All That Is Bitter and Sweet (57 page)

Next morning I did my usual routine of meditating, eating quickly according to my meal plan (protein, starch, fruit, and fat for breakfast), making a five-minute attempt at looking sort of maybe kind of cute if you closed one eye and squinted the other, and surrendering the day and the outcome to a Power greater than myself. I knew I’d need to do that more than once, as I was in brothels again, this time with a woman who was a stranger to me but a beloved star to millions of Indians: Sushmita Sen.

As anyone who follows the movies already knows, India has the biggest, most dynamic film industry in the world, and it’s based in Mumbai, formerly Bombay—hence the name Bollywood. Indians are absolutely crazy for films, and they follow the Bollywood stars in numbers that make Hollywood agents swoon. That is why it can be so useful to recruit actors to lend their social capital to marginalized and despised populations, to dispel myths and stigma through public conversations and the media about a range of vital issues, from medically accurate sex education and HIV to access to education for girls. But Indian society is so conservative that it’s been hard to convince anyone to speak out.

That a person of Sushmita’s stature even deigns to talk about this issue, much less hangs out in a brothel, is shocking in Indian society. We approached her to join the campaign because of her willingness to break with convention in her personal and professional life. She was a single mother with an adopted daughter and had played the role of “immoral” (whatever that means) women in films. Typically, the big stars in the global South do not touch roles that are not virtuous, and I was curious to meet her.

At a Catholic school compound (of course I managed to find a priest with whom to talk for a few minutes), I sat in an austere room with nothing but a chair. A tall, regal woman in a lovely pale blue sari came in and immediately captivated me with her womanly brilliance. She reminded me of Salma right away (although let’s be clear, S.H. is in a league of her own). Even though she had worked until three a.m. the night before, she was focused, clear-eyed, intent, attentive, dazzling. Her wild, dark hair was unbrushed, she wore no makeup, and her only dressed-up detail were long, lilac fingernails. She oozed star: that “It” factor of confidence, poise, carriage … and killer eyebrows!

As we readied for the film crew, she asked me a few questions about my work and shared some of her own story. She is a former Miss Universe who went into modeling and acting. In a maverick move, she chose not to marry and had to fight in the courts to adopt her daughter seven years ago. Her longtime personal assistant had recently died of AIDS. He had been so afraid of the stigma of his disease that he’d told no one, not even her. He might have received treatment and lived a long life, but the shame of AIDS killed him as surely as the disease. It was because of him that Sushmita decided she would campaign to end the stigma and raise awareness that there is help and hope for people living with HIV.

Hope, however, had already run out for the first woman we visited together at the Marwari Chawl brothel in Kamathipura. Geeta Sulunke was from Nepal and in her early thirties. Years ago she’d had her name tattooed on her arm; it was misspelled. Her luck went down from there. She was drugged one day at home and woke up in a Mumbai brothel. She waited a month, trapped in
karza
behind a curtain, before she succumbed to her first buyer. It’s such an Indian process, that. While rape, and certainly gang rape, is not unheard of in the Indian sex trade, it is not the dominant method of breaking a woman, as it is in Cambodia and Eastern Europe. In India, many girls and women are simply left to sit there in this new, squalid, dark, frightening place until they are hungry and hopeless enough to surrender.

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.