The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  Imphal hadn’t changed much since the last time I had been there some ten years earlier. In the cool winter afternoon, people picked their way past the rubble and refuse on the streets, surveyed at every corner by armed policemen and soldiers. The electric supply in the town was intermittent, and the small generators chugging away in buildings that looked on the verge of collapse added their diesel fumes to the squalor, the grey of the streets rising to meet the grey of the sky until you could no longer see the hills surrounding the valley. When dusk came, there was a final, frantic burst of activity around the marketplace, creating traffic jams along the main avenue, but by seven in the evening everyone was off the streets, leaving behind a ghost town.

  Even by the standards of north-eastern India, where the unemployment rate is twice the national average and the per capita income 30 per cent lower than the rest of the country, Manipur is an especially failed state. The periodic infusions of cash from Delhi seem only to have lined the pockets of local politicians and bureaucrats, leaving Manipur bereft of the most rudimentary infrastructure. Such neglect has been accompanied by the harsh authoritarianism of the government in Delhi, which has subjected the state, since 1958, to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives security forces the right to detain and to kill without having to answer to the local government.

  Half a century after the imposition of this act, Manipur remains as violent a place as ever, with at least twenty-three insurgent groups operating among a population of only 2.5 million people. Some of these groups owe their allegiance to the Meitei culture of the valley, while others represent the diversity of tribes up in the hills, but all of them offer one of the two main employment options for young men in the state, the other being to join the police or paramilitary and fight the insurgents.

  When I last came to Manipur, I had just quit my job in Delhi. I took my final pay cheque from the magazine in Connaught Place, locked up my flat in Munirka and headed out of Delhi. I was sick of the city and filled with longing for the north-east. I travelled cheap, going sleeper class on the slow Brahmaputra Mail, making one of the longest train journeys in India, some 2,000 kilometres from Delhi to Guwahati. Then I took a bus to Shillong, my hometown, and another bus to Silchar, a small town in Assam where my sister lived. From Silchar, I flew to Imphal, a flight of some fifteen minutes with the ticket, subsidized by the government, costing me only 600 rupees. It was my first time in Manipur, and there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Imphal, the only sounds at night being the rumbling of paramilitary convoys heading for the hills. In the morning, I read or heard about young men suspected of being insurgents who had been picked up from their houses by jeeps that had their licence plates covered. In the countryside, there were battles going on between the Naga and Kuki tribes, the latter apparently supported by Indian intelligence agencies to take on the separatist Nagas.

  The violence wasn’t quite as overt when I arrived in Imphal in 2007, but there were still ‘encounters’ between security forces and young insurgents, with the corpses of guerrillas being dragged out feet first from the hotel rooms or houses in which they had been shacked up. A few days into my stay, a bomb went off in an Imphal marketplace, killing eight people. In the countryside, meanwhile, the paramilitary was engaged in operations in Chandel district, bordering Burma, pushing back insurgents from a landmine-strewn area where they had successfully maintained a base for some years. All this seemed to happen silently, like a film with the sound off. Not a word of any of these events appeared in Delhi. It was all too far away, too remote, and since few of the insurgents were Islamists, they evoked no interest from those obsessed with the clash of civilizations.

  One day I headed south-west of Imphal, travelling along National Highway 150 towards the hill district of Churachandpur. This is classified as a backward district, the epicentre of the clashes between Kukis and Nagas when I had last been in Manipur. The ethnic violence had simmered down since then, giving way to a more everyday combination of grinding poverty, skirmishes between security forces and insurgents, and an especially high rate of HIV infection. In fact, Manipur has the highest concentration of HIV-affected people in India, with 17 per cent of total cases in the country. Among those particularly vulnerable to HIV infection are drug users who share needles and women who are sex workers, and I was going to Churachandpur to interview some of these women.

  Although 150 was called a highway, it was little more than a narrow track built on an embankment raised above paddy fields. The driver of the jeep I had hired came to a small village where there seemed to be a roadblock of sorts. A car was parked on the road, with a group of scruffy-looking boys gathered around the driver’s window. Another boy straddled a wooden bench that had been placed on the road. My driver tried to squeeze past the makeshift barrier while everyone was busy with the other car. He accelerated, the bench shot out and closed the gap, and the boy sat back again on the bench, his hard gaze meeting ours. The driver sighed and reached for his wallet.

  After an hour of driving along the valley, we reached the hills and the town of Churachandpur. It was built on a slope, a crowded settlement of run-down two-storey buildings, with shops on the ground floor, many of them selling wrinkled, second-hand clothes. In one of those buildings — a warren of rooms connected by narrow wooden staircases — a local group ran a centre for sex workers. The man in charge of the centre was in his mid-twenties, short and tough-looking. He had been a thug in his teens, he said, working for one of the many ‘voluntary’ organizations that indulged in petty extortion and moral policing and often beat up sex workers. He hadn’t realized at the time that the women were driven into prostitution by poverty, violence, drugs and the lack of employment. Now, he helped run the NGO that focused on HIV prevention and provided facilities for the sex workers, including a ‘daycare room’ where women could leave their children or take a break from work. ‘If there’s trouble and the insurgents or police start beating them up, they come running to the daycare room for shelter,’ the man said.

