by Anosh Irani
She walked past the numbered brothels: Welcome 52, 63, 420. The numbers had made sense in a government survey a long time ago, but now seemed completely random. She turned the corner, past Café Andaaz and the police booth, and entered a side alley toward the lair of Padma, one of the most powerful madams in the area. At one point, Padma had more cash flowing through her brothel than sewage through a gutter drain, but it was the power that came with the cash that was the greatest kutti of them all—the bitch could leave without warning and, when it did, deposit inside of you a stadium of emptiness.
Things had changed, reflected Madhu, since she had started living in this area years ago. The place had become more professional. Pimps now had business cards to provide an air of decency and professionalism to the rundown brothels. Nirmal, one of the pimps for Padma’s brothel, was cajoling a couple of tourists—one could always spot the tourists; they smelled different, afraid but inquisitive—to try out the goods. He handed them his card, crumpled at the edges and damp from his own sweat, which announced with great pride that the brothel had A/C. The card had a sketch of a sandy beach on it, which had made Madhu laugh when she’d first seen it. There was even a phone number, for return buyers.
“Do you want to in-joy?” Nirmal asked. “Should I make your prog-raam?”
Nirmal was young, not more than twenty-five, with straight hair that fell just below his eyebrows, and unlike some of the other pimps in the area, who were tough and dirty and stank, Nirmal kept himself fresh and non-threatening so that tourists weren’t intimidated and fell for his bait. Pimps with stubble and heavy, cold hands were allocated to the locals.
“You don’t have to sex them,” Nirmal said in English to the tourists. “If you want oral only, that also I give.” Then he corrected himself quickly: “Not me, not me, I don’t give oral.”
The tourists smiled, charmed by his talk.
“Nepali, South Indian, all types I have. Christian also. Just come see,” he said. “If you want, we show oreejnal report.”
The report business was a sham. There was a new report each month, from some quack with a medical degree who had a deal with all the brothel owners in the area. Sick or not, the prostitutes got a clean bill of health, as spotless as the marble floor of a five-star hotel. Real tests were a waste of time, money, and blood. Even if the report was genuine in the morning, by the end of the day, five truck drivers had entered the woman. The “pojeetives,” as they were called, were in the thousands. They looked fine until they became sick and weak and fell like flies, only to be swept off the next morning with the lazy swish of a broom.
Madhu looked up at the three-storey building that was Padma’s brothel.
Built during British rule, the structure was over a century old, and at one point had housed just as many women. Now the number was a mere fraction of the twenty thousand women who worked the district, but when the sex was on, the building rumbled. The dirty glass windows were a patchwork of purple and green, and some of the panes were broken, exposing the rusted iron grilles, while others were shuttered with wooden boards. Wires looped precariously from one window to the next, like garlands, then ran in a vertical mesh all the way down to the street level, ready to electrify those who touched them. But it wasn’t the wires that made the place sizzle. It was the burning of skin, and Madhu could feel the moans of the customers just by standing underneath this tower of flesh.
A couple of fat, defeated women stood on the balcony, staring blankly into the space below, inhaling petrol fumes, their ears no longer sensitive to the car horns, the buzzing of scooters and motorcycles, or the sudden jamming of brakes, noise they had perhaps accepted years ago, the sound of their own lives coming to an abrupt halt. Their bodies, once butter, were now layered; these were women whose girth would certainly be noticed on any street corner outside the district, but inside this frenzied menagerie they were insects, insignificant yet capable of transmitting disease. Way above these women, on the rooftop, three men lay sprawled like panthers on a tree branch, scanning the labyrinth of streets below. These were the “watchers,” the eyes of the brothel, who noticed the movement of the flora and fauna beneath. Even a slight deviation from any of their prostitutes, a single attempt to move beyond their allocated boundaries, and they were beaten with wooden sticks the way mattresses are thrashed until the dust comes out, then slowly settles back again.
There were scores of brothels such as this one, some smaller, some larger, and even though the district spread out over fourteen lanes, the majority of the brothels conglomerated between Lanes Fourteen to Ten, stuck together in desperation, conspiring to form one of Asia’s largest red-light areas. When Madhu had been in school, when she’d worn a boy’s uniform, she had learned about a triangle somewhere far away, and how people got sucked through it into another world. The red-light district was exactly like that. Most of the prostitutes had been tricked into landing here, some came on purpose, but everyone got lost in its black hole of existence. It slowly stripped away the past until you were reduced to a nameless, past-less creature unable to find a way out.
The world saw the prostitutes standing on display behind huge windows with bars and called these rooms “The Cages,” but Madhu knew there was only one cage. It started at Alexandra Cinema and went all the way down to Underwear Tree. This was a cage without bars, and it had a name, and if Madhu were to come back to earth in another life, she would do so as a Mumbai tourist guide, and her mother-father would know this from the start because the minute she slid down the clouds and into her mother’s womb and out again, she would begin speaking, and her first words would point to this open-air cage, to this wound in the city, and as more and more nurses and doctors and ward boys gathered around, she would announce with the pomp and splendour of a lion tamer, “Welcome to the Cage. Welcome to Kamathipura.”
