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

he’ll give you more money for sex without a condom. And sometimes, when you love someone, you don’t want him to wear a condom.”
    I admire how Prashant deftly balances sensitivity and practicality. I begin to study his approach. He doesn’t do what so many of us Indians do when it comes to sex and euphemize or omit uncomfortable words and subjects. He is forthright. How would my society be different if everyone approached talking about sex this way? Even at a brothel, the men and women who are exchanging sex for money speak in coded terms and suggestive looks. How much more oblique must the average Indian be in other settings?
    From here on I will speak frankly, I decide.
    Still, the women are used to Prashant and unaccustomed to me. Many days, no one has the energy or desire to answer my detailed personal questions. Some decline to be interviewed, or give monosyllabic answers and gaze away. Others are thrilled to talk, though, and — slowly, slowly — I start to become an expert on Kamathipura.
    There are at least 10,000 women living in this cluttered mix of concrete buildings and flimsy shanties. Some estimates place that figure five times as high, but it’s impossible to know because there’s scant documentation and many people stay in the shadows. In addition to those who reside here full-time, there are also many other women who have separate homes but come into the area to work.
    There is no standard brothel, but one defining characteristic is darkness, even during the day. Most of the buildings have honeycomb grills on the windows that block natural light. Within these labyrinthine buildings, each brothel has two to a half-dozen cubicles arranged around a common area. The interiors are generally clean, as the brothel-keeper — often an older female sex worker — assigns the young women housekeeping chores. But the hallways and stairways are moldy and filthy with red betel juice splattered on the walls and garbage nesting in the corners.
    Early on during my reporting, the women at a sprawling, mazelike 500-bed brothel called Simplex told me a police raid a few months earlier had chased away many sex workers and clients. Sex work is not illegal, per se, but soliciting and living off the earnings of a prostitute is. Police sporadically crack down on the pimps and brothel-keepers who rely on this money, often collecting hefty bribes in the process. Some of the women are accused of pimping younger women. Others are treated as victims and dispatched to state-run shelter homes until the magistrate orders their release.
    Many women in Kamathipura have been through this ordeal, and I become determined to learn why so many people who’ve been “rescued” return here. Oasis India, a nonprofit organization working on the rehabilitation of sex workers, agrees to help me gain access to a state-run shelter home. But they say it will be impossible to enter as a journalist, advising me to pose as a fund-raiser for their organization instead.
    I am conflicted. Isn’t it my professional responsibility to represent myself truthfully? But these homes are one of the only solutions the Indian government offers sex workers. Ultimately, I can’t pass up the opportunity to see one from the inside.
    When I arrive at the shelter home in Chembur, a neighborhood in the city’s east, I am strictly forbidden from speaking to the women. But, locked behind bars in cramped quarters where almost a hundred bodies wilt on bunk beds or mattresses on the floor without sheets or pillows, their faces say it all.
    The women are allowed outdoors for only one hour each day, under staff supervision at all times. They are compelled to attend sewing and craft classes each morning even though the teachers themselves rarely show up.
    The spirits here are so much more broken than in the brothels. The air is thick with utter defeat. In Kamathipura, I sometimes see women with vacant stares, but others wear an aura of defiance, a confidence born from