MINA 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.”
MAHENDAR 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.’
MINA 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.”
In recent years, the panchayat has been trying to erase this village’s association with ‘the line’. According to a panchayat ruling, families were free to send their girls to the cities, but they could not operate inside the village. Those who, like Mina’s sisters, didn’t agree with the panchayat were exiled to the outskirts of the village but the harassment, says Mina, continues.
It’s nightfall by the time we reach Shilpa and Shalini’s home. As the Bolero swings down the sandy path, we see an old man, possibly Mina’s father, on a charpai outside. He’s been woken from a nap and is glaring at the car. Mina ignores him completely and goes into the house, calling out for her sisters.
The house, built by those who have always lived in cramped environments, is clearly playing out the fantasy of space. One first enters a large corridor, half-open on one side, which serves no obvious purpose except to announce itself as a luxuriant emptiness. It is filled with a melee of children, like a kindergarten gone berserk. Mina strides into one of the three rooms strung along this corridor.
Shilpa, a tall, fair, buxom woman, joins us. Her elder daughter, Priya, has just finished Class VIII in the village school and she will have to go to the city if she is to study ahead. Shilpa is anxious.
“I don’t want to send her to the city,” says Shilpa to Mina, and Mina says, “The city boys will put her in the bazaar, haan.”
Girls from communities like the Bedias, that are known to send their daughters into the line, are reviled. Boys will mock Priya for being a Bedia, and call her names. Shilpa describes the trouble she’s recently had educating Priya. After an accident in Sawai Madhopur district in March 2010, when a bus packed with students and teachers collided with a jugaad—a makeshift truck—and plunged off a bridge, killing 28 people, jugaads were banned in the state. For children like Priya, who had to walk a long distance to get a bus to school and were dependant on the jugaad, this was a blow. Shilpa says she’s been anxious about Priya returning home from school in the darkness of early winter evenings.
“Where’s Shalini?” I ask, about their eldest sister.
“Oh, she’s around,” says Shilpa.
She says she’s considering sending Priya to Jhunjhunu, 250 km away, where there is a good residential school. No one in Jhunjhunu will know about Priya’s antecedents. Echoing Mina, Shilpa says that the only thing that matters to her now is educating her daughter and seeing to it that she gets a good job.
“And then she’ll marry?” I ask.
“If she finds a good man. Out of one hundred men, ninety are crooks,” says Shilpa.
I watch the sisters talk, the camaraderie between them. Children go in and out of the room, fiddling with the television controls, finishing bottles of soft drinks and depositing them proudly on the table before us, clamouring to be held by Shilpa. Most of the children belong to the three brothers, who, with their wives, live in their own set of rooms at the back of the house. Each has eight or nine children. Their wives, the ‘bahus’, come in with their heads covered to be introduced to me. They are small, emaciated, shy-looking women with none of the easy confidence that Mina and Shilpa have. (The wives of Bedia men are rarely sent into prostitution.) The bahus mumble namastes and then drag their children away from the TV. Hung high on one wall of the room is a pristine pink teddy bear in a see-through plastic bag, way out of the reach of any of the kids. On another wall hangs a laminated blow-up of a strikingly beautiful, long-haired, jeans-clad girl, sprawled languidly against some cushions.
The sisters are talking about marriage. Shilpa is telling Mina the story of a village girl who was married off, and then went to visit a bar-dancer cousin in Mumbai. Seeing her cousin wearing makeup and nice clothes and going out to restaurants regularly, the girl returned with the idea that she wasn’t interested in the husband any more. She was adamant about going into the line. The marriage had to be annulled and the money that the groom’s family had spent on the wedding returned to them by the girl’s family. Mina sighs and rolls her eyes at me, her expression saying—see, there are girls like this too. As for Mina, her heart was never in the line. She hated it from the beginning, which doesn’t mean that she didn’t put on her high heels and dance all night—‘akhi akhi raat’—even when she had fever or had hurt her foot. It doesn’t mean that she scrimped on sending money to her brothers and parents, and clothes for her sisters-in-laws, nephews and nieces.
Shalini comes in finally, scrubbed and glowing. It turns out that she’s been with a client in one of the huts they have out in front. She’s just washed her face free of the makeup she had put on for him. Unlike Mina, both Shalini and Shilpa have remained in the village but they don’t ‘sit in the bazaar’ any more. They have old customers who return to them, most of them out-of-towners from Agra and Jaipur. It was one such man that Shalini was with, a tourist who is a regular visitor to the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary nearby.
“That’s my daughter, Aditi,” says Shalini, pointing to the photograph on the wall. “And this,” she says, lifting up a snotty, wild-haired toddler, “is her daughter. She has two more.”
“You’d never guess Aditi’s a mother of three,” says Mina. “She’s kept her figure.”
Aditi was a bar dancer who now acts in television serials in Mumbai and drives a scooter. She speaks English and is as fair as a foreigner, according to her mother and aunts. When she visited a few weeks ago, all the other kids thought she was a tourist and ran after her, asking for toffees. There are photographs of her in the other rooms too; she is clearly the family hero, the girl who turned her disadvantage on its head.