—
As Madhu climbed the stairs to Padma’s brothel, her slipper got stuck in a nail. Perhaps it was a sign for her to stop and turn back. But no, that was not possible. It was thanks to Padma that gurumai was able to own her current abode. Here, in the district, favours stretched on for decades and had more value than currency. Padma had known that by helping gurumai, she would have access to all her hijras as well, and they would have no choice but to do her bidding, which was why Madhu was climbing her stairs now.
It was a long, steep walk to the first floor, thirty stairs in all, through passages sprayed with paan and urine, until Madhu reached the reception area. The first floor was where the more expensive, cleaner women were housed. A bearded guard sat on a stool, but did not flinch when he saw Madhu. A hijra was hardly a matter of concern or importance. The guard was more interested in making sure that the tourists Nirmal had brought up were feeling at home. They were seated on a sunken sofa in the “showroom,” cold beers in their hands.
She moved on to the second floor, the clash of light and darkness jarring. It made no sense to a visitor, the way the showroom was bursting with light but the corridors and stairs were uneven, shadowy crevasses where one had to watch each step, eyes adjusting like an animal’s. This set-up was for the police, in case of the obligatory raid. The wiring of the building was in such disarray that there wasn’t a central fuse for the guards to snap shut. So it was prudent to keep the stairs in darkness so the insides of the brothel could go dead and quiet when needed, and just as quickly come back to rude life.
The second floor was where the second- and third-hand goods were stored. It was the haunt of truck drivers, labourers, servants, laundrymen, and watchmen. Too broke to visit the first floor, they fed on the cheapest women, who were paid as little as a hundred rupees. What these women lacked in looks, they made up for by tolerating beatings, the pulling of hair, and the burning of thighs and vaginas with matches. This was also the floor where Padma lived, so it was no surprise to Madhu that it was guarded by Hassan, loyal and robust, more concrete than man. Padma believed in battling it out in the trenches with her troops. After all, she had got her start as one
of them.
“Wait here,” Hassan said to Madhu.
She could see that he had been expecting her. He got up from his stool and pointed at it for her to sit on, but Madhu knew it wasn’t out of courtesy. He wanted her to be the eyes for a moment, to take his place at the tower. Hassan was a feverish being, so used to not sleeping at night that his eyes had forgotten how to close. He drank as he neared the end of his shift, at 4:00 a.m., to knock himself out, the booze tranquilizing him into baby sleep, where he was no longer responsible for sensing danger.
As instructed, Madhu sat on the stool and lit a Shivaji. The climb had made her pant, and she was getting anxious. She needed some of the warrior’s guts to soothe her. He, too, had instructed his Marathas to keep an eye out from the Pratapgad Fort for the invading Mughals under Afzal Khan. Long ago, Madhu had loved hearing from her father tales of Maratha bravery, of how Shivaji duped the Mughals, outsmarting them with guerrilla warfare. These had been the only times her father treated her like a son, so she never tired of listening to the stories. And she loved how Afzal Khan’s head was buried under a tower after Shivaji’s victory. There was no documented evidence for this, her father had told her, but he shared this story with his students at Maharashtra College anyway.
Now, Madhu reflected on how Padma had Shivaji’s guile. It had helped Padma sustain her reputation as one of the most feared madams of Kamathipura, until the mantle had recently been taken over by another woman, Silver Chaya. Padma had no silver teeth like Silver Chaya, whose mouth shone in the dark when she spoke. Padma was simple and plain, and vocal in her disdain for men. Silver Chaya was a voracious lover, but Padma was now in her seventies and had long ago become an ascetic. She dealt in flesh but never partook of it. She was like gurumai, an overseer, an orchestrator of life and the destiny of human beings. But none of this was evident when Padma was a young girl. If anything, she had been a mere twig snapped off a branch and thrown to the side of the road for any traveller to trample upon. That was how gurumai always started Padma’s story when she told it to her hijras, with the smoke from her beedi rising to the ceiling just like Padma’s eventual rise to power.
After what had happened to Padma as a child, gurumai had said, she vowed to never be vulnerable again, to never leave things in the hands of a higher power. If that higher power was taking a nap, like in her case, things happened that one could never truly recover from. “But then I told myself that if God was sleeping while bad things happened to me, then I could use that same nap time to make good things happen as well,” Padma had told gurumai.
She had always been a child of Kamathipura, back when Sukhlaji Street was known as “White Lane,” on account of the British troops that came to anchor their cocks. And it was in “Safed Gulli” that her father’s face started turning white too, and his lips, the coughing disease feeding on him right before her very eyes, as though it had bought her father’s lungs at an auction and was now enjoying the merchandise with absolutely no regard for the twelve-year-old who sat praying in front of a small picture of Lakshmi, while her father kept assuring her between coughing fits that he would never leave her, trying to hide the blood at first, but failing so pathetically that they both knew he would soon be joining his wife, who had died giving birth to Padma.
