Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels (3 page)

I am conflicted. Isn’t it my professional responsibility to represent myself truthfully? But these homes are one of the only solutions the Indian government offers sex workers. Ultimately, I can’t pass up the opportunity to see one from the inside.

When I arrive at the shelter home in Chembur, a neighborhood in the city’s east, I am strictly forbidden from speaking to the women. But, locked behind bars in cramped quarters where almost a hundred bodies wilt on bunk beds or mattresses on the floor without sheets or pillows, their faces say it all.

The women are allowed outdoors for only one hour each day, under staff supervision at all times. They are compelled to attend sewing and craft classes each morning even though the teachers themselves rarely show up.

The spirits here are so much more broken than in the brothels. The air is thick with utter defeat. In Kamathipura, I sometimes see women with vacant stares, but others wear an aura of defiance, a confidence born from making a living and even providing for children despite the complete absence of an education or outside support. That vanishes here. These women are zombies.

I enter the kitchen along with the home’s counselor. Seven women are stooped over a counter, peeling potatoes and chopping onions. Most days the menu is convalescent rice and lentils, but today they are to have
biryani
because the home’s superintendent received a promotion.

“Madam,” one voice pipes up, “How are we going to cook? We need whole masala, powdered masalas… we don’t even have
dahi
!”

The counselor assures the women the ingredients will be provided. They slump back onto their stools and fall silent. They know that even their special meal will be bland and bad.

This contrast is acute. When I visit Kamathipura, the pungent, spicy aromas of Bombay cooking rise above the stench of garbage between 2 and 5 p.m., as the women wake and prepare the day’s first meal. They whip up whatever they fancy and sometimes are treated to the “hotel” food that clients order. “Meat twice a day,” many tell me.

“Even when I don’t have a lot of money, I need to eat well,” said Rani, a brothel-keeper, as she filled my plate with rice, curry, lentils, and deep-fried
pakoras
during one interview. It was past 4 p.m. and I didn’t need a second lunch, but Rani was determined I try her cooking. That hospitality is not uncommon. Most of my interviews at the brothels include at least a cup of milky, sweet chai. I once made the mistake of turning down the offer. A moment later a glass bottle of Sprite appeared, which I knew cost five times as much.

At the shelter, the women long for spice and flavor. They are like prisoners anxiously awaiting their release, which is to be granted after three weeks by law but often takes longer. Many languish for months before they are sent back to their families in the villages, a spectacle that brings shame or worse. If they can’t go home, they are placed in long-term rehabilitation centers. These, run by nonprofits, are a step up from the government facilities, but they are still forced detention for women who have grown accustomed to financial independence.

At one nonprofit home, I am discouraged from asking the women questions about their past because, I am told, this will require them to relive trauma, adding to their anguish. It’s a reasonable request, but a severe limitation for a reporter. I abide, though, and ask innocuous questions, like, “What makes you happy?”

This is how my interview begins with Leela, a young, reticent woman who moves as awkwardly as a newborn foal.

We sit down with the home’s overseer and Leela mutters something about sewing class before whispering, “Can I tell her about the bad things?”

With a wary acquiescence, the three of us troop into a private room in the back. Leela unravels into such sobs that her body shakes and water streams down her pocked cheeks.

“My parents beat me a lot even though I went to work in the village and did my best to earn. They didn’t feed me properly, they just abused me. I used to sleep in the jungle on the other side of the road from our house. People used to say, ‘Look at this girl. She doesn’t have parents. She’s no one’s daughter.’ My parents used to feed me like a dog, kick me like a dog. They never loved me. I took the money I’d saved and went to Bangalore, but I couldn’t find work there. I spent six months sleeping at the bus stand. I used to eat the food from the trash can because I had nothing else. I was hungry and thirsty all the time. A man and woman saw me crying there. I told them I wanted to go back to my village in Karnataka. They gave me some water to drink and I became unconscious. By the time we arrived in Bombay, I didn’t know where I was.”

