Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  Just before independence, a musical renaissance for women began. Only in the past sixty years has it been possible for a woman who did not belong to a family of hereditary musicians to take up music as her life’s work. Despite the renaissance, Anuradha Pal is an anomaly, because the tabla, a two-piece drum and one of the most popular percussion instruments in India, is still very much a guy thing.

  Pal lives in a swank high-rise with her parents and their small white stringy-haired dog, all of whom have welcomed us into their home with a kindness and savvy that indicates they are well versed in receiving the press.

  Anuradha has a wide face, long brown hair with curly bangs, and a zeal for both her music and her family, to whom she attributes her opportunities and considerable confidence. While John sets up, and Julie and I knock back chai, Anuradha changes her outfit four times (old-school-diva behavior) and simultaneously educates us on the tabla.

  “The right, treble side of the two-piece drum is usually referred to as the tabla,” she says, “and the left, which makes a bassy sound, is called the baya. The tabla is played with every part of the ten fingers—the tips, the middle, and the base of the fingers where they connect with the palm.” When Anuradha picks up the instrument and begins to play, my snooty reaction to her multiple wardrobe changes evaporates into the searing heat of her pure, unfathomable talent. Now I understand why The Hindu magazine touted her as having “the most pliable fingers in the world” and how she dazzles crowds with her virtuosity. Anuradha delivers ten minutes of genius in motion. We will end up threading her music throughout the program.

  We sit down to talk about the historical and cultural implications of her music-making. In a global music landscape of remixes and sampling, Anuradha Pal creates new music within very old frameworks.

  “What does it means to be creating within a culture that is five thousand years old?” I ask, thinking about how Kiran Bedi said she draws on time past for her creative solutions.

  “I think it’s a great legacy to live up to. Absolutely, you have to be very individualistic, and as a musician you’re not performing set compositions. I’m talking about the pattern of improvisation. You’re creating new, but it’s coming from something of the past. You have to be very well rooted into what your tradition is, but be able to look ahead, have a broad vision and move from today into tomorrow.

  “You’re not doing things that just your guru has taught you. You have to go ahead. You have to give it your own individuality,” she says, pushing back the red sash on an otherwise bright orange sari.

  When one’s body of knowledge about something is considerable (five thousand years considerable), the brain is then poised to ignite—to leap to a higher plane of creativity. (Knowledge + magic intuitive potion = inspired creation.) I can’t relate musically, but I understand this phenomenon from fishing. Anglers can approach a river, full of generations of fish facts and strategy, as writer Howell Raines noted, but in the end it is a mysterious intuitive message that tells us exactly where the fish are. Anuradha’s description of inspiration sounds like the same thing.

  “Tell me about your gurus. The concept of guru is—I think, um, it means something different to me than it does here,” I say.

  “What does it mean to you?” she asks.

  “Well, guru in my mind is someone to whom you have sort of a blind devotion,” I say, treading lightly, thinking Jim Jones! Jim Jones! “And my sense of what it means here is, um, more of a teacher,” I say, with tentative diplomacy.

  “Well, actually, it is a blind devotion. It is a teacher—but more than a teacher. You know a teacher is somebody who can teach you anything, you can go learn science, physics, math, whatever from a teacher. In the case of the guru, what our Indian tradition tells us to do is a surrender. It’s love, worship, and devotion towards a particular guru, his music, his style, his approach to music and you’re following that with a degree of not only devotion, but a certain surrender. Which I think is alien to the Western rational mind,” she says.

  My Western rational mind does flinch when I hear the word guru. The moniker conjures up fat cats in white Mercedeses cruising along wide Texas roads. But what Anuradha seems to be describing is a very intense mentoring relationship. So intense that the guru’s power, for his or her part, must be responsibly wielded.

  “But how do you become an individual? How do you express your individual creativity within that context? Isn’t there a conflict?” I ask, wondering, Must we surrender to evolve?

  “Oh there’s a huge [conflict], but that’s a very good question, because that’s exactly what I was saying—that you have to have this improvisatory attitude while sticking to the traditional setup. And that is where the challenge is. We are interpreting according to the moment, so that’s why you would hear the same artist perform it differently depending on what that audience gives him,” she says.

