Daughters of the Red Light
Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels
Shanoor Seervai
Copyright © 2015 Shanoor Seervai
All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Publisher’s Note
Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai’s Brothels
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Shanoor Seervai is an Indian writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Guernica Magazine, The Caravan and The Indian Express. Born and raised in Mumbai, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is pursuing an advanced degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Publisher’s Note
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Daughters of the Red Light
Coming of Age in Mumbai’s Brothels
By Shanoor Seervai
“When you come as a volunteer, you’ll have to dress… differently,” said my new supervisor, disdainfully running her eyes over my black capris and short-sleeve scoop-neck purple T-shirt.
“Yes, of course,” I stammered in embarrassment. “I don’t expect to… I’ll wear Indian clothes when I visit the brothels.” I cursed myself for not choosing a more appropriate outfit to meet the head of an anti-trafficking nonprofit that helps sex workers and their children in Mumbai.
I went straight home and rifled through the bottom shelves of my closet, looking for my loosest, most modest salwaar khameezes. I found a full-sleeve pink-and-green one that looked about right. And then a synthetic black one that would dry quickly if it got wet in the monsoon. Or the flowing blue khameez with a geometric pattern of overlapping diamonds that belonged to my grandmother. I hoped they’d keep me unnoticed.
When I ventured into the brothels of Falkland Road a few days later, everyone turned to stare.
The lungi-clad men in the dank hallways I’d anticipated. But I was unnerved when the women swiveled their heads to gawk at me. A client asked a pimp how much I cost, erupting in laughter. I pretended I didn’t understand.
When I told my friends I would be volunteering in Kamathipura, the city’s largest red-light district, the first question they asked was, “Is that safe?” At the time, the question seemed prejudiced. At 20, I thought I was too worldly for such small-minded fears.
But the only place I ever felt comfortable over my three months there was at the daily after-school program where I taught English to first-graders whose moms were sex workers. The goal was to help them stay in school, where they would be less likely to become ensnared in the sex trade.
Over time, I got to know something about the children’s lives. There was one girl, Shabnam, who always finished her work last, but the drawings on the backs of her worksheets were the most intricate. Before she colored, she studied all the crayons in the box, carefully selecting the ones she needed, lining them up in a neat row in front of her.
Shabnam wore her hair in two thick braids, tied at the ends with red ribbons. When she grinned — her response to frequent mistakes in math homework — she revealed a large gap between her two front teeth. Her mother worked at a brothel on Falkland Road, and at least once a week Shabnam missed school because her mother didn’t wake up to walk her to the bus stop.
One day in July of 2009, Shabnam came to class in a sleeveless orange T-shirt and gray shorts. A few minutes before class ended, sheets of rain suddenly drenched the world outside the windows. The other students began pulling crumpled plastic raincoats out of their bags or waiting for their mothers to arrive with umbrellas. I was collecting my things when Shabnam, without a raincoat or umbrella, asked, “Didi, mein ghar kaise jaon? Aap mujhe chhod dogi?” Big Sister, how will I go home? Will you drop me?
We crouched under my umbrella as I walked her home. The drains in Kamathipura are perpetually clogged. The street had started to flood. We cut through the downpour to Falkland Road. Empty plastic bags, coconuts, stray slippers, and muck rose up with the water. Despite the pelting rain, the women were standing in the doorways of the brothels, waiting for customers who might be undeterred. Their faces were carefully made up with lipstick, eyeliner, and a mask of powder iridescent under the streetlights’ glow.
Shabnam trotted along confidently, until she suddenly darted out from under the umbrella and hopped over a puddle. “Bye, Didi,” she called, waving over her shoulder as she disappeared up a dark wooden staircase at a brothel called Café House. I still have a vague recollection of where it is, though in the dark, all the alleyways look the same.
For a few moments, I stood there, transfixed. I gazed up the stairs into the abyss and imagined the men jeering inside with red, unfocused eyes, the businesslike madams counting cash, and the sex workers putting on a grand show with pouty lips and hips suggestively cocked to one side. A seven-year-old girl, who often deliberately forgets her math textbook at school but loves to draw, goes home every evening to this, a place where abuse of women is routine, I thought.
I was overcome by a sudden impulse to run up the spit-stained stairs and rescue Shabnam from the room on the second floor. But I turned around instead. In the taxi to the station, boarding the train and riding home in the pouring rain, I repeated, “No one will ever forgive me,” over and over. My father answered the door to the apartment. “I left a seven-year-old girl at a brothel today,” I blubbered.
I cried through my hot shower and home-cooked dinner, my brother glancing warily in my direction, prompting my mother to cast stern looks at him.
That memory of Shabnam and the abyss stays with me even today.
