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

Nowhere else in the country is as cheap.”
    Vada pav, a mashed-potato patty deep-fried and stuffed into a small square bun that’s liberally slathered with coriander chutney, is a quintessential Mumbai street food. Lata’s right. It fills you up for several hours. Beyond the hardship of Kamathipura, I realize, there is a brutality much worse: that of starvation.
    Many sex workers explain to me that in their villages, all they eat most days is a single meal of rice and maybe a small clump of cooked vegetables, often carefully divided between families of perhaps eight or ten. On a good day, they have leftovers for a snack the next morning; on a bad day, they wait for the breadwinner to purchase more rice with his daily wages and bring it home. For many sex workers, Mumbai, with its ample array of cheap street snacks and roadside restaurants, is symbolic of the end of hunger. Moving to the city entails grueling and demeaning work, but it also holds the promise of adequate and spicy food, including the ultimate luxury: “non-veg.”
    To be sure, many teenage girls are sold into the sex trade against their will. Human trafficking is one of India’s well-documented horrors. But there are also women who “choose” the sex trade. It’s not a free choice in the sense that they could choose instead to go to college or to find another job. All the women I meet are illiterate. Most believe sex work is the only way to support their families. They spend a significant portion of their earnings educating their children, whom they hope can thereby lead less cruel lives. To deem this so-called choice noble would be to glorify it. But there’s no denying that many of the women think they are making a sacrifice for the future.
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    From my days as a volunteer, the question of what happens to the children of sex workers weighs heavily on my mind. The women beam with pride when they tell me that they finance their children’s education. “We do this work so our daughters will never have to,” I hear again and again.
    But the daughters, even if they do go to school and receive extra help with homework, aren’t really given a fair chance. The stigma against their mothers attaches itself to them. Many tell me that at school they’re scorned because they are the children of “dirty” women. Even at Apne Aap, I remember a sense of resignation among the staff when it came to helping the girls with schoolwork. The quality of teaching at most Indian schools — public, but also some private ones — is very poor. Most students rely on extra help from tutors, but Apne Aap never had enough tutors, let alone enough good ones, to make a substantial difference in the girls’ education.
    The only creative input the girls got came from volunteers, many from abroad. There was a regular stream of us, but we were all there for short bouts of time. Another major obstacle to doing well in school is their home environment. The girls who live in the brothels are exposed to their mothers’ lives as sex workers from childhood. Late nights and lewd men are a constant threat, especially as they become teenagers. To protect them from this world, many sex workers ship their children off to hostels or shelter homes.
    These shelter homes, not unlike the ones for their mothers, are understaffed and poorly funded. They provide the children with food and a roof to sleep under, but not much else. At many, the children are disciplined with physical abuse and endure constant scorn. The best these homes do is keep them enrolled in school, offer basic assistance with homework, and perhaps give them another skill, like sewing or cooking. The more ambitious girls might learn to give pedicures or facials so they can later find jobs in salons.
    The girls at these homes are led to think they are somehow inferior, “spoiled,” because of their mothers’ professions. Without encouragement, they start to believe there is no hope for kids like them.
    Life isn’t easy