  I think of the Penan’s mal cun uk, “following our feelings,” which allows them to navigate the Bornean jungle with only pure intuition to guide them.

  “Basically the tabla is within me. I mean, I think rhythm has gotten inside,” she says, touching her sternum, “and there is a need to express it. So if somebody were to take that away, oooh, I’ll be dead. Playing tabla for me is a need; it’s something that’s necessary to my survival. It’s a spiritual experience, because when I practice, when I sit onstage, that’s when I’m feeling at peace with myself. It’s what delights my soul, like nothing else,” she says.

  Crap. I thought we would have a simple five-minute virtuosa bio (shoot, write, edit, easy) but once again life, death, and the universe have been invoked and “the story” is anything but straight ahead. India seems to be a place where spiritual sustenance, through anchors, drumming, service, or other practices, is integral.

  I look at Anurhada’s bindi and suspect, not for the first time, that the ubiquitous red dot ties into India’s spiritual story. By now Anuradha and I have a rapport going, so I charge ahead with the gusto of a rhino and the protective shield of a cultural ignoramus.

  “What does—that—mean?” I say, pointing to the red dot on her forehead.

  Turns out that the bindi is decoration for some, like lipstick, but at its purest, a bindi symbolizes the powers associated with the third eye. For the aware woman, the bindi is the gathering place for her whole person and a reminder of her spiritual dimension.

  “Imagine wearing evidence of your spiritual agency—your spiritual self—smacked on your forehead,” Julie says, as we leave down the stairs.

  “I can’t. Americans are too individualistic—or maybe narcissistic—to publicly admit that we’re giving it up to something larger than ourselves,” I say, thinking this is at least true for my urban life-after-God, post-everything, we’ll-be-damned-if-we’re-gonna-be-duped-by-some-higher-power-hoo-ha generation. Then again, people in rural Utah or Texas (not to mention Venice Beach yoga classes) might disagree.

  Mumbai undergoes a transformation at seven P.M. The streets, which mellowed in blazing afternoon sun, now hatch with new movement and are awash in a golden light, a scene softened by the filter of polluted air. Stores that have been shuttered in slumber open. We steal glances into cracked doors for transitory peeks into life’s backroom details.

  Kurla train station is a hive of activity, a unique bedlam. There are dozens of tracks in the vaulted main room with trains pulling in, pulling out, bodies leaping on, leaping off. Legless beggars rolling like cylinders to the rhythm of the chai vendors’ sales chants. Heads piled high with suitcases or bundles of food or blankets or jungle-gyms of lashed-together pots and pans. Chaos with a deliberate step.

  If I keep looking long enough, I feel certain that a pattern will emerge.

  We are taking a train to Kamathipura, Mumbai’s infamous and historic red-light district. Kamathipura is one of the biggest and oldest red-light districts in Asia. The British established a brothel district here in the nineteenth century for soldiers in the service of the British Empire. British
authorities issued licenses to brothel owners on the condition that they keep “their girls disease-free.” Almost sixty years after the end of the British Raj, the area is still a haven for the sex trade, and it was the setting of the 1988 Mira Nair feature film Salaam Bombay!

  Our taxi creeps down streets alive with man, beast, rickshaws, and cars through intermittent glittering lights and shadowy movement. Women linger in doorways, some sitting, some standing, their silhouettes cocked against the doorjamb in the international pose that says “Come hither.” A girl of about thirteen lounges in a long mint dress next to her more matronly colleagues—an anonymous group of solid pinks and reds and blues. The image of girlish pink headbands collides with glittery jutted hips on the same person. Here, sex acts are performed for as little as fifty cents (U.S.). Kamathipura isn’t merely a promenade, it’s a slum where thousands of women in prostitution live with their children. On Raksha Bandan, a Hindu holiday on which sisters tie bracelets to their brothers’ wrists in order to symbolize their brothers’ duty to protect them, prostitutes give bracelets to their local politicians.

