Unguarded in Kamathipura- 2
First job in the red light area of Mumbai
First things first, a very huge thank you to each one you who reached out and shared your love and your responses for my last blog on working in the red light area. Your questions were so genuine and rightly directed, please do remember that the world needs more of you and us. For the ones who have joined me now, please do read my previous blogs on my journey from wanting to become a journalist and ending up as a social sector professional. This blog is my medium to reach out to more and more people and make them aware (through my experience) about the grass root realities of our underprivileged communities.
I had completed 6 months working in the red light area, I was about to be 25 years in the next 4 months. As a normal routine of a middle class family, my father had already started looking for “the right match” and had also found a match in Mumbai. Talk about timing, huh? I had no idea about any of this as I was busy making sense of my job and my work and the situations. One fine day he called and informed me that he is coming to meet me the next day with his younger cousin. He tricked me saying he wants to see my office (while he also wanted to meet the right match he had found) and I was excited and awkward at the same time. You see, by now the women in the area knew me and I knew them. It was just too difficult to see my dad entering that area. And then my office was a broken school building. I had no idea what to tell him and so I decided to go with the flow.
My dad, chacha and I started off early and it was around 9 am and as we were walking towards the lane, my anxiousness began to increase. And just then, the workers standing outside the brothel started shouting, “Oh Babu, Waise to mera rate 500 hai, per tere liye discount mai 400. Aaaja o Babu,” (O Babu, My rate is 500 but for you I can give a discount and fix at 400. Come Babu!) and I decided to never remember my dad’s and uncle’s uneasiness. I joined my hands and shouted back, “O Didi, Papa aur Chacha hain please mat Karo na!” (O didi, this is my dad and chacha, please forgive us) and they laughed and giggled. We reached my office and I showed them the anganwadi and the recreation hall and my seat. I introduced him to some of the girls who had come to study and then they both patiently waited to meet my boss. There’s a funny thing with dads, their every interaction with your boss or your colleague or in-laws feels like another parents teachers meeting! He literally asked my boss if I was doing a good job and congratulated her for doing such incredible work.
There have been uncountable moments where I have felt proud of my dad but this remains my favourite. He has broken every damn taboo I thought existed and has remained the most powerful support of my life. Well, going to focus on Kamathipura in this blog but promise to tell you all about the “right match(s)” and I how I dodged them all for 4 long years all in a separate blog, because sometimes our dads are just like they are supposed to be and they care about the society and the culture and the caste and the family and everything that’s secondary for us. You can’t blame them, can you? This is generation gap and is the most constant thing between us and our parents.
And while I was personally dealing with trivial issues like how to not get married, the situation in Kamathipura remained unchanged. We all understand why HIV is so much prominent in the red light areas. Any person who takes the chance of having multiple physical partners without protection is prone to HIV. What I am trying to highlight is that multiple partners isn’t a new concept. It’s been prevalent in our mythology, in history, in our society and to be frank, in our lives. Yet, red light area has the maximum cases of HIV. Just to give you some facts, the governments, NGOs and some corporates have done incredible work on ground to create awareness for HIV, just as they did for Polio which is now eradicated from India. Whereas for HIV, India has the third largest ranking in the world, with 2.1 million people living with HIV. India’s epidemic is concentrated among key affected populations, including sex workers and men who have sex with men.
When I visited the brothels for my outreach, I saw drawers full of condoms and when I asked women, they knew everything they were supposed to know about it too. I wondered and asked them why there was no decline in the increasing number of new HIV infections. And the answer surprised me. The women told me that the men commanded that they will not use protection as it did not satisfy them enough. They paid extra to the women and often beat them too when they insisted to use protection. As a result, the women ended up being HIV positive (and so did the men) either for a few extra bucks or for the fear of getting beaten up. And in the worst case scenario, most of the women never revealed they were positive as it would take away their only source of earning and were forever stubborn to get themselves checked at the hospitals. If you do not know, HIV doesn’t show any symptoms. It gives a slow death which kills the immunity system gradually and after some years one could just die of viral fever or a common cold. So, they chose to hide it till they died.
