Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels (2 page)

I threw myself into volunteer work that summer with the single-minded determination of someone looking for misery. Once I started to visit the brothels, I couldn’t get the poverty and desperation off my mind. I came home every day exhausted, often in tears, and very few people actually had the patience to see me because all I could talk about was how terrible life is for Indian sex workers.

At the end of the three months, feeling helpless and in complete despair, I returned to life as a liberal arts major. I took the semester off to satisfy a long-pending desire to paint with oils and matriculated in a program that guides students through the cathedrals of Italy before retreating to artists’ studios on a Greek island.

The misalignment between my twin callings of social responsibility and creativity was profound, taxing. And my infinite privilege became clearer than ever before, inducing a queasy concoction of shrugging gratitude spiked with heaps of guilt.

At first, I hadn’t given much thought to how I would transition from the dark, bleak lanes of Kamathipura to Italian Renaissance art’s obsession with sun-choked tableaus and new achievements in linear perspective.

These were two separate facets of my life, I tried to convince myself. But detachment is not my strength, and it turned out they weren’t so distinct after all.

The sex workers and their daughters remained at the forefront of my thoughts long after I arrived in Pistoia, an idyllic city an hour outside Florence, where I lived in a 16th-century villa with a garden of wild figs and age-old olive trees. My peers and teachers were from a world far from the one I had just inhabited. I remember looking out from my third-floor-bedroom window at night. The glimmer of the city below the Tuscan hills instantly carried me back to the neon fairy lights strung in the hallways of the brothels where I knew women were at work.

Two years passed. I graduated college and, after a stint as a legal assistant, I abandoned notions of law school. I’d had an epiphany of sorts (at least, I wanted it to be one) that my manifest destiny was to become a writer. And I couldn’t get rid of the nagging voice of 16-year-old Shanoor telling me I needed to go back to where I was from. The untold stories I so wanted to tell were in India, not North America, it said. I needed to reconcile with my homeland, my home city, my home, it said.

The voice reminded me that I’d never publicly told the stories of those sex workers, that after my volunteering was over, I’d escaped to art school. Now it was time to speak up.

I arrived in India in the fall of 2012, without a job but with a mission to write about the vulnerable. Of the many landings I’ve made, this was the bumpiest. It turned out Mumbai did not open its arms and thank me for the noble decision to abandon my Brooklyn apartment with a rooftop view for the higher purpose of writing about injustice.

I also had to confront the reality of being a woman in India, no easy feat even in the country’s most cosmopolitan megacities. I found male eyes staring at me everywhere. My 16-year-old self was either too young to notice or had unconsciously tuned out. My 23-year-old self became repulsed, infuriated, and debilitated.

Some days I wanted to shake men by the shoulders and scream, “Why the fuck are you staring at me?” Others, I climbed into a taxi instead of walking past a corner where they loitered, chewing betel nut, waiting for a target at which to aim their lustful gaze.

India is still a country where contact between men and women not married or otherwise related is taboo, a girl child a burden, a widow the bad luck that caused her husband’s death.

Demands for equality and an end to shame and violence fall on deaf ears, so women who live or travel in India take precautions instead that perpetuate a vicious cycle. Don’t go out late; don’t wear revealing clothes; don’t make eye contact. Being a woman in India requires us to steel ourselves to invading male eyes, and often verbal and physical assault.

Less than four months after I returned, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi, the city I had recently relocated to for a job with an English-language newspaper. The woman was brutalized with a metal rod in the presence of her male friend. When she died, outrage swept the country and a national reflection on the treatment of women finally began. Indians took to the streets, and an eerie sense of solidarity grew among young, educated women who felt personally violated by the assault.

Like the dead woman, I was also 23. I found commuting in Delhi, especially at night, terrifying, a reoccurring nightmare of dark, deserted streets.

And my job as a copy editor was unfulfilling. My dream of writing stories that addressed the suffering I’d witnessed and the rage I felt seemed distant. I left the capital and moved, again, to my birthplace, Mumbai. Newly unemployed, disillusioned about jobs in Indian media, I decided to write freelance articles for U.S. publications and only pursue stories that interested me. At the top of my agenda were sex workers and their children.

