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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Walking the Line
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| Forced into prostitution as a child, a former sex worker finds her way out and then comes back home |
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Published : 1 December 2011 |
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| The photographs featured here are part of a series by Panos photographer Abbie Trayler-Smith taken in the Bharatpur district of Rajasthan. These images do not represent any of the characters in this piece.
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| M |
INA IS STANDING barefoot in a faded nightie at the counter of her little shop, selling small packets of homemade gur sweets, sachets of shampoo and washing powder, and bottles of soft drinks to the children who come up to the shop with coins clutched in their sweaty fists. She’s also selling hot samosas at  4 a piece, wrapped in squares of old |
newspaper. Her husband, Mahendar, is frying the samosas on a kerosene stove in an adjoining room.
“They’re not perfect today,” he says. “The crust should be a little softer, more chewy.”
Sitting on the floor of the shop in a T-shirt and jeans, the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, Abhilasha, is cutting the dough left over from the samosas into fat strips, which Mahendar will later fry into namkeen. Every time she notices me looking at her, she flicks back her long, shiny hair, smiles to herself and continues her namkeen-cutting with renewed seriousness. No one bothers to swat away the flies that work diligently on every surface in still, black droves. Mahendar has one ear on the TV playing in the inner room. A crucial India-Australia cricket match is on. As soon as there’s a power cut, which is about every 15 minutes, he switches on the battery-operated transistor standing near the stove. On his forearm, a tattooed word has been inked over, and the word ‘Mina’ is tattooed next to it.
Mina ignores the cricket. From time to time, she steps away from the counter and leans against the doorjamb separating the two rooms to continue with the story she’s telling me.
Before she married Mahendar seven years ago, Mina used to be a bar dancer in Mumbai. In 2005, the family returned to this village in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur district to set up life in the very place from which Mina had made her journey outward, following the compulsions of her trade as a sex worker. Mina belongs to the once-nomadic Bedia community—scattered over Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh—whose men are known to sell their sisters and daughters into prostitution.
At one point, after a customer has called her out and she’s returned, I say to Mina, the thread of our earlier conversation having been broken, “Tell me something nice that you remember about your life in Mumbai.”
“I don’t remember anything, I’ve forgotten everything,” says Mina smiling.
She has small, shiny teeth and the kajal glistening in her eyes is the only makeup she’s wearing. She could be an elder sister to Abhilasha. Mina speaks slowly and at the end of every second sentence, she drawls a slow ‘Haan’, for emphasis and gives a charming little shake of her head.
“How many years did you spend in Mumbai?”
“Two.”
“And how did you meet Mahendar?”
“He was working there, as a manager in the dance bar. Haan.”
As it turns out, Mina remembers a great deal—both about Mumbai and about her life in the village as the daughter of a man who tried and failed to do a little farming to make ends meet. Her mother, she says, only managed to serve them one meal a day of coarse chappatis and chutney. Mina’s four brothers, illiterate like their parents, earned 100 to 150 a day washing plates at dhabas. From there they graduated to breaking stones for a living. For some time they shepherded goats. Mina remembers trying to stay awake through winter nights as a 12 year old. Her father would make a fire out of a few sticks, and he, along with Mina and her two sisters, would camp by the Agra-Jaipur highway, hoping to hook a customer—anyone willing to pay for half an hour with any of the girls. She remembers how there was a time when she was servicing up to 15 trucker clients a day in one of the little concrete huts off the road, screened by bushes, which her father and brothers built once the business got going. She remembers playing marbles as a 15 year old, oblivious to the fact that she was pregnant with Abhilasha.
As Mina tells me all this, standing before me, playing with the beads of her mangalsutra, I wait to detect a note of bitterness or rage.
“My father used to lie in a drunken stupor all day,” says Mina matter-of-factly. “My sisters look after him now.”
Mina’s elder sisters, who stayed back in the village, have built a house where their three brothers and their wives and children live, along with their father. They also take care of the youngest brother who isn’t married yet.
