Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels (6 page)

I ask Saira if she told her mother what happened.

“No. I didn’t tell anyone. I thought it was my fault.” She didn’t know why her mother came and took her away. “Maybe my sister told her I was crying a lot. I never told my sister, but maybe he had done it to her, too.”

Stories of abuse come as a shock each time. No matter how many I hear, I have to control my revulsion and remain a calm but empathetic listener.

Like their mothers, the daughters of sex workers can become inured to sexual abuse. But from speaking to the Kranti girls, I realize that while the mothers have their colleagues for solidarity, the daughters suffer in silence. They grow up to believe the abuse is their fault, and that it destines them to the same dirty work their mothers do.

For Saira, the memory makes her angry, makes her hate herself and everyone else. Her entire body tenses when she speaks about her father. She still wakes up each morning at the same time, 4 a.m., and her thoughts churn. For years, she tries to harbor it all inside, though the anger slips out in lies, screams, belligerence. When life feels unbearable, Saira cuts her wrists and lets the pain bleed out of her body, even if just for a while.

The first time she moves into Kranti, she despises it so much that she goes back to live with her mother. But the second time she comes to Kranti, her attitude starts to change.

“I realized that all the other girls were talking about bad things that happened to them, and I wanted to tell someone about my life, too. When I first told Robin, she gave me a big hug and told me I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

“I think I used to be so angry because I had never told anyone what my father did to me. Now I’ve stopped cutting myself.” Saira shows me a bag of anti-depressants and other medicines. I’m pleased we’ve progressed from monosyllables to this level of openness, but I’m not sure how to respond.

Later, I ask Robin about how she deals with Saira’s self-inflicted violence, and she says it’s been one of the most difficult issues to work through. “For many of the girls, cutting themselves is a learned behavior. They’ve seen their mothers do it and learned that it’s how to take care of pain. I still get chills when I look at the scars on some of their mothers’ arms.”

Saira’s relationship with her mother is better, but she still struggles with rage and sometimes wants to go back to cutting herself. Her dream, once she completes high school, is to teach street children and work with women and girls in Kamathipura.

When I leave Saira that afternoon, I have a bittersweet taste in my mouth. I could tell that healing for her is a daily struggle. She still has a long way to go. Saira’s story isn’t wrapped up and tied with a bow, the way Shweta’s tale sounds to most people. But in many ways, Saira represents what Kranti professes to stand for. It’s not an organization trying to turn the daughters of sex workers into success stories for a glossy brochure. There are different degrees of trauma, and each girl deals with trauma in her own way, even in a loving and nurturing environment.

And while it’s tempting to write Shweta as a happy ending after her first year at Bard, her story is far more complex.

*****

On a rainy Saturday in July, I slip on a pair of waterproof sandals and seal my cell phone in a Ziploc bag. I’m on my way to meet Shweta at Grant Road Station, near Kamathipura.

When I’d woken up, I looked out my window and texted Shweta, “It is pouring here — not good for a walk.” She called me minutes later to convince me that we should stick to our plan instead of delaying our meeting another week. I relented. If rain didn’t bother Shweta, I couldn’t let it bother me.

Shweta arrives at the station 20 minutes late with Asmita, her younger sister. She’s dressed in a fitted, bright orange salwaar khameez, bursting with excitement to stroll around her old neighborhood. I’d long since learned the Kranti girls don’t care how I dress, so I am wearing loose batik pants and a T-shirt.

I share my umbrella with Shweta — she has her own, but it’s easier to talk this way — and we start heading towards Kamathipura. Shweta chatters a mile a minute about the classes she took last semester at Bard and the drama program she’s enrolled in for the summer in Mumbai.

In spite of the pelting rain, it’s impossible to move ten steps in Kamathipura without someone stopping Shweta to say hello. A young boy on a bicycle leaps off to greet “Shweta Didi.” A former neighbor rushes over from the other side of the street to ask about her new life.

The downpour intensifies, and puddles start to fill the potholes. I suggest we find a café where we can chat over chai. But Shweta knows exactly where to go.

