Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels (5 page)

I haven’t spoken to Shweta before, but I can tell that the way she carries herself has transformed at Kranti. It isn’t just that she doesn’t speak in the stilted, uncertain English typically taught in public schools. There is self-assuredness in her tone and her posture, the way she gestures with her hands and makes eye contact.

“I never knew I loved books before I came to Kranti. I used to read the newspaper because I’d never had books before.” Now the Harry Potter series is Shweta’s favorite. And as Harry moved from the Dursleys’ closet under the stairs to Hogwarts, she sought passage to a magical world far away.

I’ve already read this part of the story in local news reports, about getting into a liberal arts college in America, but I want to hear Shweta tell it anyway. To get all her paperwork together, Shweta needed to take a gap year after she finished high school. She also traveled around India, speaking in public about her life and running workshops on sexual health and child abuse. She got help from Robin, foreign volunteers at Kranti, and a Bard College alum to complete her application.

Besides telling me how excited she was to find out she’d gotten in, she doesn’t want to dwell on the idea of going away. She is more concerned about what she’ll be able to do once she has her college degree. “I want to give a comfortable house to my mom, give something to my community, and then live my life and travel the world, get to know more about other people.”

Her relationship with her mother is complicated, though things improved when she moved away from home.

“It would have been better if you would have been born a rock,” her mother told her once several years ago.

“That hurt me a lot,” Shweta said. “Now we joke about it.”

It strikes me as unusual that an 18-year-old Indian girl, especially one who grew up in the red-light district, is open enough to share intimate details about her family with a stranger. And then I remember something Robin had said just a few minutes ago about therapy: All the girls see a therapist once a week.

I realize that the whiteboard with the grid on the wall behind Shweta is a schedule, individually tailored for each girl. Neatly packaged into the martial arts and painting lessons are the hour-long therapy sessions. Was it the emphasis on therapy that made Kranti so revolutionary, the stumbling block for other organizations also trying to help these girls?

Shweta tells me her therapist has helped her see the value of where she’s from and become more confident. “But it isn’t only therapy. It’s the environment where I live, where people always say, ‘You’re beautiful.’ I’ve started making my own thoughts about why someone’s ugly or beautiful. I don’t think there’s anything like ugly in the world. There’s diversity.”

This is no longer a typical interview. Instead, Shweta’s offering me advice about how to live my own life with greater empathy.

“We are learning to question our beliefs. Robin doesn’t say, ‘You’re wrong.’ There’s no, ‘You should do this or that.’ There are always options.”

*****

When I leave that evening after interviewing all the girls, hours later than I’d planned, I call Robin, almost in tears, to tell her how inspiring and strong her girls are. Laughing, she says, “Yes, but they can also be a handful of bratty teenagers.”

How politically incorrect, to call the daughters of sex workers bratty teenagers, even if somehow they had been just that. But perhaps that’s why Kranti works. For everyone else, these girls are objects of pity. Their misbehavior could never be spoken of, and in the same breath, their independence and aspirations are wiped away. For Robin, these girls are not a glitch in the sensibilities of Indian appropriateness. They are young women who face incredible hardship and want to make it in the world.

“Robin’s thinking is
hatke se
,” says Laxmi, one of the other girls at Kranti, using a Hindi phrase that loosely translates to “offbeat.” Laxmi, whose mother is a bar dancer, spent much of her childhood at shelter homes. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was ten. “Some people say Robin’s crazy. But I’ve never met anyone else who thinks about girls and women the way she does. Everyone else takes the boys’ side. They say boys can do anything — they can stay out late at night, drive a car, and girls can’t. Robin asks, ‘Why?’”

Who is this woman who runs such a shelter home? What happened to make her want to care for teenagers from the red-light district? That first time we talked on the train, I was so curious about Kranti that I hadn’t asked Robin about her own life. I’d noticed, but hadn’t questioned, her ambiguous, could-be-from-anywhere accent. There were more than hints of American inflection, but the frequent Hindi colloquialisms she dropped into conversation indicated she’d lived in India for at least a couple of years.