“What does he do?”
Nothing,” says Mina, in a tone that suggests ‘obviously nothing’. “We used to try to send him to school but he ran back every time. We’d beat him and send him back and then he’d run away again so we let him be. Haan,” she says then, smiling her attractive smile, extending the plate of just-fried samosas that Mahendar has handed her. “Here, have a samosa.”
“And your mother?”
“Woh toh off ho gayi,” says Mina, momentarily distracted by a car advertisement on TV. “She broke her leg and became very weak; I gave her a bottle of blood, so did my elder brother. But then she just stopped eating and drinking.”
“Did she come to visit you when you lived in Mumbai?”
“Of course, lots of times.”
“Did she ever feel bad about what she and your father had to make you do?”
“Everyone knows the pain involved. But what’s the point of feeling bad? Majboori thi,” says Mina. She grows thoughtful for a minute, then adds, “If she’d asked me, I’d have answered back because I was earning. I’d have said—why didn’t you ask me before? Ab toh jaisa kat raha hai waisa kat raha hai.”
“So you never spoke about it with your parents?” I persist.
“We were poor,” explains Mina patiently. “We didn’t have enough to eat. What can people do in these villages? They can either make hooch from gur or send their girls into the trade.”
“I’ve been speaking to a few other women and they say that things are changing, that they will never send their own girls into this line,” I say.
“That’s what they say,” says Mahendar gruffly, who’s been listening to us silently for a while, “because they have a little money in their hands. As soon as the money goes, what option will they have left? It’s not like these women are married. It’s not like they’re running a business from which they’ll keep raising profits.”
“They really want to educate their girls, they want to send them out of the village to study,” I say.
“Mina used to go to school. Did that make a difference?” asks Mahendar.
Mina studied till Class IV in a government school before her work put an end to her studies. “I didn’t learn any English,” she says regretfully. “In those days they introduced ABC only in the sixth.” In the past few years, helping Abhilasha with her schoolwork, Mina has picked up enough, she proudly tells me, to be able to teach up to Class V students if she ever needs to.
There’s a subdued excitement in her when she talks about Abhilasha’s studies, which I notice a clear echo of in Mahendar’s voice. He has got it all worked out. He plans to help Abhilasha clear the entrance exams for the prestigious residential school—the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya. After that, he wants her to complete a BA in history, geography and political science. He’ll send her to Jaipur for coaching in the last year of her BA so that she can prepare for her Civil Services examination. Mahendar wants Abhilasha to return to Bharatpur district as a Collector.
“Of course, only if she has the aptitude for it,” he says after he has laid out this elaborate plan. Abhilasha calmly hands over the platter of cut namkeen to Mahendar. We could be discussing someone she has never heard of. Abhilasha was raised by her grandmother till she was four. When Mina and Mahendar married, they brought her to Mumbai. Now she goes to the school run by a local NGO.
“What do you think of this plan, Abhilasha?” I ask her.
“We’ll see,” she says, giggling, and starts to unpack a carton of biscuits that her father has bought for the shop.
Mahendar is done with his samosa frying and is finishing up the namkeen.
“Delicious samosa,” I say mopping up the last bits with the tangy saunth and the pudina chutney that Abhilasha gave me in small glass bowls.
“Not the best,” says Mahendar. “The dough should have been a little looser. You should try my lassi some time; I make the best lassi in the world. And Mina didn’t even know how to set good curd. I taught her how to make curd so thick you can cut it with a knife, like barfi, and as sweet as barfi too. Not sour at all.”
| M |
AHENDAR WAS BORN into the Yadav caste in Patiala, to a landed family that was related to the Nawab’s. His brother is a magistrate. One uncle was a colonel in the army; another an official in the telephone department, a very upright man who never took a bribe in his life. “Sahi ko tang nahi kiya, galat ko chhora nahi,” he says pithily of this relative. |
Early in life, Mahendar took some tough decisions. He decided that he would not depend financially on his family for any longer than he strictly needed to. He also decided that the woman he’d marry would be someone he had rescued from ‘the line’, an ambition of which even God might approve. “Bhagwan bhi bolein, waah kya kaam kiya hai. If I’d chosen to have an arranged marriage within my community that would have meant five lakh rupees and a Maruti car for me,” says Mahendar, smirking.
