All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  Geeta became HIV-positive quickly. Soon after, she developed tuberculosis. HIV-positive people like Geeta are five to six times more likely to develop tuberculosis, which is already one of the deadliest killers in India. According to the World Health Organization, one person dies from it here every ninety seconds. She never, thank goodness, became pregnant. When we entered the sparse room where she lived, she greeted us with a namaste and a lifeless smile, revealing dirty teeth. Her limbs were emaciated, and her skin sallow. She answered our questions in a monotone. She was grim, cynical, illiterate. She looked me dead in the eye and told me neither to fall in love nor to marry. When I told her I had and I am, she turned away from me to focus her attention on Sushmita, and she did not speak to me again. She was one of the few people I met in my travels that I was completely unable to reach in any way. The only thing I overheard Sushmita saying to Geeta was “We are all going to die someday, shouldn’t we live while we can?”

  Geeta just coughed, covering her mouth with a handful of her sari.

  Sadly, she died a few weeks after our meeting. Knowing her end was imminent, and that she could no longer be used for sex, the brothel bosses put Geeta out on the sidewalk—well, actually, in the gutter—to die. A PSI staff member who had been the only person to gain Geeta’s confidence found her there and held her as she expired. Then, she washed her remains, collected her corpse, and provided for her cremation.

  Any trepidation about working with Sushmita evaporated once I saw how wonderfully personable yet gentle she was with shy, vulnerable, traumatized people. It was a horrific time at the brothels, but the highlight of our day together was a ceremony with the members of Sanghamitra at a hall rented by the project. Thirty radiantly excited women of all ages and sizes turned out for us in their best saris. We were greeted with incense, drishti dots, and elaborate garlands. Sweets were fed to us. I loved watching Sush; she’s an enormously popular movie star accustomed to this adoration, and I studied how she reciprocated. She kissed heads, took the sweet out of her own mouth, and put it in the giver’s. She gave her garland back. That stopped me short. Oh no, all this time, was I supposed to give my garlands back? Dang! I’m pretty selfish when it comes to my flowers. I decided to believe someone would have told me by now if I was supposed to honor the giver by returning my flowers right away. And so, like a child with a favorite toy, I kept my garland!

  There were speeches, presentations, affirmations. But the best part was the dancing. A boy child began the festivities with the most extraordinary dance. He was gifted, and the room roared with encouragement and approval. He sweated profusely yet never dimmed in his exertions. I was prodded to join him, so—garland swinging—I twirled around behind him. Eventually everyone joined in, Sushmita dazzling with her graceful Bollywood moves, all of us waving our arms in the air in joyous communion, the ecstasy of sisterhood.

  “This is big,” Kate explained as we drove north toward the giant Bollywood soundstage where Shahrukh Khan was filming a movie—something like his fiftieth starring role.

  Kate had met him at a cocktail party the night before. He had arrived at an hour commensurate with his status, meaning one a.m.—which was long after I had left. I have rarely been much of a partier, and I’m constitutionally unable to hang with the late-nighters. I know I miss out on so much fun, particularly when I’m making movies. Norma Jean and Marilyn, which filmed in Hollywood, was one of the only movies during which I could partake in the afterhours moveable feast, partly because the feast so often landed at my hotel, the Chateau Marmont. I have amazing memories of being up so late with Mira Sorvino and Sean Penn, both of whom were nominated for Oscars that year, that we were still drinking champagne and swapping crazy actor stories when the daily trade magazines were delivered, with both of them featured on the covers. But last night I had missed my chance to meet Shahrukh because I needed to poke around my hotel room in my nightgown and write in my journal. The irrepressible Kate, though, had been willing to take one for the team and wait for his arrival. He had wanted to meet me, and when he asked her where I had gone, her patented charm had yielded an invitation to visit him on set to discuss his joining the YouthAIDS campaign. She explained what an opportunity this was, quite possibly the biggest box office draw in the world, with hundreds of millions of fans. “He’s the Brad and Angelina, the George and Julia, the Bruce and Arnold, all combined,” said Kate.

  Expectations are usually disastrous, and I assumed that a film set, surely, would be … well, a film set. I didn’t think I was going to 20th Century Fox or Warner Brothers, but it’s such a powerful, influential industry in movie-crazy India, I figured it would be at least a little upscale. Wrong. We turned off the crowded, honking highway onto a dusty secondary road that passed stagnating rivers choked with debris and rubbish. Litter lined the verges. A few tattered picnic tables and snack stands were open to the public. I saw a man, asleep in his rickshaw, looking for all the world as if someone had broken his neck. Ubiquitous stray animals scrounged by the wayside, their ribs as prominent as the flying buttresses of Notre Dame Cathedral.

  The studio itself was a plain, large, unadorned building with a tin roof. I wondered immediately what they did for sound during the rainy season. Before we got out of the car, Kate and I invited God into the experience. I realized I was “Bono-ing” this movie star, reaching out to a powerful entertainer to encourage him to use his substantial fame for good, reminding him he could effect great change through the ever-growing pop culture machine.

