or drunk, abusive husbands — illiteracy, and no decent jobs. In addition to their own sustenance, a great many are responsible for their elderly parents, daughters, and sons.
These tales are brutal, but from each I try to glean insights that might help me diagnose why sex work is so rampant and devastating in India.
Besides the mental strain, reporting from Kamathipura poses another challenge. I am an outsider. I must be careful. When I visited the brothels as a college student, the field workers of the NGO I volunteered with never left me alone. A young woman, fair and tall, they told me, would attract curious and lewd stares from pimps and johns. They sought to avoid trouble.
When I decided to return to Kamathipura more recently as a reporter, I still didn’t feel comfortable walking around the area and going into the brothels completely alone. I came to an arrangement with a community organization in the red-light district, a federation of sex workers called Asha Darpan. They allow me to come to their office — a hole in the wall sandwiched between a shoe-repair store and a vendor of fried snacks — and I accompany the staff to brothels for health check-ups and to distribute condoms. I tell them where I will be and am free to speak with whomever I want. They pick me up when it’s time to leave.
From noon to 7 p.m. — when dhandha , or sex work, is slowest — I do my reporting, armed with a notebook and recorder, dressed in my baggy, washed-out salwaar khameezes. Sometimes the sex workers running the organization interrogate me for a while first. They are understandably perplexed by my endeavor. My home, an eight-minute train ride from theirs, is as foreign as another planet. It can be exasperating trying to explain what the heck I am doing here.
Roshni, at the end of our interview, asks the usual dreaded questions. Why are you writing all this down? What are you going to get out of it? I stumble to convey how I desire to be the sort of reporter who doesn’t just chase the news but tells the stories of people without a voice, without recourse.
But Sailesh, a transgender sex worker and peer counselor at Asha Darpan who has come to collect me at the end of my visit, cuts me off.
“See, you and me,” he says to Roshni, “we’re from this line.”
What line? I wonder.
“She,” Sailesh motions to me with his chin, “is from the family line.”
“People in the family line, they think sex workers only do dhandha. But there’s much more to our lives — we have homes, we cook food, we have children. She wants to see what that is. She writes it down so she can tell other people in the family line that, actually, this is what sex workers do.”
The family line. I never thought about it that way before. But the phrase makes sense in the context of a group that feels shunned by India’s intractable notions of family values and rigid morality. I belong to a different “line,” not only because of socioeconomics but because of my ability to have familial relationships instead of transactional ones, dhandha.
I learned something important today, I know, and Sailesh’s validation of my reporting is welcome, too. My confidence has been sagging.
The broken family lives of the sex workers explain, in part, why they end up in Kamathipura. I also need to understand, however, what dhandha is really like for these women, a difficult topic to discuss. Indians avoid talking about intimacy. And young-ish Indian women certainly don’t go around asking strangers about their sex lives, let alone querying, “How much do you charge for a blow job?” I am nervous all the time. But I need to know.
One afternoon, I listen to the health counselor at Asha Darpan.
“Today, the results are good,” Prashant says to a woman who tests negative for HIV. “If you always want good results, you have to use condoms.”
“Sometimes, when you are drunk, you forget to tell him to wear a condom. Sometimes, the customer tells you
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