  Manipur has traditionally been a matriarchal society, with women possessing far greater autonomy than their counterparts in the plains. Yet this does not seem to have helped those who become sex workers. They are among the most invisible groups in this invisible corner of the country, but they are also constantly subject to violence from the police, local churches, insurgents and vigilante groups.

  The room that offered the Churachandpur sex workers shelter from such storms was small, with wooden walls, a low ceiling, and windows looking out to the bus station where the women often went to solicit clients. I sat with my back to a wall with posters of Jesus and Norah Jones, facing a 23-year-old called Luni. She had straight hair down to her shoulders, a snub nose and large eyes, and although it wasn’t cold, she stayed huddled in a shawl as she told me about her life.

  What a life it was, filled with struggle and aspiration, with a search for happiness and the discovery of failure. She was one of countless young women drifting to small towns like Churachandpur from smaller, even more anonymous villages. Luni’s parents had separated soon after she was born and she had grown up with her mother in a village. She had not been happy with her mother and, at fifteen, she left home and travelled to Aizawl, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mizoram. She had wanted to track down her father, she said, hoping to find in him the affection she felt missing from her life. She worked as a maidservant for a year while she looked for her father. When she finally met him, she discovered that he was married and had other children. He had been happy to see Luni, but he was also afraid of his wife. One morning, he left a note for Luni saying that she could no longer stay with them.

  Luni moved again, this time to a village in Manipur where she worked as a labourer in the rice fields. There, she met a farmer whom she eventually married and with whom she had a daughter. But Luni’s husband was an alcoholic and frequently beat her, and she ran away again, abandoning her daughter and coming to Churachandpur, where her maternal grandparents lived. The el
derly couple had not been pleased to see her, but they grudgingly let her stay with them. In Churachandpur, she found friends of her age, youngsters who eked out a miserable living through jobs as daily-wage labourers or as petty criminals. One of them introduced Luni to heroin, and when she became addicted and needed money for her fix, he found her the first of her clients.

  She had tried to break the habit once when an NGO took her and other addicts to Delhi for a detox programme. When I asked her what it had been like, this being her only time out of the north-east, she laughed. ‘I saw nothing,’ she said. She had been curled up on her bunk as the train made its way through the Gangetic Plains, suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms. When she got to Delhi, she was kept inside the detox centre before being put on the train back home.

  Luni had relaxed a little as she talked. Around us, the other women were drinking tea and smoking, their laughter lively but not intrusive. Luni took her hands out of her shawl and began rolling cigarettes at great speed. It was a little side occupation of hers, something with which to supplement the money she made from prostitution. I asked her to come out to lunch with me and some of the NGO workers, and her wariness returned.

  She was silent as we drove to the only restaurant in Churachandpur, a surprisingly pleasant and airy place called ‘Fat Jame’s’ [sic] that offered a wonderful view of the rooftops and the surrounding hills. But although Luni had lived in Churachandpur for so many years, she had never been there. When we went inside, walking past the modern-looking kitchen with glass walls, she went off to a balcony and stood there on her own, her back towards everybody. I went up to her and asked if she wanted to listen to music, handing her my iPod and headphones. She had never seen one before, but she quickly figured out how to use the menu and I left her there, looking out at the town with the headphones on.

  Luni joined us at the table when the food arrived. Fat James came over to ask how we liked lunch, and to tell me that he had learned the business of F&B in Delhi, where he had worked at a restaurant as a cook. Luni seemed more at ease, participating in the conversation, and it suddenly became apparent that not only did she understand English, but that she could speak quite a bit of it too. I asked her if she would show me where she worked, and she said she would as long as the pimp and the madam who ran the place didn’t mind.

  There are no red-light areas in Manipur, and most sex workers practise their trade near stalls on the highway and in houses and hotels. Churachandpur was too small for hotels, and Luni worked at what she called a ‘wine store’, a stall selling locally brewed liquor. We left Fat Jame’s and walked back past the daycare centre, entering an alleyway that led through a marketplace. There was a butcher’s stall, empty but buzzing with flies, the cement floor covered with congealed blood. The stalls in the market, their roofs made of nylon sacks, were filled with plastic trinkets, necklaces and dolls. Even though there were only a few days to go before Christmas – and Churachandpur was primarily Christian, unlike the Imphal Valley – there wasn’t much activity at the stalls. Men in tattered clothes loitered around, some of them looking at Luni with appraising glances.

