They might sell their bodies daily to men, but they also have tortured relationships with steady partners

They might sell their bodies daily to men, but they also have tortured relationships with steady partners



That morning, Sushmita Shetty’s lover Kuttalingam Nadar slit her throat and ran outside the tiny room where they had been sleeping. She just sat there, cupping her hands to her neck as it dripped blood, too shocked to shout. She couldn’t have even if she’d tried. Her vocal chords had been sliced.

Nadar ran out screaming that Sushmita was having fits and that somebody’s ghost had taken over her body. Outside, commotion ensued. A friend of Sushmita caught hold of Nadar, but he pushed her away, even though she managed to tear off his vest, a piece of it left in her hands as he tried to get away. He couldn’t. Other women chased and pinned him to the ground.

It was around 8:30 am, the stoves hadn’t yet been lit in Gulli No 14 of Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, and most sex workers were either asleep or servicing the last of the night’s clients before they could doze off till noon, wake up to cook food and get ready for another round of men to arrive.

The police came and took Nadar away. Short and dark, he used to be a truck driver and had been visiting Sushmita for a few months. They had become friends, and he had even loaned her some money. Some say he had asked it back and she had refused. That’s the version of the police. Others say she had taken another lover.

In the gullies of Kamathipura, that is one of many stories that sex workers tell of the love lives of their lot. There are many others. Murder cases left unsolved. Lovers who have disappeared. Like in Gulli No 11, where Salim locked himself in a room with the body of his lover, a young prostitute, for some three days; and when the stench grew too strong, he left.

In the neighbourhood, people are afraid to speak about the case of a young man who moved in with his prostitute lover and killed her once he found she was not being faithful to him. A tailor next to the brothel where this happened about a year ago says that thick blood had seeped out, flowing into the drains. That’s when he called the police. They broke open the door, and took the body away. At the Nagpada police station, the man in charge says it would be too much work to check in the piles of files the status of this particular case, but is certain it remains unsolved. In houses of sin, he says, many such things happen. And there are no lovers here, just men exploited by prostitutes—like in Sushmita’s case. She had taken Rs 40,000 from a truck driver who is now in prison.

Men are fools, according to the police officer. “There are many cases where men have been robbed, injured, or killed,” he says. “There are no stories here. You are in the wrong place, Miss.”

A policewoman is amused. She thinks the media is out to romanticise brothels. “I wouldn’t go there. What are you going to ask them? Who are their lovers? I will tell you. Pimps and migrants. They feed off each other,” she says.

But there is love. And of many kinds.

Like Khaja Bi’s. They say she had a lover who lived with her for 15 years, and she returned to her brothel in Gulli No 1 only after he died. It is a nostalgic love she talks about. With reluctance. Love is a malady, she feels, a condition—a fatal one. Once you have known love, lived it, it is hard to survive without it, she says.

For a long time now, Khaja Bi hasn’t taken much time in front of a mirror. Just enough to keep her going. She has loved many men. Out of desire. Out of need. But the memories of her lover torment her on most nights. Seventeen years ago, she fell in love with a man she met outside a paan shop. They flirted with each other, and he became a customer. The love, misunderstood as desire at first, soon became an obsession. She would constantly need him with her, and the man eventually moved in with her in a small room that she rented near Gulli No 1.

Khaja Bi used to be a man once. Perhaps that’s why she understands a man’s need of freedom, his inclinations towards polyamoury. She refused to marry him. They loved each other and lived together. She would carry on her dhanda as usual, and he would wait for her to finish, and then they would lie down and talk. Of household stuff. Of repairs. Of, say, a fresh coat of paint. His family came to see them and urged Khaja Bi to let him go. But he said he loved nobody but the eunuch. He said he would marry her and nobody else. Love was enough to keep them together.

“I didn’t want to ruin his life. Eunuchs are not meant to get married. We are cursed creatures. I told him ‘Stay until you are done with me, but I won’t marry you’,” she says, resting her head against the dressing table at her Ramabai Chawl residence to which she returned after her lover died.

They say he died because of her: because he loved her too much. He would smoke too much garda. He was too possessive to deal with her work life.

Khaja Bi was with other men. It didn’t matter if she slept with them for money. But if she was going to involve emotions in her job, it would mean a betrayal he wasn’t prepared to handle. What could a lover of a prostitute complain about? The body is for everyone. It is loyalty of the heart one seeks, and that’s the most difficult to assure. There are no red lines drawn. Expectations dilute love, and then they forget this is not the world outside. Here, love must be independent of carnal desire—of sexual jealousy.

