I knew them?

I called Tennie in Texas, described the brothel, and told her of the children I had met on the roof, how they played using that small bit of elevated space to escape their mothers’ sex acts and the equal dangers of the streets below.

“How do I pray for these children?” I asked, sobbing. “I don’t know how to begin, if I am not supposed to pray for specific outcomes.”

In her gentle voice, strong with experience and made gentle with empathy, Tennie began to tell me about her daughter, Kim, and the years Kim lived on the streets, in active addiction and anorexia. Tennie relied on Twelve Step programs as well as professional help to learn how not to enable, how to detach with love from a person’s problems and to cope with her own desperate impulses to continually rescue and caretake her daughter. She had to let Kim go, to allow her to find recovery on her own. Tennie even held a symbolic funeral for Kim to assist her as she let go of her daughter. She described to me how, over and over, hundreds of times, as her fears about Kim resurfaced and reanimated her grief process, she would visualize her daughter. In her mind’s eye, she gently held her daughter in her arms and carried her to the God of her understanding. Tennie described her God concept as a conventional image of a loving father and said she would lay her daughter in her God’s lap, turning Kim over to a Power greater than herself, who could do for Kim what no earthly parent, however loving and dedicated, ever could. Tennie would repeat this prayerful visualization as often as necessary.

I pondered my God concept and to what I might be able to turn over to each child, what I could entrust to them. A river’s edge came to me, and I saw a beautiful, mighty, flowing river, which I realized represented God’s will. I thought of myself and how I sometimes wade right in, abandoning myself to the care and protection of God’s will without hesitation. Sometimes, though, I sit on the riverbank, stuck in my self-will, watching the river flow right by, unwilling to take the steps necessary to put me in the graceful currents. Other times I step in, but only to my ankles, back turned on the river, staring at the bank, thinking about why I can’t have it both ways, self-will and God’s will. Or I come to God as I did tonight, on my knees, crawling, begging for it.

As this powerful imagery was coming to me, I received it as a gift being washed up on the shores of my conscious mind by something preternatural inside of me. I knew that it would work for me throughout my life. In my mind’s eye, I was on the brothel roof. I picked up each child one by one. I cradled them, kissed their foreheads, tenderly said their names, and squeezed them into me, swaying gently as I walked them to the river’s edge. There, like Moses’s mother, I accepted my limitations and set them in the river of God’s love, which could take them someplace I never could.

Aadarshini

Yamuna

Nabhendu

Asiya

Aarti

Utterly drained, but now with some degree of peace, I thanked Tennie and hung up the phone. I carefully placed the small pieces of paper in a small fabric bag, and set them on my bedside table by a flower and a picture of Dario. I lay on my side, staring. I could put the kids in the river, but I couldn’t quite let go of the scraps. I trusted I would know when it came time, whether casually or in ceremony, and I knew it would be an enormous act of faith on my part that I wasn’t ready for just yet. The scraps were a way of hanging on, just a little longer, to the delusion that I have some control, some influence. Giving them up would mean accepting my limitations all over again, knowing there are things I cannot, and will not ever, know, such as how each child’s life turns out, if there would ever be peace. But I can hope, and I can believe. Along with hard work, it’s all that is asked of me.

That evening, I invited our group to a sharing circle in my room, during which each one could, if she wished, process their Mumbai experiences. Seane regaled us with her thoughts about her time with the women of Sanghamitra. It was ironic for a Westerner to teach yoga in the country where it all began, but the prostituted women of India are so isolated from their society that the benefits of their great traditions are often lost to them. Helping them to bring some healing to their own bodies, an antidote to the abuse heaped on them for years, was her dream. As always, Seane received much more than she gave in this simple act of service. She came back bursting with respect for their activism, heralding their life experience as the expertise the policy-makers and governments actually need.

We tried to process together every night as a way to release the emotions that surfaced during our time in the field. It is important to name our feelings, out them, and release them before they have a chance to become toxic to our bodies and our souls. So many aid workers (and others in helping professions, such as nurses) anesthetize themselves at the end of the day with alcohol, cigarettes, food, or even drugs to numb the effects of what they’ve witnessed. Too often, gifted, compassionate people burn out. Seane and I encouraged the humanitarian and aid staff to join us to talk honestly about what we had been seeing and feeling, even if those thoughts were not exactly politically correct. In our circle, it is okay to admit, “The stench of that person made me want to gag and run away,” or, “I wanted to smash that pimp’s head in with a brick.” We would listen without judgment in a room filled with candles and friends. We considered how we could overcome the anger, revulsion, guilt, and fear that we weren’t doing enough and carry on with greater love.

Our staff members were so used to stuffing down their emotions that this process was alien, even frightening to some of them. Some later confessed they thought it was compulsory, because I was on PSI’s board of directors, and I felt bad about that. For myself, I have made it mandatory. Feelings are not facts, and in order to endure in this work, not burn out or give up or just stay home on the farm, I need to express my feelings, even the crazy ones. I need the support of others as I do so, to know I am not alone in my internal struggles. And I certainly need spiritual tools to go the distance and stay present in the work, when it is so tempting and easy to become hopeless, apathetic, cynical. Because if I am one with every being on earth, then I must keep growing in order to arrive at the place of not just intellectualizing, but feeling my shared humanity with both the prostitutes and the pimps, the abused and the abusers, and locate within my own heart compassion for both, equally and unconditionally.

Easier said than done.

I knew that my compassion was going to be tested at the next big event on my schedule: an afternoon with hundreds of truck drivers who exploit men, women, and children to satisfy their alleged sexual “needs” during the long separations from their families. As I said my evening prayers, I wondered how my tools were going to see me through that one.