And the condition was much worse. My job was also to identify new skills for the women (only who were 45+ and were permitted by the brothel owners) like tailoring, beauty parlour courses or helping them train for small scale industries like papad and aachar making. How we decided this you ask? Please note that these women were trafficked at the age of 7-15 years and almost all of them were illiterate. It might be difficult to imagine but most of these women did not even know where they were. Their lives were confined to the gate of their brothel where they sold themselves always at less to their beds that never gave them a good night’s sleep.
And we had strict instructions from the pimps and the brothel owners to never teach them how to form full sentences because if they learned that, there was a small window for them to write something to someone or reach out to someone that could lead to their escape. So, we could teach them how to write ‘A’ but not apple. In short, we could only teach them the alphabets and help them identify currency notes and their value. But some women were smart and one day one of them wrote “आम” (mango) as it was her favourite fruit and when my colleague praised her, she beamed with joy! Well, the pimp who was watching all this went straight to the brothel owner who came after us with abuses, took away all the books from all the women, went outside and in no time she burnt it all. We had to literally fold our hands for hundred times and ask for forgiveness from the brothel owner. The only reason why she allowed us was because we got free medicines for all the women. We continued to go but were never allowed to teach again in that brothel. And that was the repercussion of teaching and learning one damn word.
Therefore, we could only identify skills that did not require any form of literacy. We did a need analysis to understand what these women would like to do and short-listed tailoring, beauty parlour courses, etc. We reached out to hundreds of women and some came too but the attendance kept decreasing. Sometimes, the women were tired or drunk and most of the times they just did not see any sense in learning a new skill. They were so used to their life that giving them any form of hope was also hopeless. They used to come to me and tell me, “Madam, hum 300-400 aadhe ghante mai kama lete hain, aap kyun humse itna kaam karva rahe ho?” (We easily earn 300-400 in half an hour, why are you making us work hard?) But my organisation did not give up and though the attendance was low, we did all the outreach we could and kept ourselves content even if 2-3 of them learned a new skill. There were some beautiful case studies where the women after 40 years of being in the red light area, opened their “idli cart” or became a tailor or got married to their lovers who paid the debt to the brothel owner and took them away from their misery. But this was 1 in a 1000 or even 10,000 case scenario.
This is everyday life for more than 1 lakh women in Kamathipura alone. This happens in the middle of the highest and the most sophisticated buildings in South Mumbai. And every one who should work towards their betterment, knows their situation, be it the government or the police. The havaldaars weekly collect their commissions and pretend to raid a lane once in a while to tick a check-box from their job responsibilities. And none of the governments care and turn a very convenient blind eye towards the whole issue at large because what’s in it for them?
Can these women vote? No.
Is there a possibility of them voting in the near future? No.
Does it matter anymore? No.
And this is the area (the lowest level of brothels) where organisations are allowed to enter or work for sex workers but according to estimates, human trafficking in India may affect between 20 to 65 million people. So you do the math and you’ll know that we are catering to a very small percent. There are hundreds of high level brothels that are involved with the trafficking of minors and are untouched. We don’t know the names of the people who are involved, we have no idea how they function and it wont’t be a surprise if we never know anything about them because who the hell is asking the question?? No one. It’s true that all of us cannot go and work in the red light area, but the only thing we can do is ask the right questions to the people we elect as our government: for us, and for the people who are not given a chance to ask questions. That’s the least we can do and we must do.
The next part will focus on the young girls who face the persistent danger of inter generation prostitution and the dreadful life they continue to live. It will also shed some light on my decision to leave my job and what did I learn after facing these failures.
Please do spare sometime from the much hyped and nonsense debates like who is found with 80 grams of weed or why did the government ban crackers and not let you celebrate your festival or anything that that the current journalists (you know who) shout for. Move away. Reflect on what the real issues are and do realise that until we do not ask the right questions, our news channels will just have monkeys shouting on top of their voices for the things that don’t really matter and we will just change channels hoping to hear something relevant someday.
Hoping we start with the smallest steps. NOW.
Love,
Ankita
Good going yaar..... Continue to do the same😘