When he did go, a neighbour took Padma in.
For one whole year, this neighbour treated Padma as her own, held her close to her chest even though her husband did not like it at all. Padma could give the cough to both their children, the husband said, and she was a sly devil, she hid the cough, she went outside and coughed, so it was gullible of the woman to think that Padma had been spared.
But Padma had been spared. She had been spared from the cough, but not from puberty. Not from becoming a woman. Nothing could stop that.
After one whole year of eating meals with her new family, she was sold. She was not even sent far away. She was sold into a brothel only a few feet away, on White Lane itself. It was a matter of convenience, and when she had been broken, several times, until she accepted who she had become, she went across the street, to the woman who had taken her in, and asked her point blank if she’d been in on it. But the woman just shook her head, and from the single tear that rolled down her cheek, Padma knew she hadn’t known, or if she had, she was powerless. Then it dawned on her that her father had failed to look after her, even though the cough wasn’t his fault, and now yet another man had failed her. One good, one not so. Either way, it did not matter.
From then on, even when she was spreading her legs ten times a day, sometimes fifteen, she never lost that burning desire for power, to never be at the knees of a man again, and she quickly shrugged off any tears and self-pity and focused on rising to the top, which in her world meant owning her own brothel. Her father’s illness had pulled her out of school, it had torn her like a page from a book, and the wind had carried that small page to a small bed, which became her working space seven days a week for the next five years. It was her prison, and if she used her head, it could become her liberation too.
Her lack of resistance was misconstrued by the madam of the brothel as the sign of someone who was sex-mad, and that was perfect for Padma, because no one detected the cold reasoning under her heaving breasts; no one realized that she accepted prostitution as work, just as a man accepted going knee-deep in a sewer to clean up shit for the rest of the city. The man did not choose that job; it was given to him. It was the same with Padma, except that by the time she was eighteen, her owner, the same madam who had bought her from her neighbour, declared her a free agent. From a sex slave, she was now an adhiya prostitute.
“What I paid for you, you have earned out,” said the madam. “From this day on, you will get paid. Half of what you fuck, you keep.”
“Thank you” was all Padma said.
Then, about ten minutes later, she went back to her madam.
“How much did you pay?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For me,” said Padma. “How much did you buy me for?”
“What difference?”
“I want to know how much I was worth.”
“Three hundred rupees.”
The sum made Padma reel, but she did not show it. Three hundred rupees could be considered a fair amount at the time, especially for a poor family, but it was also incredibly low. It made her realize that she had no place on this earth at all, that as a girl she had the same importance as a rubber tire, or a clock, or a pair of shoes.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she told the madam. “I’ll look after the books for you as well. I’ll manage the place. That way you can rest.”
“What do you know about accounts?” the madam asked.
“Nothing,” said Padma. “But then again, I didn’t know anything about cocks either.”
She got the job. It was not the books Padma was after. It was the police. If she had access to the books, she would know which cop to grease, which dick to moisten with her own cunt, and she dove into her dual role with the passion of a woman putting herself through a business degree. When the time came, when the madam was on her deathbed, Padma was twenty-five, a veteran of the business, and had saved enough money to call it a small fortune—but it still wasn’t enough. So she went to a moneylender, took a loan, kept her breasts as collateral, made him feel as tall as any building in the city, told him that the goons that worked for her madam could be at his disposal as well if they went into partnership together. She told him it was important for them to own the brothel, to buy it from the actual owner. The day she got ownership of the brothel was the last time she gave herself to a client. This was in the 1960s, when Madhu hadn’t even been born and the opium dens on Sukhlaji Street gave everyone equal rights by sending them all to heaven. This was when Padma single-handedly caught the imagination of Kamathipura.
She hired two men—Hassan the watcher’s father was one of them, a striking Pathan, and the other was a thin hero-type, with a knife tucked in his belt—and she walk
ed across the street from her brothel to the home of the man who had sold her. She carried a steel thali in her hand, with a small bowl of sugar and a wad of cash tied with a brand new rubber band. Seeing Padma in her new incarnation made the man nervous, but she reassured him there was no need to be. Padma was there to pay her respects. She fed the man sugar with her own hands and gave him the money, thanked him for her success. If it hadn’t been for him, she said, she would still be poor and helpless. She touched the feet of the woman who had looked after her for a year just like she had her own children, and then went back to her brothel.
Nothing more happened for an entire year.
And that was fine. Padma waited. She knew that once the man had tasted money, he would want more. The day he ran out, he came to her brothel. He came for a loan, he said. He was going through hard times, and she was like a daughter to him. Would she help him out?
Of course she would.
She asked him to wait while she went and fetched the money. She came back, like before, with sugar and cash. But this time, the hero-type held the man’s hands from behind. The Pathan was about to give the man a thrashing, but Padma told him not to be immature about things.
Once again, she fed the man sugar with her own hands.