I Googled Robin a few times in those early months and found a handful of patchy details. She’s the daughter of Indians who immigrated to America. She had served in the U.S. military.

Robin sometimes let a little snippet about her past slip into our conversations, but I get the sense that she prefers not to talk about herself. I choose not to pry — not only to respect her privacy but also to avoid giving her an excuse to stop speaking to me. After I’ve known her for many months and feel confident she will be straight with me, I persuade her to chat about her past.

Robin’s father grew up in acute poverty, selling snacks by the railway tracks in central India. But he was “brilliant,” she says, and took a difficult exam to secure a place reserved for lower-caste applicants at a prestigious college. After he graduated, he found a job in America and moved there to start his family, free from the poverty and discrimination of India. But their new life in Seattle where he was a Boeing engineer wasn’t quite the American dream. Robin’s father abused his daughters and her mother, who suffered from schizophrenia and couldn’t care for Robin and her sister effectively. Not unlike the girls from Kamathipura, Robin grew up just wanting a way out. She enrolled in the military after high school because it won her a full scholarship to a university in Illinois.

After her first stint on active duty and before she went to Budapest for a gender-studies Master’s degree, Robin had some time off. She came to India to volunteer with sex workers through various anti-trafficking and rehabilitation NGOs. Witnessing how these organizations perpetuate victimhood, Robin decided she would start a shelter home that did things differently after she finished graduate school. But instead she got notice that she had to return to duty, this time at a base near St. Louis.

Robin had harbored dreams of becoming a fighter pilot but ultimately decided the U.S. Air Force was no place for a woman of color. Certainly not one who decided to come out at a time when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that prevented gays from serving openly in the military, was enforced. When Robin’s commander found out she was a lesbian, he told her he would turn a blind eye. But Robin had had enough. She became a vocal campaigner against the ban, pushing forward rallies in Washington, D.C., raising money from wealthy donors, and stirring up a media storm. She got kicked out in 2010, just before the policy changed.

Robin went to India to begin work on her next crusade.

“Starting Kranti was a type of healing for myself. At first, it was just something I desperately wanted to do. I never had any support as a kid, and I wanted to give these girls support. I first started therapy at 25,” she says. “I am finally getting to a place where I don’t hate men. I can’t push these girls along their path, but I can help them get there earlier. I want to help the girls get out of a place of being angry all the time.”

But the equilibrium Robin’s arrived at is precarious, and keeping Kranti afloat is a constant uphill battle. “There are disasters that make me question what I’ve been doing with myself for the last four years.”

Nearly a year after my first visit, I learn Robin is being evicted. Her landlord has discovered she is running a nonprofit out of a residential apartment and asks her to clear out.

I go to Kandivali to meet Robin’s neighbors. Many refuse to speak to me, and the few who let me in grow uneasy when I mention Kranti. As a reporter, however, I’ve grown accustomed to having doors slammed in my face.

“We are family people. We don’t want neighbors like this,” one person says. The Kranti girls “do not represent our Indian culture,” I hear more than once.

Downstairs, I find Robin lying on her back in the middle of the room, wearing black sweatpants and a faded T-shirt. Her hair is in a sloppy ponytail. She looks as if she just woke up. One of the home’s cats is also sprawled out on the floor.

We settle in the study, a room crammed with books, a desk, and an old computer. “We’ve called over a hundred landlords, and no one wants to rent to three single women and ten girls,” Robin says. “Everyone has a ‘not in my backyard’ attitude. They all say Kranti does great work, but they don’t want us to do it here.”

Robin always gets heated when she talks about Kranti — she is very protective of the girls — but today, there’s an indignation I haven’t heard before in her voice. The sudden imminence of having nowhere to go means there is a risk she could lose everything she has worked to build.