Amma
and
Baba
, as Shweta calls them, used to live in the same loft where Shweta grew up, built above a brothel, where residents were separated from one another with flimsy plywood. For all practical purposes, they’re family.

We step into their home, now a single room in a different alley. Amma insists Shweta and Asmita change into dry clothes, which are rapidly produced from an old Godrej steel cupboard. I try to hide my surprise that she still keeps a spare set of clothes for the girls, even though they haven’t lived next door for years.

While Baba reads the newspaper, looking up occasionally with questions, Amma fusses over the girls and grinds spices to make fresh chai.

Shweta and I speak about her journey from Kranti to Bard and back. “I feel as if I don’t belong anywhere anymore,” she says.

This is a sentiment I relate to like no other — the question of where I belong constantly rips at my heart and keeps me awake at night.

We sip the gingery, creamy chai Amma just made, a taste I associate with being away from India. I never drank chai as a child, but it became the default beverage of nostalgia after I left, one I grew to love not for its taste but for its quintessential Indian-ness.

The conversation morphs into the two of us sharing notes about what it’s like to never feel completely at home after leaving Mumbai. I realize that Shweta is now almost the same age I was when I returned from the U.S. to spend my summer volunteering in Kamathipura. The disparity between the two universes had seemed so absurd to me at the time. For Shweta, this was her home, and I imagined it was a difference even more acute.

I feel closer to her than ever before as I offer the little advice I’ve cobbled together through years of angst and guilt over trading in home for school. It’s easier said than done, I know, even as I reassure Shweta that learning to adapt to a foreign culture is isolating but also tremendously enriching. She nods, but I can tell that in her heart she is comparing the comfort of being with her friends at Kranti to her anthropology class.

I’ve also weighed all that binds me to India with the intellectual freedom and seemingly boundless possibilities of a liberal arts college in America.

But Shweta’s commitment is less abstract than mine. She’s one of the only people representing Kamathipura and Indian sex workers on a global platform.

“Many people say it’s a horrible place, but for me, it’s just normal. It’s where I’m from,” Shweta says. She does, however, acknowledge some aspects of Kamathipura are not normal. “Having used condoms on the streets isn’t safe for anyone.”

But sex workers can’t be blamed for this. Cleaning up the red-light district is the city government’s responsibility, one it has long abdicated.

I say goodbye to Shweta, who is staying at Amma and Baba’s home for lunch. She’s more confident than ever. I’m glad she’s also conflicted about where she belongs — questioning is an important part of growing up.

I dip my head as I climb down the rickety, cobweb-ridden staircase, trying to wrap my mind around the complexity of Kamathipura’s problems. It’s sort of like navigating a brothel for the first time: It’s dark, there are hallways you’d never even dream exist, and it’s impossible to tell which stair might give way until you’re standing on it.

I emerge onto a narrow street. Clouds mute the daylight.

Perhaps Kranti’s approach is the only solution that’ll work — gradually transforming the life of one girl at a time.

The organization can’t be scaled up to reach every single girl from Kamathipura who needs a safe home, let alone the other red-light districts of Mumbai or India. Kranti doesn’t have the space, staff, or resources to grow beyond being a family home for ten girls. There are many boys who need help, too, but a mixed-gender shelter would be complicated to run.

And yet, after meeting Robin and the Kranti girls, I can’t be entirely disheartened. I’ve seen them fight even when all the odds appear stacked against them — who am I to lose hope?

At the end of the street, I look around for a taxi to take me to the station. Seeing none, I decide to walk. The rain has let up a little. The flooded roadside ditches are starting to drain.

Something Robin said when I first asked her about Kranti’s potential to expand comes back to me. “My focus is not on scale but on what these girls go on to do. This is about a mind-set change. Shweta going to Bard is a way for the world to value these girls’ experiences. Her reading Marx and Lenin and Kafka is an experience we want the other girls to look at as if it is within reach.”

I don’t know if Shweta is reading Kafka, but she did tell me today she has graduated from Harry Potter. She’s enjoying
The Kite Runner
, a book many university students across the globe are also probably reading.