I try to comfort Leela, but I can’t contain this Pandora’s box I’ve opened. The overseer remains stone-faced.

So many questions rush into my mind.

Does Leela have anyone to talk to? Should she be in a place that discourages her from speaking about the past? How will she ever overcome all that’s happened?

*****

I am shaking when I leave. This shelter is run by one of the better NGOs, its staff smart, sensitive. If the women here remain so broken, what reason is there for hope? As I ride the train home, I quietly cry, not for the first time.

I am exhausted from thinking about sex workers, talking about them, dreaming about them, and constantly worrying about how I can help solve an intractable problem. My family and friends are incredibly patient, listening to the stories I recount, my polemics about the consequences of a male-dominated society.

But not everyone finds the world of Kamathipura as worthy of attention as I do. Many, like my father’s lawyer colleagues, struggle to conceal their disdain for my decision, not only to write instead of going to law school, but to write about a population that could so easily be ignored.

A friend’s husband — who claims to have never set foot inside a brothel — tells me how naïve I am. “You don’t understand. These prostitutes are greedy. They like it. They like the money of Bombay.” It takes all the self-control I can summon to not slap him. But then a sad realization strikes me. Most people probably think the way he does. They don’t see these women as fighting tooth and nail against exclusion. They see willing participants who choose to exist in a land of vice because the going rate for debauchery is far better than decency.

At times, even I have doubted my own beliefs. For in some twisted way that’s more damning of society than anything else, they’re not entirely wrong.

Some days I wait around for hours, observing what feels like the same scene over and over. Women emerge groggily from cubicles around midday, dressed in faded nightgowns, to assemble around a small TV in the waiting room. Some cook, others sip tea, others start preening. The lazy afternoon gives way to another night just like the last.

On a sticky day in May, I am idling with Lata on the first floor of Playhouse, the sort of brothel one would visit if searching for a 14-year-old girl in extra-high heels. Lata is a Kamathipura veteran who works with Asha Darpan and wears her long, thinning black hair in an oily braid down her back. She pulls a bottle of Bisleri water out of a pleather handbag, revealing below a mustard-yellow sari the taut skin of her plump midriff, ridged with burn scars. She takes a long swig and offers the bottle to me, explaining she bought water today because she forgot to bring some from home. I’m surprised Lata can afford this, because bottled water is beyond the means of most poor people in India. Like them, Lata usually waits in line each morning to gather water from a communal tap and then boils a portion for drinking and cooking, she says. “It’s difficult, but not as difficult as it was in the village.”

Lata is from Bijapur, a district in the southern state of Karnataka. Before she came to Mumbai, she earned a couple of cents, a roti, and some rice from a priest for walking his cows and bullocks each day, a paltry sum even for rural India. She never went to school. “We were very, very poor,” she recalls, the hoop in her nose glinting in the sun.

Lata doesn’t remember how old she was when she arrived in the city, but she was already pregnant with her first child when a woman bought her from her parents and sold her to a pimp. Almost 30 years later, she still sees a handful of regular clients but doesn’t work long hours and lives in a northern suburb of Mumbai. What she remembers about the village is constant hunger.

“You keep asking why we came here, but how were we to fill our stomachs?” Lata chuckles, pointing at her now quite large belly. “In Bombay, no one goes hungry. It’s the only place where even if you have only ten rupees you can eat a
vada pav
and be full for the rest of the day. Nowhere else in the country is as cheap.”

Vada pav, a mashed-potato patty deep-fried and stuffed into a small square bun that’s liberally slathered with coriander chutney, is a quintessential Mumbai street food. Lata’s right. It fills you up for several hours. Beyond the hardship of Kamathipura, I realize, there is a brutality much worse: that of starvation.

Many sex workers explain to me that in their villages, all they eat most days is a single meal of rice and maybe a small clump of cooked vegetables, often carefully divided between families of perhaps eight or ten. On a good day, they have leftovers for a snack the next morning; on a bad day, they wait for the breadwinner to purchase more rice with his daily wages and bring it home. For many sex workers, Mumbai, with its ample array of cheap street snacks and roadside restaurants, is symbolic of the end of hunger. Moving to the city entails grueling and demeaning work, but it also holds the promise of adequate and spicy food, including the ultimate luxury: “non-veg.”

