Under a red light, anguish and resignation are bedfellows

Far removed from the glitzy world of escort services, Mumbai’s prostitutes continue to suffer in silence

“Many girls have died of Aids in the last two to three years,” says 42-year-old Padmini.  She’s sitting in a small dark room in Mumbai’s red light district — Kamathipura. Her grief is recognisable in her voice, but those emotions are not reflected on her face. She remains stoic. Padmini came to Mumbai 20 years ago from Karnataka. She spent the better part of her youth working as a prostitute; now she cooks for the younger lot. Age forced her to change her job. “It was becoming difficult to attract customers as I grew older,” she says.

It’s noon, and most of the sex workers have yet to wake. An hour later, a few emerge from their single-storied hutments. Their dwellings are uniform in their unsightly appearance with tiny box-like excuses for windows on the first floor. The entrances are closed from public view by flimsy curtains.

It’s the twelfth lane in Kamathipura, and Sheila and Nishita are residents. They shell out Rs1,500 each, per month, on rent, to the landlady. But they are not the only occupants; they share the space with three other colleagues. Sheila, 35, is originally from Nepal.

“Poverty made me take up this profession,” she says. It’s the same story with most of the women here. “I charge Rs50 to Rs60 per customer; this fetches me a monthly income of about Rs3,000, half of which goes on rent,” she says. Sheila insists that her customers use condoms. And if they refuse? “Then I simply turn them down; I don’t want to die of Aids.” She says that she doesn’t entertain alcoholics either.

Wearing a long red dress, she sits on a charpoy spread at the entrance to her house. The casual expression on her face dissolves when she talks about her children. “The rest is used to ensure that her children are educated. “I have a six-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, both of whom are studying in a home in Matunga. I don’t want my daughter to become a prostitute like me. I won’t let her be part of this world,” she says. Eventually, Sheila will return to her home in Nepal.

With more than one lakh prostitutes working in Mumbai alone, 20 per cent are minor, and police raids are a regular occurrence. Damodar Hande, a CID officer attached to the Nagpada police station, says, “We conduct raids based on tip-offs. Minors are either sent to a shelter or we try to send them back home. However, if adult sex-workers choose to continue to work in the brothels, we don’t have much of an option, but to set them free.” Women who are forced to work usually leave, but many simply go back to work.

Rani, who is originally from Kolkata, has her room on the eleventh lane in Kamathipura. She almost managed to escape from her profession when one of her customers married her, and took her away from “this inhuman world”. But her joy was short-lived when her husband left her for another woman, and forced her to leave their home. “I eventually had to come back here. With children to care for, and no support or shelter whatsoever, prostitution was the only way I could make money,” she says.

Rani’s older son is in the tenth grade. “He’s very intelligent, and wants to become a doctor.” But he doesn’t know his mother’s true profession. “He thinks I work as a house-maid. He will die if he ever learns the truth,” says Rani; the fear in her eyes is quite evident. Her younger son is three-years-old, and has just returned from a night-care centre that’s run by the NGO, Prerana.

At night, while their mothers work, the children - both boys and girls — are either shoved under the beds or left to wander the streets at night. “We started Prerana to protect these children by offering them a night-care centre,” says Priti Patkar, founder and secretary of Prerana. According to Priti, often, older boys would end up becoming pimps while girls were seen as an “indirect sexual gratification by accompanying their mothers”.

Little has changed in Kamathipura, the narrow gritty streets, the cell-like homes. Only the faces of the women change. In the evening, the women will get ready for another night’s work. But their anguish, and their resignation, seeps through their make-up.

h_ansari@dnaindia.net