The neighbors, who’d been blissfully unaware of Kranti’s work for its first two years, started causing trouble after Shweta’s story became widely known. Middle-class Mumbai’s aspirations clashed with the idea of a girl from the red-light district going to America, something still out of reach for most Indians. I try to play the unbiased reporter, but it’s hard not to sympathize with Robin.

Many also say the girls dress in revealing clothes and talk to boys. Robin snorts when I ask her about this. Shorts are appropriate for the children of the aspirational class, but when girls from the red-light district dress the same way, they are upsetting the apple cart of socioeconomic expectations.

The most disheartening part is that the wealthy and well-connected people she knows are sympathetic but none offer tangible help, “even though they could just make a few calls and find me a place,” Robin says.

She’s on the phone with another potential landlord when I leave. Over the next few weeks, Robin and I have many phone and text conversations about her apartment hunt. The process is complicated by the fact that two of the girls are also applying for passports to go to summer camp in the U.S. and the U.K. One of the requirements is a permanent address, but because their days at their residence are numbered, the passports are in jeopardy. Robin makes trip after trip to the passport office, shunted from one official to another. There’s no precedent for girls from the red-light district applying for passports, and Indian bureaucracy isn’t known for making exceptions for those without clout.

Through it all, Robin manages to insulate the girls from the struggle. When I speak with the two girls, they bubble with excitement about visiting another country and summer camp. That any hurdle could come in the way is hardly on their minds.

Eviction day arrives in June, and Robin still hasn’t found a home. She’s forced to split the girls up among Kranti’s various staff members. She keeps looking, incessantly calling landlords.

What must it be like to never have a moment of rest, to move from one crisis to the next, all the while knowing ten girls are entirely dependent on you?

Robin does finally find a stand-alone bungalow that would be suitable.

The price tag is high, but it would mean they’d never again have to worry about complaining neighbors. And it’s a much larger space.

A few months after everyone has settled in, Robin steps onto the balcony one evening as I speak to her over the phone. She still can’t believe she’s survived another storm.

“There was a day I was in tears,” she says. “I was just so upset, and nothing was working out.”

“The kids were coming back from a trip, and when we all sat down to have dinner that evening, I just felt that all of it was worth it.”

No matter what, the Kranti family remains intact.

*****

Robin acknowledges that not all the girls emerge as charmingly confident as Shweta.

Saira has a love-hate relationship with Kranti. I met her on my first visit. Our conversation consisted of one-line answers to my earnest questions and lasted all of ten minutes. The whole time, she cast a suspicious gaze on my notebook and recorder with brooding eyes that always seemed on the precipice of violence.

I make a mental note to go back another day to talk more with her. I’m used to dealing with people who don’t want to speak to me, and sometimes I take a more pushy approach. With Saira, I’ll need to be gentle if I’m to get through.

The second time around, we sit alone in the study. Besides two cats, the house is empty. All the other girls are at school. Saira starts out the same as before. She squints slightly at every question. Her responses are bare as bones.

I can see her weighing the pros and cons of sharing intimate details of her childhood with a stranger. When it is apparent I’m not going to leave in a hurry, she begins to grow more comfortable, eventually backing up her story to when she was six years old.

It happened around four in the morning, when it was dark outside in her village in South India. The roosters hadn’t even started to crow. Saira still remembers the color of the sheets. Orange, her favorite color. She was wearing a red salwaar khameez, her other favorite color. Nearby, her older sister was fast asleep.

Saira woke up when her father entered her bed. His hands felt cold on her skin, his breath had that funny smell like when he shouted. At first, she thought he was going to beat her, as he sometimes did. Instead, he pushed the lower hem of her khameez up above her stomach and did something that hurt much, much worse.

Her memory of what happens after is blurred, a lot of pain and a lot of tears, both her own and her sister’s. Three days later, her mother returned from the city, where she’d moved for a high-paying job. Her parents fought with each other, screaming for hours. Her mother prevailed, and the next day Saira was on a train, leaving behind her father and sister.