It can take a hard toll. Unkept promises, desertions and betrayals have led to many a suicide. It is a merciless life for most of its victims, and Corex and Button and cheap liquor are not enough to erase the memory of lost love. But it’s a love of true passion. Not one of carnal fidelity, but of something that is dearer and deeper, a love that finds its way into whispers in the wee hours of the morning—after the end of work hours.

The truth is not unknown to them. Some give up, a few hang on. Others move on.

“He used to be someone else’s customer. One day, I was sitting outside, and he asked if I would come with him,” says Sushmita. “I don’t take gifts. He paid me for sleeping with him… and he would come often. We became friends. I started caring for him.”

She is tall and fair. She may even qualify as pretty. Her lover, and she is quick to point this out, wasn’t a handsome man. That he loved her was his problem, she says. “If he did, he could have told me,” she says, “There was no need to cut my throat. The scars will remain.”

Two weeks later, she has got past her anger. Her bandage has been removed. But the scars divide her neck into two parts. The price of trust, she says.

Sushmita is young. One day, she landed in Gulli No 14 with a friend. They had come from their village in Karnataka looking for work and were told to come here. By the time they realised they were to sell their bodies, they were in debt already. Their induction was quick. The brothel’s madam said they should leave their morality at the doorstep, and start servicing men because they had children and parents to feed and their husbands had abandoned them. With little or no education, they didn’t stand much chance in a cruel city like Bombay. They had to survive, somehow. Lack of choice is misunderstood, says Sushmita. That’s what pains her.

Sushmita says Nadar wanted a gold chain that she had bought for her son, who lives in the village. He slit her throat because she wouldn’t give it to him. It took her years to save the money. In fact, she still wonders what drove him to it. Handcuffed, he was taken to prison. Sushmita sits outside her brothel all day long watching people as they come and go, sipping tea from a tiny plastic cup.

She is still not taking in customers. A few stumble in to check on her and then vanish into one of the other rooms. She is upset that she is not able to make money. She needs to pay her son’s tuition and take care of her parents. There is also the rent that needs to be paid for her tiny hovel in Gulli No 14.

The night before the attack, her lover had visited another brothel where he drank with a Nepali prostitute and then came to her. They slept in her little room for which she pays Rs 5,000 every month to the madam. Sex workers don’t make much money, the going rate being just Rs 100 for a session. And she has to send Rs 2,000 home every month.

Along with Sushmita, there are four others who inhabit this small structure. There is a small waiting area with benches lined and tiled walls that are scrubbed clean every afternoon by a woman with a crooked smile. Along the wall, there are steel boxes with little locks. These are vanity kits, and some have cigarettes in them.

“For customers,” a woman says. “They might want. We can sell these.”

Sushmita dismisses the police version of events, but says she doesn’t care. If her lover didn’t, she shouldn’t either. Life must go on—despite the scars.

“How much can you love? I have been here for eight years. I know better now. I thought he was a friend. Such a betrayal. How does one go through life counting betrayals?” she asks. “It is okay. I understand. Did you meet him in the jail? You can ask him why he did what he did.”

“No, I didn’t. The police has got his version.”

“That’s bakwaas,” she says.

Bharti’s lover makes and brings her tea and leftover food from the hotel he works in. She knows he is not a good man, but she has nobody else, really. And there she sits, defending her lover in a little office with other women nodding their heads. They have given up on her. She had come in a few weeks ago with bruises. Her lover had beaten her up. But she says he won’t be able to do without her. That she means something to someone justifies her life.

She could die. She isn’t worried about it. Because she has no future anyway. Years of suffering, and she left her home at 14, have taught her patience. There is no hurry, no eternal love. Nothing that will last beyond the moment, she says, and looks away. You can delude yourself for a while, though, she adds.

Other women stumble in. They have come here to deposit money. It is a small bank, a microfinance unit started almost a decade ago to help local sex workers, pimps and others who languish half-heartedly in these cramped gullies trying to save money. They can deposit Rs 20 or Rs 100. The women who work here are counsellors. A few are friends. They listen to the stories and offer advice, which is almost never taken. Over the years, they have to grown to grasp the futility of it. But they won’t give up.

They advise Bharti to use condoms. They tell her about the dangers of her attitude. But she says she doesn’t care if she dies. Then she whispers, “Didi, he says to me ‘Bharti don’t leave me’ and I can’t do it because he has nobody.”

She is only 17. She had come and slumped into a chair. It wouldn’t be too long before she delivers a baby at a nearby hospital. The child is not her lover’s—it’s an accidental pregnancy, just another occupational hazard.

A woman from an NGO walks up to her, pats her on the back, and tells her to be careful. “Their relationships are based on money. If the woman stops giving money to the man, he leaves. Till the child is born, maybe they are nice. These women have seen abuses. A few weeks ago, Bharti had covered her head. Her man had hit her while he was drunk,” she says. “These women are hungry for love. Most, like Bharti, were trafficked at a young age. Some of them don’t know if they have a home. They are just drifters.”