To be sure, many teenage girls are sold into the sex trade against their will. Human trafficking is one of India’s well-documented horrors. But there are also women who “choose” the sex trade. It’s not a free choice in the sense that they could choose instead to go to college or to find another job. All the women I meet are illiterate. Most believe sex work is the only way to support their families. They spend a significant portion of their earnings educating their children, whom they hope can thereby lead less cruel lives. To deem this so-called choice noble would be to glorify it. But there’s no denying that many of the women think they are making a sacrifice for the future.

*****

From my days as a volunteer, the question of what happens to the children of sex workers weighs heavily on my mind. The women beam with pride when they tell me that they finance their children’s education. “We do this work so our daughters will never have to,” I hear again and again.

But the daughters, even if they do go to school and receive extra help with homework, aren’t really given a fair chance. The stigma against their mothers attaches itself to them. Many tell me that at school they’re scorned because they are the children of “dirty” women. Even at Apne Aap, I remember a sense of resignation among the staff when it came to helping the girls with schoolwork. The quality of teaching at most Indian schools — public, but also some private ones — is very poor. Most students rely on extra help from tutors, but Apne Aap never had enough tutors, let alone enough good ones, to make a substantial difference in the girls’ education.

The only creative input the girls got came from volunteers, many from abroad. There was a regular stream of us, but we were all there for short bouts of time. Another major obstacle to doing well in school is their home environment. The girls who live in the brothels are exposed to their mothers’ lives as sex workers from childhood. Late nights and lewd men are a constant threat, especially as they become teenagers. To protect them from this world, many sex workers ship their children off to hostels or shelter homes.

These shelter homes, not unlike the ones for their mothers, are understaffed and poorly funded. They provide the children with food and a roof to sleep under, but not much else. At many, the children are disciplined with physical abuse and endure constant scorn. The best these homes do is keep them enrolled in school, offer basic assistance with homework, and perhaps give them another skill, like sewing or cooking. The more ambitious girls might learn to give pedicures or facials so they can later find jobs in salons.

The girls at these homes are led to think they are somehow inferior, “spoiled,” because of their mothers’ professions. Without encouragement, they start to believe there is no hope for kids like them.

Life isn’t easy for the boys, either. In some ways, sons of sex workers, who also confront daily violence and abuse in the red-light district, are even more neglected than the daughters. Shelter homes for boys do exist, but girls have long been the focus of nonprofits. In recent years, some attention has shifted to these boys. NGO workers fear they will grow up to be violent towards women, or be initiated into manning doors and pocketing cash at brothels.

Since the nonprofit I volunteered with only worked with girls, I encountered very few boys, and only when I visited the brothels. Seven-year-old Aman was my first friend in the red-light district. He called out “Didi” whenever he saw me walking down his street — in part to ask if I’d brought him sweets, but also because I was his staunchest advocate. Aman was always in trouble with his mother for ripping his school uniform or losing a button. It was almost a daily ritual for me to have chai with her while she fumed and mended his clothes. Aman, unfazed, would grin and strut around the brothel in his underwear. I wondered if his endearing mischief would transform into belligerence as he grew older. How would he perceive his mother and their home environment?

Many of the sex workers I interview tell me about the great lengths they go to conceal what they do from their children. Painstakingly crafted stories about working at hostels and beauty parlors, for example, are how sex workers think they protect their children from the truth. While they insist their children have no idea, the children I interview say that once they reached a certain age, they saw through the fabricated “working at a factory” stories.

When Saira, the daughter of a sex worker, first arrived in Mumbai, she used to watch her mother and the other women in the brothel get dressed for the night. They would change out of faded, floral-print nightdresses and into tighter clothes. A red T-shirt with rhinestones spelling out “Bebe.” A strappy turquoise tank top. Jeans with glitter.