Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels Read Online Free Page A

have anyone to talk to? Should she be in a place that discourages her from speaking about the past? How will she ever overcome all that’s happened?
    *****
    I am shaking when I leave. This shelter is run by one of the better NGOs, its staff smart, sensitive. If the women here remain so broken, what reason is there for hope? As I ride the train home, I quietly cry, not for the first time.
    I am exhausted from thinking about sex workers, talking about them, dreaming about them, and constantly worrying about how I can help solve an intractable problem. My family and friends are incredibly patient, listening to the stories I recount, my polemics about the consequences of a male-dominated society.
    But not everyone finds the world of Kamathipura as worthy of attention as I do. Many, like my father’s lawyer colleagues, struggle to conceal their disdain for my decision, not only to write instead of going to law school, but to write about a population that could so easily be ignored.
    A friend’s husband — who claims to have never set foot inside a brothel — tells me how naïve I am. “You don’t understand. These prostitutes are greedy. They like it. They like the money of Bombay.” It takes all the self-control I can summon to not slap him. But then a sad realization strikes me. Most people probably think the way he does. They don’t see these women as fighting tooth and nail against exclusion. They see willing participants who choose to exist in a land of vice because the going rate for debauchery is far better than decency.
    At times, even I have doubted my own beliefs. For in some twisted way that’s more damning of society than anything else, they’re not entirely wrong.
    Some days I wait around for hours, observing what feels like the same scene over and over. Women emerge groggily from cubicles around midday, dressed in faded nightgowns, to assemble around a small TV in the waiting room. Some cook, others sip tea, others start preening. The lazy afternoon gives way to another night just like the last.
    On a sticky day in May, I am idling with Lata on the first floor of Playhouse, the sort of brothel one would visit if searching for a 14-year-old girl in extra-high heels. Lata is a Kamathipura veteran who works with Asha Darpan and wears her long, thinning black hair in an oily braid down her back. She pulls a bottle of Bisleri water out of a pleather handbag, revealing below a mustard-yellow sari the taut skin of her plump midriff, ridged with burn scars. She takes a long swig and offers the bottle to me, explaining she bought water today because she forgot to bring some from home. I’m surprised Lata can afford this, because bottled water is beyond the means of most poor people in India. Like them, Lata usually waits in line each morning to gather water from a communal tap and then boils a portion for drinking and cooking, she says. “It’s difficult, but not as difficult as it was in the village.”
    Lata is from Bijapur, a district in the southern state of Karnataka. Before she came to Mumbai, she earned a couple of cents, a roti, and some rice from a priest for walking his cows and bullocks each day, a paltry sum even for rural India. She never went to school. “We were very, very poor,” she recalls, the hoop in her nose glinting in the sun.
    Lata doesn’t remember how old she was when she arrived in the city, but she was already pregnant with her first child when a woman bought her from her parents and sold her to a pimp. Almost 30 years later, she still sees a handful of regular clients but doesn’t work long hours and lives in a northern suburb of Mumbai. What she remembers about the village is constant hunger.
    “You keep asking why we came here, but how were we to fill our stomachs?” Lata chuckles, pointing at her now quite large belly. “In Bombay, no one goes hungry. It’s the only place where even if you have only ten rupees you can eat a vada pav and be full for the rest of the day.