*****
For seven years, from high school in Vancouver, to college in Rhode Island, to a brief sojourn among Brooklyn’s hipster and yuppie tribes, landing meant one thing: the descent after 16 hours of in-flight entertainment into a boiling swirl of chaos.
Yes, I flew into other cities during that time, and was duly impressed. How could I not marvel at Manhattan’s stately welcome as a carpet of sparkle was unfurled below me and towering spires saluted from just outside the airplane’s window?
But nothing was more magical than hearing the jet engine change pitch at the edge of the Arabian Sea. The seatbelt would stretch against my waist as I craned past the understandably peeved passenger beside me, and I would watch in wonder as black nothingness gave way to the radiant metropolis of memory. This, I knew, was the beginning of a sorely missed cascade of sensations, culminating in that which I inexplicably craved: the Bombay Smell.
Nobody will ever forget that first breath after the aircraft door opens in this city of 18 million on India’s west coast. On modern maps it is now called Mumbai, ever since a right-wing political party rechristened it two decades ago, but
for many proud denizens the new name doesn’t always stick, and it remains, affectionately, Bombay.
After being away for so long, the Bombay Smell — more aptly described as a stench, if love hadn’t prevented me from such derision — would trample upon my weary face and press against my unaccustomed nostrils, demanding my undivided attention. Jet lag be damned! By the time the air entered my lungs, it already had begun to percolate into my pores, refusing to let me be a stranger. The Smell announced that another North American winter had been temporarily suspended for Maharashtra’s perpetual, buggy heat.
And so I came to ache for the moldering musk of home when I first left my city at 16 to attend school in Canada. Weeks before return visits I found myself dreaming about it, counting the days until I would no longer be thinking about Mumbai because I was simply there, basking in splendid familiarity. No more would I struggle to explain Mumbai, because no one would ask. Everyone around me would have, as I had, found ways of making sense of the insanity, accepting that which cannot be rationalized as madness to embrace.
But, as the years passed, as I breathed more of that sterile North American air, a creeping change took place. Going back to India started to elicit more explanation than less — to myself, that is.
How could I, who’d imagined herself as a sort of ambassador for her beloved city when abroad, no longer get it, no longer be able to decipher this frenetically scribbled code? The paradoxes that I had justified and circumvented became blatantly irreconcilable, and rather than a homecoming, returning to Mumbai became an exercise in self-flagellation.
I didn’t stop going back, but with each visit, my once-uncontainable enthusiasm waned still. Even the smell I started to find harder to call endearing. My lungs now choked when I jogged through traffic. The perpetual drip of sewage became something I dodged instead of pretending it was innocent water, the way everyone else does.
I had become accustomed to too many other, easier smells — the piney forests of the West Coast Trail meeting the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, apple-cinnamon cider as leaves turned from orange to red to brown to earth in New England.
So it was that the once-longed-for Bombay Smell turned to a dreaded one. The magic of touching down at the city’s airport gave way to traveler’s trepidation. And every time I moved from one city to another, it felt as if that initial decision to leave Mumbai — the city I once insisted was the only place I would ever call my own — had condemned me to a life of un-belonging.
By the time I finally decided to relocate to India for good, Brooklyn had become a home of sorts, too. I had to deal with a whole other wresting away from attachments I’d made, from cold-brewed coffee to artisanal ramen, to a city that promises eternal post-adolescence.
This I did, I told myself and anyone who cared to listen, so that 23-year-old Shanoor could come to terms with 16-year-old Shanoor, who had believed she could “make a difference.” In its teenage ambition and naïveté, this meant single-handedly rescuing India from all its age-old societal ills.
Growing up in Mumbai, where inequality is as obvious as the humidity, my privilege was apparent to me. My socially conscious parents raised me to be aware of it. But this happened within the confines of a relatively sheltered childhood and was most salient when my father or mother pointed out the indignity of disparity to jangle me from assuming life was guaranteed to be cushy, stable. Or when the gnarled, outstretched hand of a beggar simply couldn’t be ignored.
When I first moved to Vancouver Island in my mid-teens, I had an acute realization of how little I knew about India, of exactly what it was I’d left behind. Mumbai’s injustices somehow became far more apparent from the other side of the globe.
And I was incensed, hit squarely in the face by how unfair India could be.
I had a new mission in life: to put my global, mind-stretching education and mounting outrage to use. I made a personal promise that I would go back to my home country to effect change.
In the summer after college’s sophomore year — a miserable year for a variety of reasons, including that search for identity all young adults endure, compounded with feeling I lived in limbo between two worlds — I interned with Apne Aap Women’s Collective, an organization that supports sex workers and their children in Mumbai. It’s where I met Shabnam, the little girl with the braids and the gap between her teeth.