I am starting to appreciate the tricky calculus of relationships that Mina and her sisters have to negotiate. Mina has had the immeasurable good luck of finding a man willing to marry her despite her background. And a good man at that—one who not only doesn’t beat her, but doesn’t smoke or drink either. Out of the scores of women they know who have gone into the line, the sisters can’t think of anyone who has had similar luck. Their aunt eventually found a good man too—a Sikh doctor—but he was married and had a family. He didn’t marry the aunt, but maintained her and her children as a second family, in secret from his wife.
Shalini is suspicious of men—what if the man she marries runs off with her money? The sisters start to talk about their parents, who got married as children—he was 15 and she was 12. They then tell me the story of a district level government official who recently got his daughter married at the age of 11, even though, before the law, a girl must be 18 to marry. Someone tipped off the police but by the time they made it to the man’s house, he had taken his daughter to the groom’s village and quickly got the pheras done.
Every choice about their future open to these three dignified and articulate women is a choice, I realise, determined by men. We say our goodbyes. Back on the road, the headlights pick out a small, dolled-up girl, no older than 15, sitting regally on a charpai in the dark, waiting. A little further off, two boys and two girls are in a huddle, probably discussing rates. A pujari stands silhouetted in the doorway of a small Shiva temple by the roadside. “The temple is an alibi,” says Mina. The man is both the girls’ keeper and their pimp. He ensures that the clients don’t mistreat them and he also makes certain that the girls don’t run away.
THE NEXT DAY I am back in Mina’s village. There is someone she wants me to meet, an old lady whom she calls ‘Tai’. Tai makes excellent kajal from pure ghee and burnt matchsticks. Mina wants some of it. A group of curious children follows us into Tai’s old house—a tiny courtyard with a verandah running on two sides. She is lying under a filthy quilt on a charpai—a small, motionless heap.
“Tai!” screams Mina, because Tai is deaf, and Tai gets up hurriedly. She has a hollowed out face and there is a large wound scabbing on her forehead, but it’s something in her right foot that’s troubling her. The foot is swaddled in dirty bandages. She throws aside her quilt, revealing wasted brown shanks. On the wall is a shelf holding an ancient, dust-blackened bottle of medicine and under her bed a thali with a bit of dal left in it. Someone usually brings her lunch.
Despite everything, Tai is still beautiful. She has large, inquisitive eyes, which dominate her small face. She speaks in a normal tone of voice in response to what is shouted at her, thus making her interlocutor appear handicapped rather than herself.
Mina tells me what she knows of Tai’s story. Mina had a friend in the village, Pooja, who was married off and went to live with her husband in Delhi. Tai is Pooja’s father-in-law’s mistress, who outlived her mother-in-law and was always treated as part of the family. When everyone died or left and there was no one to take care of her in the family home in Agra, Pooja moved Tai to the village, into her own now-deserted home, and got the neighbours to keep an eye on her. Mina looks in on her from time to time. Tai has been running a fever; Mina and Mahendar took her to the hospital yesterday. She is not sure what is causing the problem in the foot, but she thinks it might be connected to the fever.
“It’s all the same to Tai whether she’s dead or alive,” says Mina affectionately. “She’s returned from death so many times.”
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“What is your name?” bellows Mina.
“What?” asks Tai, looking confused.
“What is your name?”
“Roopvati.”
Tai belongs to Gorakhpur, a city she describes by saying that its men tend to be simple and straightforward—seedhe. Mina tells me that she’s heard that Tai has been in the line too but Tai tells us a different story. When she was a young girl, her ‘husband’-to-be—a married man—and his father came to Gorakhpur looking for a bride for the youngest boy in the family. When her ‘husband’ saw Roopvati, he said to his father: Give this one to me, we’ll find another one for my brother. Roopvati’s relatives warned her that he would throw her into a well.
“But he didn’t throw me into a well,” she says tenderly. “I was fine, I ate everything I wanted to during his reign.”
When her man fell sick, she spent `100,000 on his hospital treatment.
“I just wanted him to get well. I fell at the doctor’s feet. The doctor promised me that he would cure him.”
When he died, she had a stone chabutra (stone bird-feeder) built in his memory.
Tai explains that she doesn’t have any children. When she was five months pregnant, someone did black magic on her by putting blood on her comb. She had a miscarriage and never had children since.
“How old are you?” I ask Tai.
She looks around at the children gathered near her bed, points to a boy of about 15 who has brought her some water in a brass pitcher, and says, “When I was his age, Mahatma Gandhi died.”
Tai remembers going to a large maidan in Gorakhpur with her brother and listening to Gandhi speak. She starts to sing in a surprisingly strong, clear voice the sabak, or lesson she learnt from the Mahatma: “Uth jaag musafir, bhor bhayee/Ab rain kahan jo sowat hai/ Jo sowat hai woh khowat hai/Jo jaagat hai woh paawat hai (Wake up wanderer, it’s morning/ It isn’t night any longer that you sleep/ The one who sleeps is the one who loses/ The one who wakes is the one who gains).”
Mina sits down with Tai on her charpai and Tai gives her some kajal in a small, shiny aluminum dibbi. Then we leave, our large entourage moving off with us, and Tai remains sitting there, staring at us with her astonishing eyes.
Will it end like this for Mina too—alone in some corner, nursing only sickness and memories? Walking back to her house in silence, I suddenly ask her, “Are you happy, Mina?”
“Of course,” says Mina quickly before anything like emotion can slip through. “Anyone who leaves the line can only be happy.”
Names and some details have been changed.
Excerpted from Because I am a Girl, an anthology forthcoming from Ebury Books in December