So it was that I returned to Kamathipura — older, wiser, a little more tempered — to find a way to tell the haunting tales that had consumed my thoughts since I’d first set foot inside this red-light enclave that, in a very classist society, is seen as the lowest demimonde.

*****

I am seated cross-legged on a brothel floor on a hot April afternoon. The door is ajar. Just beyond it, a disheveled man in a grey pinstriped shirt appears at the top of the dank staircase, ducking to avoid banging his head on the low ceiling. The hinges creak as he slips in.

“Is Lata here?” He asks.

“Lata has gone back to the village,” says Roshni, a chatty woman with bulging hips who, now in her thirties, has risen up the ranks to become the keeper of this three-room affair. “But you can sit with Payal if you like.”

To sit,
baithna
in Hindi, is a euphemism sex workers use.

The man looks at Payal, plopped on a bamboo mat on the floor beside me, the ringlets in her hair escaping from a loose bun. He hesitates. Payal remains silent, expressionless, tuned to the 14-inch TV on the wall rather than the prospective customer.

His eyes flit from her to me. He shakes his head no and slinks back down the stairs.

My obviously alien presence embarrassed him, I know. He was squeamish about buying sex while an outsider watched.

I’m torn between satisfaction my interview wasn’t interrupted and guilt over depriving Payal of rare afternoon business. I am no longer naïve enough to believe I’ve saved her from the indignity of selling her body.

Roshni resumes narrating the story of how she ended up in Mumbai. The burn scars on her upper arms mark when her husband doused her with a pot of boiling mutton stew. Roshni demonstrates how she had been curled up at the time, “with my legs like this, held against my chest,” she says. “It’s a good thing or I would have gotten completely burned. I’d just had an operation to stop myself from having babies.”

Roshni left home that day with her two young children. For hours she walked along a country road because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of sitting on a bus reeking of mutton stew.

At her parents’ house, the husband of Roshni’s older sister tried to sleep with her. She left and found a job as a maid at a hotel. The owner tried to take advantage of her. She accepted a woman’s offer to work at a cotton shop in Mumbai. It turned out to be a brothel. But by the time she realized she’d been tricked, it was too late. Roshni had children to feed, whether by working loom or loins.

Roshni’s story is hardly unique. In dozens of interviews with sex workers and their children, almost all have told me stories of absent men — usually dead fathers or drunk, abusive husbands — illiteracy, and no decent jobs. In addition to their own sustenance, a great many are responsible for their elderly parents, daughters, and sons.

These tales are brutal, but from each I try to glean insights that might help me diagnose why sex work is so rampant and devastating in India.

Besides the mental strain, reporting from Kamathipura poses another challenge. I am an outsider. I must be careful. When I visited the brothels as a college student, the field workers of the NGO I volunteered with never left me alone. A young woman, fair and tall, they told me, would attract curious and lewd stares from pimps and johns. They sought to avoid trouble.

When I decided to return to Kamathipura more recently as a reporter, I still didn’t feel comfortable walking around the area and going into the brothels completely alone. I came to an arrangement with a community organization in the red-light district, a federation of sex workers called Asha Darpan. They allow me to come to their office — a hole in the wall sandwiched between a shoe-repair store and a vendor of fried snacks — and I accompany the staff to brothels for health check-ups and to distribute condoms. I tell them where I will be and am free to speak with whomever I want. They pick me up when it’s time to leave.

From noon to 7 p.m. — when
dhandha
, or sex work, is slowest — I do my reporting, armed with a notebook and recorder, dressed in my baggy, washed-out salwaar khameezes. Sometimes the sex workers running the organization interrogate me for a while first. They are understandably perplexed by my endeavor. My home, an eight-minute train ride from theirs, is as foreign as another planet. It can be exasperating trying to explain what the heck I am doing here.