  We are going to meet self-proclaimed muckraker Ruchira Gupta at her office in the heart of the red-light district, a million miles away from the tinsel of Bollywood. Ruchira’s work on the award-winning film The Selling of Innocents, an exposé of the flesh trade, is what inspired us to track her down. A print journalist by training, Ruchira made the film after she visited Himalayan villages and noticed they were emptied of women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. Many of these women, she found, had been sold by their families into the sex trade. More than a million girls and women are trafficked worldwide each year.

  Julie, Cheryl, and I unload at what looks like an old abandoned building, once sturdily built with cubes of strong stone but now fallen beyond disrepair. We open a metal gate, collared by a chain with an unlatched padlock, and make our way up three floors toward the only lit room in the building. Little laughs trip down the stairwell to meet us. We arrive at the fluorescent-lit room and Ruchira ushers us in with a Western shaking of hands, and complete ease. A woman introduced as Surekha, rail-thin and in a long teal dress, sits with her six-year-old daughter, Shanti. “Namaste,” she says, welcoming us with a nod, hands touching in prayer in front of her heart. “Namaste,” we respond in kind, with a bow.

  The thick tension of the night melts away as the six of us fill this room of two desks, two chairs, and a single bare bulb hanging off a ceiling fan that whines and clicks with every revolution. Ruchira pours tea and rolls up the sleeves on her yellow linen shirt in a futile attempt to appease the sticky Mumbai night. She tells me how she came to cross the line from journalist to activist.

  “As a journalist, I’ve covered war, famine, riots, and I’ve always moved on to the next story. But when I began to work on this documentary on sex trafficking, I just couldn’t move on. I had never seen this kind of exploitation—this level of human degradation. I was so outraged about what was happening inside the brothels. I felt that nobody deserved to go through this,” she says with a sweeping arm that indicates her comments take into account not just this neighborhood, but an entire state of existence. We are at Apne Aap (which translates to “Self-Help” in Hindi), a resource center that Ruchira started after making the film.

  “What happens when the women arrive at the brothels?” I ask.

  “When they arrive they are locked up in small rooms. They are raped repeatedly until their spirits are completely broken. And then they are forced to service about twenty clients a day,” says Ruchira.

  Surekha speaks almost no English and has been quietly talking to her daughter in Hindi throughout our conversation. Ruchira tells us that Surekha grew up in a village in a Mumbai suburb and came to the city with an older boy who professed his love to her. When they arrived, he sold her into prostitution. She was fifteen.

  “Mera ghar dekhna chahate hai?” (“Would you like to come see my house?”) Surekha asks.

  “Yes,” I respond. Julie stays behind to make arrangements for tomorrow’s shoot and, with Ruchira as our translator, Cheryl and I join Surekha and Shanti on their walk home to the brothel.

  We step out onto the hot, unlit street, and a chilling number of eyes fix on our small entourage. Two other prostitutes fall in line with us; clearly they are protecting me and Cheryl. We are with Ruchira, and that is all they need to know. Surekha admonishes us on two points: Stick close, and do not film the clients.

  We wend our way down a series of dark, rotty-smelling, dirty alleys, past several fires burning in barrels, and finally duck into a door. The two other prostitutes peel off and we climb a set of narrow wooden stairs. A fire sputters in a tin drum at the top of the stairway. A woman with gaunt Nepalese features is brushing her long, dark, straight hair. Children, and a few men, are moving from door to door. The place has an air of getting ready to open for business. A middle-aged woman (the madam, Ruchira tells me) barks at Surekha and I do not have to speak Hindi to know that she does not like our camera pointing at her women. Cheryl lowers her camera and, as is her style, begins to shoot from the hip.

  The women in this brothel are the last link in an institutionalized food chain. A pipeline from villages to cities is supplied by traffickers, boyfriends who turn into pimps, and impoverished parents who sell off their daughters to support the rest of the family. Part of Ruchira’s work is to try to change the mind-set that allows little girls to become the first resource in the face of desperate poverty. The most chilling scene for me in Ruchira’s Selling of Innocents is the one in which a father is negotiating the sale of his young daughter, who is sitting right there by his side—an excited, clueless, nine-year-old girl.