  On the darkened stage were about twenty dancers dressed in a 1970s disco interpretation of traditional Indian classical dance costumes, with dazzling hair and body jewelry. The backdrop was painted an atmospheric gray-blue. Trees, painted silver with jingly bits dangling off branches, added to the Deco-Hollywood-fantasy-musical-gone-Bollywood camp. It was pure moviemaking magic: In person, it was all smoke and mirrors.

  We were served tea and our host arrived, wearing an open shirt over his bare-chested pantaloon costume. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then I immediately said, “Please tell me what you’d like to know about what I do.” Shahrukh looked at me evenly and gave a most interesting, blunt reply. He said he didn’t know why I did it, and he didn’t need to know. He believed, based on my commitment, that the work is credible and the situation is urgent. He was happy simply to do whatever I asked him to do, because I was the one asking him. End of conversation. In sixty seconds, we had a commitment and a plan: We would draft public service announcements for him to shoot while on set. He would designate PSI as a charity on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the wildly popular show that he hosted (and that the world later came to know Indians love via the film Slumdog Millionaire). He was willing to talk about “sensitive” stuff, like married men who paid for sex. He offered the premiere of this film as a fund-raiser. He agreed to be the “face” of our new Indian financed hedge fund to benefit grassroots programs.

  Kate and I were giddy. This was a huge coup in so many ways: This immense cultural figure would be modeling feminist male behavior for hundreds of millions of Indians, directly discussing medically accurate sex education in public, reducing the stigma and myth around HIV, and raising money/awareness for our programs. It was a hallelujah chorus slam dunk.

  As we said our goodbyes, members of the costume department brought us gifts, rows of glass bracelets and dangly earrings worn by the film’s stars, wrapped in shiny paper. Kate and I oohed and ahhed. I asked them lots of questions. They said they worked nineteen hours a day, slept on set, and had no union. I was shocked. The unfairness and inequity and brutal poverty of India were really beginning to wear me down. Despite the victories of the afternoon, I was finding myself increasingly pissed off at this country. And at my next activity, I was about to become a whole lot angrier.

  Chapter 19

  A HOLY MESS

  Neelam and Komal, the orphans who asked me to adopt them.

  Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment and you will amass the wealth of spiritual
awareness. The one who is motivated only by desire for the fruits of their action, and anxious about the results, is miserable indeed.

  —Bhagavad Gita, verse 49

  atasha sat in a large chair in the production office, looking very small, frail, gorgeous, and groomed. Her hair was long and lovely in a Veronica Lake–type wave. Her English was fairly good, and she was soft spoken yet clear. The camera was set up to protect her identity, and in postproduction her voice would be modified, too. One of the documentary film’s producers, posing as a sex client, had put feelers out to find a “high-class call girl” I could interview to show how HIV/AIDS is spread to the upper reaches of Indian society by prostituted women who service wealthy clients. That was the story we were looking for; what we found out still gives me nightmares.

  When Natasha arrived at the address her “escort service” was given and discovered what we were really after, she told us she was a full-fledged sex slave and her life would be at risk if her owner discovered what she was doing. But she wanted to tell her story, if only to help others in her predicament. And we had to pay her fee—12,000 rupees, about $270 U.S.—so that nothing looked odd and she’d have the right sum of money to give her pimp.

  When we settled in, she told me she was about twenty-one or twenty-two years old (many Indians can only approximate their age) and had traveled to Mumbai when she was about eighteen to visit some relatives. Her luggage was lost and there had been a lot of confusion about her arrival. She managed to end up at a girlfriend’s apartment to spend the night while she sorted things out. Her friend was going out for the evening and invited her; she was happy to tag along. The friend took Natasha to a hotel. They went up to a guest room, where a man was waiting. The friend smiled and left the room. To her bewilderment, Natasha realized she had been left there to have sex with the man. Fearing physical violence and feeling trapped with no way out, she did. When the man let her go, she went downstairs. Her friend was waiting. She slapped her face. The friend said, “Welcome to the garbage bin.”

  In a disastrous piece of timing, the relatives she had been looking for had tracked her down through her friend just as she was leaving the hotel. They put together why she was at such a nice hotel and immediately disowned her as a whore. She had nowhere to go but back to her friend’s apartment, where her fate, trapped in sex, was sealed. Simultaneously, her relatives were spreading this information back home. She was swiftly, irrevocably ostracized by her family there—even though they took the money she sent them.

  Natasha told me she was in a hell she could not escape. Her story is a complex puzzle, a combination of truly being trapped and the commensurately powerful perception of being trapped. That makes it hard to describe; it also makes my dismay deeper. Here are some questions I asked and her answers:

  Why didn’t you then, why don’t you now, just go to the police and explain what happened? Why don’t you tell them about your life now?

  “They would be the first to rape me,” she said with a sad smile. “Then they would simply hand me back over, and there would be more trouble when I was returned.”

  Why don’t you secretly, however long it takes, stash away a little bit of money and just sneak away, go somewhere else in India, start over? (Yes, I asked a lot of embarrassingly dumb questions from a Western perspective … but I think we all would have.)

  “Wherever I go, I will always be this.” She sighed. “I will see a former client who will reveal my past, and I will never be accepted anywhere as anything but this.”