The decision to learn more about this arrantly marginalized group came, in part, from watching Born Into Brothels on my pristine Ivy League campus. On a projection screen that descended noiselessly with the touch of a button in a glossy lecture room, India’s cruelty came to life. I was struck by the obvious pain, and also by an irrational, ever-precarious hope.
But all that was quickly followed by a deep sense of personal failure when I learned the screening was organized by some Indian-American frat guy who ran my school’s anti-human trafficking initiative in between raging keggers. Did he even speak Hindi?
I, who was originally from one of India’s biggest destinations for trafficked women, had never really done anything about it. I knew Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, was just as notorious and tragic as Kolkata’s Sonagachi, depicted in the film. Immediately, I needed to know more about it. And not by taking a course or checking out a book from the library. That’s what someone who isn’t from Mumbai does. I had greater wherewithal, and therefore responsibility.
I threw myself into volunteer work that summer with the single-minded determination of someone looking for misery. Once I started to visit the brothels, I couldn’t get the poverty and desperation off my mind. I came home every day exhausted, often in tears, and very few people actually had the patience to see me because all I could talk about was how terrible life is for Indian sex workers.
At the end of the three months, feeling helpless and in complete despair, I returned to life as a liberal arts major. I took the semester off to satisfy a long-pending desire to paint with oils and matriculated in a program that guides students through the cathedrals of Italy before retreating to artists’ studios on a Greek island.
The misalignment between my twin callings of social responsibility and creativity was profound, taxing. And my infinite privilege became clearer than ever before, inducing a queasy concoction of shrugging gratitude spiked with heaps of guilt.
At first, I hadn’t given much thought to how I would transition from the dark, bleak lanes of Kamathipura to Italian Renaissance art’s obsession with sun-choked tableaus and new achievements in linear perspective.
These were two separate facets of my life, I tried to convince myself. But detachment is not my strength, and it turned out they weren’t so distinct after all.
The sex workers and their daughters remained at the forefront of my thoughts long after I arrived in Pistoia, an idyllic city an hour outside Florence, where I lived in a 16th-century villa with a garden of wild figs and age-old olive trees. My peers and teachers were from a world far from the one I had just inhabited. I remember looking out from my third-floor-bedroom window at night. The glimmer of the city below the Tuscan hills instantly carried me back to the neon fairy lights strung in the hallways of the brothels where I knew women were at work.
Two years passed. I graduated college and, after a stint as a legal assistant, I abandoned notions of law school. I’d had an epiphany of sorts (at least, I wanted it to be one) that my manifest destiny was to become a writer. And I couldn’t get rid of the nagging voice of 16-year-old Shanoor telling me I needed to go back to where I was from. The untold stories I so wanted to tell were in India, not North America, it said. I needed to reconcile with my homeland, my home city, my home, it said.
The voice reminded me that I’d never publicly told the stories of those sex workers, that after my volunteering was over, I’d escaped to art school. Now it was time to speak up.
I arrived in India in the fall of 2012, without a job but with a mission to write about the vulnerable. Of the many landings I’ve made, this was the bumpiest. It turne
d out Mumbai did not open its arms and thank me for the noble decision to abandon my Brooklyn apartment with a rooftop view for the higher purpose of writing about injustice.
I also had to confront the reality of being a woman in India, no easy feat even in the country’s most cosmopolitan megacities. I found male eyes staring at me everywhere. My 16-year-old self was either too young to notice or had unconsciously tuned out. My 23-year-old self became repulsed, infuriated, and debilitated.
Some days I wanted to shake men by the shoulders and scream, “Why the fuck are you staring at me?” Others, I climbed into a taxi instead of walking past a corner where they loitered, chewing betel nut, waiting for a target at which to aim their lustful gaze.
India is still a country where contact between men and women not married or otherwise related is taboo, a girl child a burden, a widow the bad luck that caused her husband’s death.
Demands for equality and an end to shame and violence fall on deaf ears, so women who live or travel in India take precautions instead that perpetuate a vicious cycle. Don’t go out late; don’t wear revealing clothes; don’t make eye contact. Being a woman in India requires us to steel ourselves to invading male eyes, and often verbal and physical assault.
Less than four months after I returned, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi, the city I had recently relocated to for a job with an English-language newspaper. The woman was brutalized with a metal rod in the presence of her male friend. When she died, outrage swept the country and a national reflection on the treatment of women finally began. Indians took to the streets, and an eerie sense of solidarity grew among young, educated women who felt personally violated by the assault.
Like the dead woman, I was also 23. I found commuting in Delhi, especially at night, terrifying, a reoccurring nightmare of dark, deserted streets.
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