I smile to myself as I walk down the street. In many ways, Shweta is just a typical teenager — curious about the world, experimenting with a million new things, struggling to figure out who she wants to be.

And that’s what Robin has ensured. After atypical childhoods, she’s giving the girls the opportunity to be teenagers. Their lives are complicated, but don’t all teenagers have complicated lives?

Dismantling prejudice is the place to start. If Kranti’s neighbors in Kandivali had looked at the girls not as the daughters of sex workers but as regular human teenagers who needed a place to live, maybe they wouldn’t have hounded them out.

If more people were willing to see the humanness of the red-light district instead of mentally wiping it off the map, maybe it would be easier for the women to live like citizens. Maybe the sex workers would demand basic goods and services the way other communities do.

Maybe the sharp distinction between the “family line” I belong to and those who do dhandha would gradually blur.

I walk through the street leading to Grant Road Station, past stalls selling Tupperware, fake branded jeans, fruit. Peaches and plums are in season.

The platform is deserted. I must have just missed a train. I close my umbrella, shaking the excess water off before finding a quiet corner of the platform to wait.

I’ve waited at this station so many times over the past months. Soon after I first started reporting in Kamathipura, I realized that writing about injustice wasn’t like waving a magic wand and wishing it away. Was I doing the right thing? Is it voyeuristic to write about suffering?

But the story I found in Kamathipura is not only one of suffering, it’s also one of resilience. Instead of feeling pity, I learned how people negotiate with grave injustice and somehow manage to make their lives bearable.

Sex workers and their families remain at the fringes in part because they are cast by the rest of society in one of two convenient narratives — either poor and trafficked or greedy and loose.

In writing about the women and girls of the red-light district, I want to turn such narratives on their heads, to find ways to depict the fullness of their lives. In telling the stories of the Kranti girls, I discovered they are teenagers who like dressing up and want to sneak out after curfew. They’re also girls struggling to make peace with their pasts. And they have repeatedly confronted violence and rejection because of where they’re from.

A train rumbles into the station. I check the time on my phone through the clear plastic of the Ziploc bag. It’s almost two. I’ll be late for lunch, but I don’t mind.

I find a seat in the ladies’ compartment by the window. As the train gathers speed, the soaked city turns into a gray blur.

Five monsoons ago, when I was a volunteer, the commute from Kamathipura to my home used to leave me feeling debilitated. Today, in spite of all the work I know remains to be done in the red-light district, I am calm.

I know now what it is that I want to spend my days doing: talking to people in my country who may not otherwise be able to command an audience, and finding an honest way to tell their stories.

It isn’t a perfect contribution. I am still plagued with self-doubt sometimes, and I worry it’s not enough. But if with writing I can change people’s attitudes, as Kranti does in a different way, then there’s something worthwhile in that.

My train pulls into Churchgate Station. In minutes, I have returned to a part of the city where it’s easy to forget Kamathipura. But I know the women and girls who live there, and I have promised to not look away, to not leave them to a world that would let women perish from diseases and violence just to put food in their stomachs and those of their children. A world that would let children grow up in brothels where their mothers work.

I am reminded of that night when, in the pouring rain, I left a young girl in Kamathipura. How different I felt saying goodbye to Shweta, ensconced in love and the aroma of potatoes frying in cumin, than I had when Shabnam scurried up the stairs into dhandha’s jaws.

After all these years, I still have nightmares about staring up into the hazy abyss punctuated by garish beams. The place where Shabnam, the girl with the braids in her hair tied at the ends with red ribbons, was to sleep that night.

When she arrived at class the next day, she was her usual cheerful self. The world that struck me as brutal was ordinary to her.

While I was walking her to the hospital to be tested for a learning disability one day, I asked where a child could play in Kamathipura.

Shabnam played with the other children on the rooftops of the brothels, she said. “We play school-school or nurse-nurse.” And then, sometimes, they played another game. In that game, Shabnam went behind an imaginary curtain and waited for her friend to come in, just the way her mother did.