Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels
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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.
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.
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.”