  This was so troubling. In a country of nearly 1.2 billion, she had sufficiently internalized her victimization and her boss’s fear tactics to believe that wherever she might go on the subcontinent, a former client would identify her and she’d be put back into forced sex. And it might be worse than her current situation. Even though her client’s large fees are immediately taken away from her, she holds back a little to send to her home village to support eleven members of her extended family, the same remorseless family that shunned her. Because they “depended” on her, she said she had to continue earning such high fees. She was trapped by her own mind and didn’t even know it.

  Do your clients use condoms?

  “Yes, the boss makes sure they understand they must. I am tested for HIV every alternate month.”

  Ah, yes, it’s not called organized crime for nothing. A healthy prostitute is a better earner.

  Has anyone among you tested positive?

  “Yes.”

  What happened? Did she receive treatment?

  “I don’t know. She disappeared.”

  Where do you think you will end up? Is it your fear that when you begin earning less you’ll be dumped at a brothel in Kamathipura?

  “I can’t think about that,” she said, her face flashing blind panic. The question so terrified her, I instantly regretted asking it.

  When I asked her questions about her daily life, her answers were even more chilling. Natasha said she lived in a three-bedroom apartment with ten others, all of whom shared her predicament. She is on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She never knows when the call will come; she lives knowing at any second she will be sent to have sex with a strange man, and she must do whatever, however grotesque, painful, and degrading, he wants. Her owner is someone she has never seen. In a perverse twist on Charlie’s Angels, she hears his voice on the phone as he bosses and threatens her. The pimp is the day-to-day manager of her life, checking on her, spying, supervising, and collecting money. Her clients include Indians and foreigners. I asked her if she had been to the Taj, my hotel, and she smiled. “Oh yes, many, many times.” I felt sick.

  Sensing the destroyed condition of her soul, I flailed for something, anything, positive to talk about. “Your English is so impressive, Natasha. You speak wonderfully. I bet you read very well.” She said indeed, she did read some. When I asked what she might envision herself doing as a career, she told me she had long ago dreamed of becoming an Ayurvedic doctor, but insisted that this was now impossible. She did, however, try to surreptitiously teach the others, the little ones, at the apartment to read so that maybe someday they could do something different.

  “The little ones?” I asked, a new sickness rising in me.

  “I am the oldest,” she said. “The youngest is about fourteen.”

  What? How long has she been there?

  “She was eleven when I arrived three years ago. The others are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, around there.”

  What does one say to that? How does one react? My time with Natasha was coming to a close. She couldn’t be late without arousing suspicion. The next part for me was incredibly emotional. To know she was walking out of that room and back into her life was a pain the likes of which I have felt only a few times in my life, pain like walking away from forty orphans in a well-meaning but underfunded crèche in a South African slum. It was just so wrong, so very, very wrong. I pulled her close to me and held her and tried to burn myself into her eyes.

  I said to her, “Will you believe there is hope for you?”

  “No.”

  “Natasha, can you believe, then, that I believe? When you are completely hopeless and despairing, will you remember me, can you believe that I believe?”

  She broke down. “Yes. I will try, I will try. I will try to believe that you believe.”

  The time for which we had paid was up. She was crying as she hurried out the door. As a team we raged, sobbed, planned, plotted, and despaired. With Papa Jack guiding us with his New York police and FBI experience, we tried frantically to sort out ways to reach Natasha again, to rescue the children. Every idea was a bust, as each one, given the vulpinic efficiency of organized crime, led to potential danger for Natasha. Their network is so vast, so thorough, so complete—and girls and women are so disposable. It is unlikely we will ever find her. She and the other slaves of her type are a mysterious, inaccessible component of prostituted commercial sex. But we will never forget her. And every day, every minu
te, every breath, I bless her. I still believe, Natasha, I still believe.

  The evening with Natasha made my meeting the next day harder. We passed again through rows and rows and rows of houses, many with modest religious icons or now dead flowers over the crumbling portals, crammed full of people going about their daily lives. In one of these houses Neelam, fourteen, and her sister, Komal, twelve, were waiting for me in matching yellow saris. They were AIDS orphans who lived with an aunt in two low-ceilinged, windowless rooms. Both girls were very small and thin, with long dark hair. Komal’s was lustrous and smooth, Neelam’s was rough, coarse, dry. I wondered if it was from malnutrition. The children each took a hand, brought me in, sat me down. They were eager yet reserved. Indian women sit alongside one another, knees touching, arms draped across each other’s legs. I had picked up on this and gratefully snuggled into a comfortable position with these precious girls. They would never sit in my lap, but they did sidle up to lean on me and let me love on them.

  Their story was all too familiar. Their daddy became HIV-positive having sex outside the marriage. He died soon after being tested. Their mama also tested positive and died soon after. The girls, plus their then five-year-old brother, were suddenly orphans. An aunt who lived with them was also HIV-positive and suffered from tuberculosis. She slept alone in the back room, as she was highly contagious. They had, thank God, a grandmother, who did much of the cooking. When I asked Komal how she prayed and what she prayed for, she replied she prayed her auntie didn’t die, too.