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

eye contact. Being a woman in India requires us to steel ourselves to invading male eyes, and often verbal and physical assault.
    Less than four months after I returned, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi, the city I had recently relocated to for a job with an English-language newspaper. The woman was brutalized with a metal rod in the presence of her male friend. When she died, outrage swept the country and a national reflection on the treatment of women finally began. Indians took to the streets, and an eerie sense of solidarity grew among young, educated women who felt personally violated by the assault.
    Like the dead woman, I was also 23. I found commuting in Delhi, especially at night, terrifying, a reoccurring nightmare of dark, deserted streets.
    And my job as a copy editor was unfulfilling. My dream of writing stories that addressed the suffering I’d witnessed and the rage I felt seemed distant. I left the capital and moved, again, to my birthplace, Mumbai. Newly unemployed, disillusioned about jobs in Indian media, I decided to write freelance articles for U.S. publications and only pursue stories that interested me. At the top of my agenda were sex workers and their children.
    So it was that I returned to Kamathipura — older, wiser, a little more tempered — to find a way to tell the haunting tales that had consumed my thoughts since I’d first set foot inside this red-light enclave that, in a very classist society, is seen as the lowest demimonde.
    *****
    I am seated cross-legged on a brothel floor on a hot April afternoon. The door is ajar. Just beyond it, a disheveled man in a grey pinstriped shirt appears at the top of the dank staircase, ducking to avoid banging his head on the low ceiling. The hinges creak as he slips in.
    “Is Lata here?” He asks.
    “Lata has gone back to the village,” says Roshni, a chatty woman with bulging hips who, now in her thirties, has risen up the ranks to become the keeper of this three-room affair. “But you can sit with Payal if you like.”
    To sit, baithna in Hindi, is a euphemism sex workers use.
    The man looks at Payal, plopped on a bamboo mat on the floor beside me, the ringlets in her hair escaping from a loose bun. He hesitates. Payal remains silent, expressionless, tuned to the 14-inch TV on the wall rather than the prospective customer.
    His eyes flit from her to me. He shakes his head no and slinks back down the stairs.
    My obviously alien presence embarrassed him, I know. He was squeamish about buying sex while an outsider watched.
    I’m torn between satisfaction my interview wasn’t interrupted and guilt over depriving Payal of rare afternoon business. I am no longer naïve enough to believe I’ve saved her from the indignity of selling her body.
    Roshni resumes narrating the story of how she ended up in Mumbai. The burn scars on her upper arms mark when her husband doused her with a pot of boiling mutton stew. Roshni demonstrates how she had been curled up at the time, “with my legs like this, held against my chest,” she says. “It’s a good thing or I would have gotten completely burned. I’d just had an operation to stop myself from having babies.”
    Roshni left home that day with her two young children. For hours she walked along a country road because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of sitting on a bus reeking of mutton stew.
    At her parents’ house, the husband of Roshni’s older sister tried to sleep with her. She left and found a job as a maid at a hotel. The owner tried to take advantage of her. She accepted a woman’s offer to work at a cotton shop in Mumbai. It turned out to be a brothel. But by the time she realized she’d been tricked, it was too late. Roshni had children to feed, whether by working loom or loins.
    Roshni’s story is hardly unique. In dozens of interviews with sex workers and their children, almost all have told me stories of absent men — usually dead fathers