  “What happens is that normally in a village, a couple has a small child, and if she’s a daughter, and the couple is in desperate need of money, they might mortgage the child to the local agent—everybody knows who the trafficker is in the village—and they might say, ‘Give three thousand rupees now, and when she’s seven or eight or nine, we’ll give the girl to you.’ The girl comes here, to the brothel district, and she’s sold off to the madam by the trafficker. The madam may pay between five and six thousand rupees, which is like fifty to sixty dollars, for the girl, and she would try to keep the girl to herself for five years, during which period, the girl would get nothing. She’d be locked up in a small room, made to service a couple dozen clients a day.”

  “The little girls?” I ask, disgusted.

  “The little girls, sometimes they are even premenstruating girls, and the madams force them to have sex with men, they say use ice and they say if you’re bleeding, then the ice will stop the bleeding, and they just force them, and the girls have no way of trying to get out of the situation. At other times, the madams encourage the girls to become dependent on drugs and alcohol because then they cannot run way.”

  Surekha ushers us through a dark rabbit warren of tiny wood-framed rooms, almost like container boxes. She motions to one of them.

  “My house,” she says, in English, and with pride.

  “Bedroom, kitchen,” she says, pointing to two bunk beds and a hotplate, in one corner of a long corridor of many beds. “A-C,” she adds, pointing to a hole torn in the ceiling which I suppose provides a modicum of ventilation. It takes me a few seconds to understand that she’s saying “air-conditioning.” The space is not more than twenty cubic feet. Her son is asleep on the top bunk. A young woman with a shy smile in a floral-patterned sari offers us Coca-Kolas (Coke knockoffs). She puts a straw in each of them, as if knowing we will be concerned about hygiene.

  “Holy shit,” whispers Cheryl from behind her camera, “this is unbelievable.”

  “I know. It’s . . . it’s . . .” I stammer. “Are these apartments, or . . . ?” I finally ask Ruchira.

  “Beds, everyone sleeps at different times, in shifts, and if there is a customer, then no one gets to sleep at all,” says Ruchira.

  “So this is part of the brothel?” I confirm.

/>   “Yes,” says Ruchira.

  I look at Surekha’s hovel again, which she is clearly proud of, as many of the women here have no space of their own at all. As if reading my thoughts, Ruchira says, “It’s like a hole in the wall, as you can see, there’s no window, there’s no ventilation, there is no light, and yet this is what they live in. This is all that they have for eight hours, then they have to give it up to the next person. They are servicing their clients in the bed and the children are playing on the floor at the same time. They cook, they clean, they eat, they service their clients, they look after their children all in that same space of four feet by four feet.”

  “The police try to extort money from them. These girls also have to offer free sex to the police. Sometimes the policemen say, ‘We don’t want sex with you, we want you to get us a young girl.’ So they have to give one of their daughters,” says Ruchira.

  The conditions in this brothel are inhuman, but the atmosphere is vibrant, which must be what prevents me from sliding into an inert depression. I try to feel beyond the choking parameters of the abysmal setting and the exploitative, usually fatal, flesh trade; I note the rapport among the women, the laughing, the way they care for one another’s children.

  I feel the respect the women of the brothel have for Ruchira—someone who has created, in concert with them, a resource and hope beyond these walls, and who does so without judgment or condescension.

  “So the center is an outgrowth of your film?” I ask when we meet again at Apne Aap the following morning.

  “It is. Because some of the women that I worked with while making the film pushed me into starting it. They said, ‘You will come, make the film, and go away. How will our lives change?’ I told them, ‘Your lives will only change if you want to, I can’t do anything.’ So they said, ‘But we can’t do it right, we don’t know anybody.’ So I said, ‘Well, I can be a facilitator, but you have to organize.’ And through that process, we set up this organization in 1998 informally, and in 2002 as a formal legal entity. People come here, make promises, and go away, so there’s a lot of faith that I have to live up to,” says Ruchira.