Bharti left home in Latur district in Maharashtra when she was 14. Her mother kicked her out of the house. A woman saw her at Victoria Terminus station and brought her to Kamathipura, telling her she would find her a place to stay. She hadn’t reached puberty then. That’s how she began her other life in Gulli No 11.

A few months ago, she met Rajesh at a nearby hotel. He brought her tea and struck up a conversation. He later told her he was in love with her. They moved in together. “We will get married but he says ‘Earn money first’,” she says. “He used to say don’t do dhanda, but I know that I can’t be dependent on him.”

Breathing heavily, she sits straight in an iron chair lined against the wall of this small establishment. Offered a cup of tea, she hesitates before accepting it. Her hair is cropped short and she covers her head with a dupatta. She has bruises to hide.

This isn’t such an extraordinary place. There are vendors selling vegetables, and women from ‘respectable’ families walking around haggling for better prices. Cafes are doing brisk business. The normal intersects with the outrageous, and it looks routine in a way. Prostitutes can be spotted standing at various points.

Bharti came to the bank a few weeks ago and announced she was getting married. That’s unusual. But then, her lover—Rajesh, the hotel boy—advised her to earn more money so that she get out of here as quickly as possible. But he took his words back later. They need to survive, he said.

“Mera aadmi hai, mere paas aayega,” she says.

He even gave her a mobile phone, a gift she cherishes. “He has no mother, no father. He has nobody. I feel I must be with him,” she says. “There is so much sex here that you want love. Just to be in the company of someone who makes promises.”

Every night, he brings her food. Then he says he loves her, and moves his hand over her belly. Bharti smiles when she speaks about Rajesh.

“If he feels pain, I feel hurt. I don’t make that kind of money. He loves me and my child,” she says, pointing to her belly.

They have stopped having sex. He keeps her feet on hers, and they sleep through the few remaining hours of the night or wee hours of the morning.

“When I am with others, I think of him. It makes me feel better. He keeps calling my phone. He asks where I am. Sometimes, we go for films,” she says.

Then Anjali of the NGO asks her why she is so reckless with her life.

“Marne doh mujhe,” she says.

“What about the child?” Anjali asks.

“I miss my mother. I don’t have her number. I miss everything that I can’t have,” Bharti says. “If this love is illusion, it is good for now. I don’t care.”

She walks out, and disappears into one of the lanes.

We don’t find her again.

They ask us not to confront her lover. She wouldn’t like it, we are told.

Puja stands at the landing of Alexander Theatre in Kamathipura. She spends most of her time here. In her choli, she has a mobile phone tucked that’s playing songs. Usual fare— songs of heartbreak. Bollywood and Farida Khanum.

I ask her if she has a lover. She had one, a Gujarati man who was much older. They would spend hours drinking beer and talking about their lives. He would come on Sundays and take her out. Puja is from a village in Uttar Pradesh. She is beautiful, has a child to take care of and a family to provide for.

One night, she went to buy beer and he saw her. She had almost turned alcoholic, even had surgery to rid herself of internal stones. She was weak when she met him. He was drinking beer alone and he bought some for her. They sat on the pavement, and he asked where she lived and worked. Puja had been married once and abandoned.

“I came here,” she says, “I had no education, and I needed money. Now, I am able to take care of my son and my parents.

Of course, they don’t know that I am a prostitute.”

She wears the vermilion of a wedded woman. She stopped questioning fate long ago.

“How much will a customer love you? They are abandoned in their own way and so they come here. They get attached. We both know there is no future for this love or whatever it is. But it is good while it lasts.”

Nobody takes you home, she adds.

Seema is ready to tell her story. She is from Odisha and was brought here by someone from her village. Trafficked, as we would call it. She refused to budge. Kept crying until she realised there was no way out.

“My first customer became my husband,” she says.

“Is it a happy love story?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” she says.

She is 32 years old now and arrived in Kamathipura with her daughter, who is now studying in a college and lives with the son she had with her lover in another part of the city. Her daughter wants her to leave the red-light district and lead a life of dignity. Not now, Seema tells her. Seema recalls how her lover would pay the madam to come sit with her. One afternoon, they went for a film.

“He said ‘aaj mood hai’ and I thought I should oblige him after all,” she says.

That was 2002. She had come from a village where condoms were called ‘balloons’. She had no idea what they were meant for when first told to insist on these while servicing clients.

“What I liked about him is that he never demanded sex in those first few months. We married. We live together in that building,” she says, pointing to a building across the road. “I never loved him. But I am loyal to him. I don’t count on him. But it has lasted this long… I am doing my dhanda.”