Mahendar privately completed a BA in history and then worked in a string of businesses before ending up as the manager of a dance bar in Thane on a salary of 30,000 a month. I ask him where he learnt to cook. “I learnt by watching,” he says. “My family had a mithai shop and I would watch. I never actually made the sweets myself,” he insists. “I just watched.”
Mahendar is at pains to establish that he is not what he appears to be—a vest-wearing halwai, grimy with sweat, frying samosas for a living. But neither does he tell me the story of his life in a straightforwardly chronological way. He starts enthusiastically on things, then veers off if I ask too many questions. When I show him my recorder and ask if I can switch it on, he’s very clear that I cannot.
“No recording and no photographs,” he says. “They’ll recognise my voice and my face.”
“Who are they?”
“People in Gurgaon, Delhi … they all know me,” he says vaguely.
He jumps from talking about learning how to make sweets to telling me about the time he decided to spread awareness about HIV among sex workers and landed up in Alwar district with bags full of free condoms. He was arrested for suspicious behaviour.
“Alwar is where you should go,” says Mahendar repeatedly.
He insists that I am in the wrong place if it is the exploitation of women I’m concerned about. Alwar is the district in Rajasthan that made national headlines in the summer of 2010 for a prostitution racket that thrived on the basis of injecting young girls with a veterinary drug called Oxytocin. Normally used to induce lactation in cows and buffalo, injecting Oxytocin into six- and seven-year-old girls caused them to reach puberty abnormally early and start looking like young women, ripe for what is known as the ‘flesh trade’.
Mahendar and Mina know Alwar. When she informed her parents that she was leaving the line and had found someone who wanted to marry her, they beat her and packed her off to Alwar. Mahendar traced her there, took her to Mumbai and married her.
Mahendar’s famous samosas have now run out and Mina laughs as she turns away the youth who come to buy more. She waters her plants—roses and marigolds in two pots on the wall—the small, lush flowers an incredible sight in this dusty village of open drains and lanes smeared with dirt and dung. A small boy appears, wailing, a sharp stone in his raised fist, poised to strike at the head of an even smaller child who is fleeing from him, squealing. Mina chides the children gently and the stone is eventually dropped. Mahendar is lamenting something in the cricket game. Glancing into the small, dark, inner room, I see melted gur glistening in plastic bags, lined up on the floor.
“What’s the gur for?” I ask no one in particular.
“It’s to make sweets with,” says Mahendar, while, simultaneously, Mina says, “It’s to make hooch with.” I decide to change the subject.
“I’ve met women who’ve been in the line and left but none of them have married. They either can’t find a man to marry them or they don’t want to,” I say to Mahendar. “You and Mina are a rarity.”
“How much do you think Australia will make? They’re batting like devils,” says Mahendar.
After he’s stepped in to check the score, he tells me, “Only five percent of all men can be trusted.” During his time as manager of the dance bar, run by one Shetty from Karnataka, Mahendar says that the men were nothing but trouble, both the paisewale men and the taporis: men who wanted to touch the girls, who got into fights, who got drunk and refused to leave. Also, he has seen scores of men marry bar dancers with the promise of rescuing them only to send them back into the line and live off their earnings. “My advice to the girls would always be, first live with the man for a year and observe his behaviour.”
After Mahendar and Mina got married, they ran a general store for a year in Chembur. It was doing well till the Mumbai floods of 2005, when Mahendar was marooned in the shop for two days and had to wade through water chest deep to get out. The water destroyed their goods. He never went back. They packed up and came to this village, not the one that Mina grew up in but close enough. I am curious to know what the village made of him.