Roshni, at the end of our interview, asks the usual dreaded questions. Why are you writing all this down? What are you going to get out of it? I stumble to convey how I desire to be the sort of reporter who doesn’t just chase the news but tells the stories of people without a voice, without recourse.

But Sailesh, a transgender sex worker and peer counselor at Asha Darpan who has come to collect me at the end of my visit, cuts me off.

“See, you and me,” he says to Roshni, “we’re from this line.”

What line? I wonder.

“She,” Sailesh motions to me with his chin, “is from the family line.”

“People in the family line, they think sex workers only do dhandha. But there’s much more to our lives — we have homes, we cook food, we have children. She wants to see what that is. She writes it down so she can tell other people in the family line that, actually, this is what sex workers do.”

The family line. I never thought about it that way before. But the phrase makes sense in the context of a group that feels shunned by India’s intractable notions of family values and rigid morality. I belong to a different “line,” not only because of socioeconomics but because of my ability to have familial relationships instead of transactional ones, dhandha.

I learned something important today, I know, and Sailesh’s validation of my reporting is welcome, too. My confidence has been sagging.

The broken family lives of the sex workers explain, in part, why they end up in Kamathipura. I also need to understand, however, what dhandha is really like for these women, a difficult topic to discuss. Indians avoid talking about intimacy. And young-ish Indian women certainly don’t go around asking strangers about their sex lives, let alone querying, “How much do you charge for a blow job?” I am nervous all the time. But I need to know.

One afternoon, I listen to the health counselor at Asha Darpan.

“Today, the results are good,” Prashant says to a woman who tests negative for HIV. “If you always want good results, you have to use condoms.”

“Sometimes, when you are drunk, you forget to tell him to wear a condom. Sometimes, the customer tells you he’ll give you more money for sex without a condom. And sometimes, when you love someone, you don’t want him to wear a condom.”

I admire how Prashant deftly balances sensitivity and practicality. I begin to study his approach. He doesn’t do what so many of us Indians do when it comes to sex and euphemize or omit uncomfortable words and subjects. He is forthright. How would my society be different if everyone approached talking about sex this way? Even at a brothel, the men and women who are exchanging sex for money speak in coded terms and suggestive looks. How much more oblique must the average Indian be in other settings?

From here on I will speak frankly, I decide.

Still, the women are used to Prashant and unaccustomed to me. Many days, no one has the energy or desire to answer my detailed personal questions. Some decline to be interviewed, or give monosyllabic answers and gaze away. Others are thrilled to talk, though, and — slowly, slowly — I start to become an expert on Kamathipura.

There are at least 10,000 women living in this cluttered mix of concrete buildings and flimsy shanties. Some estimates place that figure five times as high, but it’s impossible to know because there’s scant documentation and many people stay in the shadows. In addition to those who reside here full-time, there are also many other women who have separate homes but come into the area to work.

There is no standard brothel, but one defining characteristic is darkness, even during the day. Most of the buildings have honeycomb grills on the windows that block natural light. Within these labyrinthine buildings, each brothel has two to a half-dozen cubicles arranged around a common area. The interiors are generally clean, as the brothel-keeper — often an older female sex worker — assigns the young women housekeeping chores. But the hallways and stairways are moldy and filthy with red betel juice splattered on the walls and garbage nesting in the corners.

Early on during my reporting, the women at a sprawling, mazelike 500-bed brothel called Simplex told me a police raid a few months earlier had chased away many sex workers and clients. Sex work is not illegal, per se, but soliciting and living off the earnings of a prostitute is. Police sporadically crack down on the pimps and brothel-keepers who rely on this money, often collecting hefty bribes in the process. Some of the women are accused of pimping younger women. Others are treated as victims and dispatched to state-run shelter homes until the magistrate orders their release.

Many women in Kamathipura have been through this ordeal, and I become determined to learn why so many people who’ve been “rescued” return here. Oasis India, a nonprofit organization working on the rehabilitation of sex workers, agrees to help me gain access to a state-run shelter home. But they say it will be impossible to enter as a journalist, advising me to pose as a fund-raiser for their organization instead.