  The wine store was a stunted little shack on one of the side streets. I waited outside while Luni went in to get permission. A plump, middle-aged woman slipped out a few minutes later. This was the madam, careful to avoid having to talk to me. Then the pimp emerged with Luni to ask me what I wanted. I had been imagining the kind of villainous figure one sees in Bollywood films, the sort who goes around slashing the women who work for him. But the pimp was the same age as Luni, his sweater full of holes and his aggression barely masking his anxiety. He was worried that whatever I was writing would lead to trouble for him from the insurgents or the police. A policeman had come in just a little while ago, he said, threatening to arrest the only client in the place until he was paid off by the pimp.

  I reassured him that whatever I was writing was unlikely ever to make its way to Churachandpur, and he invited me inside eagerly. The wine store was a dark, low-roofed room cobbled together out of plastic sheets, bamboo matting, wood and tin, with a couple of benches and tables pushed against the walls. A few translucent bottles stood on the rough dirt floor, next to an aluminium pot. It was still early in the afternoon and business was slow, and three women sat on a bench, one of them fifteen years old and in a daze. The other women were friendly and welcoming, looking like spectral versions of the young people I taught at a college in New York. I almost felt that I should ask them if they had completed their assignments.

  Luni led me out through the back and up some rickety stairs to the room where she met her clients. It was bleak and to the point, with four beds in the room, each separated from the other by curtains. The sheets on the rough wooden cots were old and stained, and I wondered what it was like to make a living like this, offering sex on one of those beds for a few hundred rupees. There wasn’t enough room to walk around, so I didn’t do much more than stand in one spot and turn, trying to understand the lives that converged in this space. Luni stood by and let me look around, but after a while she suggested that we go down. It was the week of Christmas, a busy time for her, and her clients would be coming in even as I took the highway back to Imphal.

  7

  The restaurant Esther worked in was a long way from Fat Jame’s in every way. It was located on the top floor of the Emporio Mall, a granite monstrosity that had been a work in progress for many years. It sat on the foothills of the Delhi Ridge, a forested area that ran all the way from south to north Delhi. The construction of the mall had been temporarily held up by environmentalists taking the developers to court, but theirs was a losing cause in the new India. Now that the mall was complete, apparently the largest in Asia, it prided itself on being home to luxury brands, with four floors of designer outlets topped off by the experience of dining at Zest.

  Although I had often stopped by the mall to pick up Esther, I had never been inside and decided to take a closer look one afternoon. I stepped in through the door and wandered around for a while, increasingly puzzled by what I saw. The people around me were middle class, no doubt fairly well off, but they didn’t look like the luxury-brand clientele Esther had spoken of, purchasing items worth lakhs. The shops too were run-of-the mill franchises. Finally, when I asked one of the attendants where Zest was, I discovered my mistake. I was in the wrong mall. Although it looked like one vast complex from outside, there were actually two malls next to each other, both owned by DLF. I was standing in the more downmarket one. If I went outside and made my way along the winding walkway to the next building, I would reach Emporio.

  The luxury mall was like a five-star hotel, with a fountain, brass railings and marble floors. The impression of a hotel was emphasized further by the open lounge on the ground floor where people sat on couches eating pastries and drinking tea. I went up and down the mall, sometimes using the stairs and sometimes the elevator, wondering what it was like for Esther to work here. The luxury stores around me seemed quite empty. I decided to go into one, a Paul Smith outlet, but I lost my nerve at the last moment and veered away from the door. Instead, I continued on my circuit of the corridor winding around the atrium, puzzled that I had been unable to go inside the shop. Below me, in the lobby, I saw a woman stride out to the middle of the marble floor, pirouetting on high heels and sticking out her hips. She was tall and slender, and as I looked more closely, I could see the group of people she was posing for. It was some kind of a fashion shoot.

  I was still wondering why I had been unable to enter the Paul Smith store. I didn’t normally go to designer stores, but when I had ventured into some of them in New York out of curiosity, I hadn’t felt such unease. Somehow, I was more exposed and vulnerable in Delhi. This wasn’t because it would be apparent to everyone in the shop that I couldn’t afford to buy anything – because that would be pretty obvious in Manhattan too – but it mattered to me in Delhi that people would know, as if the very objects would sneer at me for daring to enter their space. In th
e West, with its long excess of capitalism, it might be possible to scoff at luxury brands. They had been around so long that they had lost some of their meaning. But in India, luxury brands still possessed power.

  I went up to take a look at Zest. Earlier, I had thought of going in and having a drink there. But now I felt uncertain, remembering what Esther had said about how it wasn’t officially open. And who knew how much a drink there might cost? Instead, I loitered near the entrance, staring into the dark interior of the restaurant while trying not to be too obvious. I could see the bar, generic with its dim lighting and polished wood. The dining areas were much further back and I couldn’t see anything of the places where the seven cuisines were served. It was still early in the evening, and in spite of the music playing softly (piped over the Internet from the UK) and the waitresses walking around looking fresh in their crisp uniforms, there seemed to be few customers. It was like a stage set before the opening of the play, holding no meaning yet for the audience. It was alive at the moment only for Esther and her colleagues.