“They all come to my shop. I stock Dove soap, I have sanitary pads. None of the other shops have these things.”
“Everyone treats us with respect,” says Mina. “How can they not? People have become crorepatis sending their girls into this line. Don’t be fooled by the appearance of this village, there are some very rich people here.”
“I know boys around here who live off their sisters’ earnings and wear gold chains this thick,” adds Mahendar. “Cielo, Mercedes, you name it, they have it.’
| M |
INA AND I ARE BUMPING along in a hired Bolero, going to meet her sisters, Shilpa and Shalini. She is telling me about her time in the Mira Road dance bar; she speaks of the bar dancers—as if unselfconsciously distancing herself from them—in the third person. They lived in an apartment building whose other residents had no clue about what |
the girls did for a living. They would dress in full-sleeved kurtas, their faces free of makeup, shoulder bags stuffed with their gear, and head out to the bar in the evening. To anyone who asked, they said they worked the night shift in a hospital.
“No one cares in Mumbai,” says Mina. “People there don’t make distinctions based on your caste or background." Then, perking up to a loud, clicking sound coming from the one of the houses we’re passing, she says, "Atte ki chakki. There’s no sound like the sound of a chakki."
Later we see some women feeding plants into a manually-operated fodder threshing machine and I ask our driver, Anil, to stop so we can take a better look at it. The women come up to the jeep, laughing, and I tell them I’ve never seen a machine like that before.
“Well, take a look at it now,” they say, amused.
“We’re going to my sisters’ village,” Mina tells them and they wave as we move away.
As the Bolero negotiates the narrow village lanes, I read signs promoting education painted in blue letters on white-washed walls: “Pehle dein shiksha daan, phir karein kanya daan (Education first, marriage afterwards)” and “Hum bachchon ka ek hi nara, bhaymukt ho school hamara (We children have just one desire/ Let us not be afraid of school).”
On the radio, a man is dispensing advice to mothers in a fatherly voice. “Roast a little wheat flour in ghee, boil it with water or milk, add some sugar and feed it to the infant. Also feed your child a boiled mash of whatever vegetable is in season.” I try to remember the statistics for child malnutrition in India. Do we have the worst record in the world or the second worst?
Soon we’re out of the village and driving past fields of ripened wheat. There is also arhar dal and kala channa—crops which require very little water. It’s harvest time for the kala channa. A woman riding pillion on a motorcycle ahead of us keeps picking the tender green pods off the stalks she’s holding and popping them into her mouth. Anil laughs. “By the time they get home, there’ll be nothing left on those stalks.”
Lorries rumble towards us carrying huge slabs of the red sandstone this area is famous for—the same stone that Akbar had the nearby Fatehpur Sikri built from.
“Do you think this will end? Will families ever stop sending their daughters into the line?” I ask Mina.
“Earlier people had very little sense,” says Mina. “They thought that all that mattered was being fed. If you had food to eat, however you got it, you were fine. It’s only now that people think about the future.”
“What do you see when you think of your future?”
“All I want is that Abhilasha should study and get a job, even if it’s a five thousand rupee a month job. I’ve told my brothers as well—educate your children and save for the future. Things are going to get very expensive. And there’s trouble in this line too. They’re closing down the dance bars in Mumbai, and there’s some lafda happening in Delhi too. And the huts where my sisters used to see their clients … the panchayat has had most of them broken down and they haven’t even got compensation.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Deepti
9 December 2011
04:02 PM
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this is the first time i have ever read such a story though article, i was just going though Mumbi mirrorr and came across dis one, it was really good real life storywork done by you well written well phrased as i read novels also it was as good as reading a novel for appx1 hr or less than that
imagining each scene of the story thanks to you and even thanks to you to show that a women's destiny is always unpredictable my best wishes to to mina and mahendar !!|
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