Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  In Sri Lanka, we boarded the train service that was running again between Colombo and Galle, so that we could sit in the guard’s van alongside Wanigaratna Karunatillek. A gentle and dependable man who wore a thick black woollen tunic even in the baking heat, Wanigaratna had been in charge of the ‘Queen of the Sea’ on the morning of the tsunami, and now had to revisit his memories every working day.

  Once, his job was one of the most envied posts on the railways. Now, it was among the most wretched. ‘Every time I make this journey, I feel sorrowful agony,’ he told us. As we travelled south, he described how the coastline had become a graveyard and place of death. Yet the most painful stretch of the journey came when we reached Peraliya and he looked out over the buckled carriages of the ‘Queen of Sea’, which had been left at the side of the rebuilt track. ‘When I see the wreckage, my heart is in pain,’ he told us. ‘Tears come to my eyes.’

  Further down the coast in Galle, the tent shanties that had gone up in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami had been replaced by rows of wooden huts that offered only temporary accommodation but were more substantial nonetheless. The bus depot was operational again, and the concrete stalls at the fish market were shimmering with freshly caught tuna now that the fishermen had rebuilt their boats and returned to the sea. Even the cricket pitch was playable again.

  In the north-east, the seafront at Mullaitivu not only remained unoccupied but also had now been declared uninhabitable, with a strict prohibition on rebuilding homes close to the ocean. No longer trusting of the sea, many locals had not yet ventured back into the waters.

  We happened to be in town the day that the surviving children from the Tender Sprouts orphanage returned to the seashore, a journey that involved crossing a massive physical and psychological threshold. Clutching tight the hands of their friends and teachers, they felt the sensation of sand under their feet for the first time in six months. Then, in motionless trepidation, they felt the waves splash around their ankles. To begin with, they stood in the ocean, waited for the wave to break and then sprinted back towards land. Then they started playing and gurgling with laughter, as they realised the sea no longer posed a threat.

  On our return to southern India for the first anniversary of the tsunami, we met dozens of young mothers who, years earlier, had been encouraged by the authorities to have birth-control treatment, which usually involved tying their fallopian tubes. All of them had lost sons and daughters, and feared they might never be able to bear children again. In Nagapattinam, the corridors of the local hospital were busy with bereaved mothers waiting in line for consultations for procedures that would hopefully give them the chance of falling pregnant again. Still, out of the 50 reversal operations so far performed, just two had been successful.

  Selvi, a middle-aged woman with a deep-red pottu, a Tamil version of the bindi, on her forehead, had lost all her five children. She had paid to have the treatment, and for eight months running she had thought she might be pregnant. Each time, however, her overdue period eventually arrived. ‘What is the point of living,’ she said, ‘if you can’t have a family?’ More than 200 families in this town alone had lost all their children.

  In a relief camp nearby, Gita and her husband, Vasu, performed regular pujas before a shrine decorated with candles, garlands and portraits of their two daughters, five-year-old Jyothika and her younger sister, Sofia. ‘It would have been better if one of us had died,’ said Vasu, as he stared blankly at the photographs with a tear racing down his face. Yet here, at least, there was hope. Gita had paid for the reversal treatment and now was four months pregnant. If the newborn turned out to be a girl, she planned to name the baby after her eldest daughter. ‘Now we are looking forward to our daughters being reborn,’ said her tearful husband.

  Before leaving Nagapattinam, we heard from doctors at the local hospital that a woman who had lost her children in the tsunami and then had the reversal treatment was about to reach the final stage of labour. Matarasi had got pregnant two months after the tsunami hit and was more than happy to withstand the pain of labour after the agony of losing a child. To begin with, the labour was routine, but as the baby moved down into the birth canal there was a problem.

  The female doctor on duty pressed her old-fashioned stethoscope to Matarasi’s swollen belly and detected from the hurried heartbeat that the baby was in distress. Her diagnosis was instantaneous. The umbilical chord was wrapped around the baby’s neck and threatening suffocation. Immediately, Matarasi was rushed into the operating theatre for a Caesarean section.

  In the courtyard outside, her mother thrashed around on the concrete floor, beating her chest and throwing her head violently from side to side. She feared both her daughter and the unborn baby were about to die.

  Both did survive, but there was a fear that the baby might be brain-damaged through lack of oxygen at birth. Our footage was so harrowing that when we filed our report back to London the editor of the evening news decided that viewers would not be able to bear to watch it and simply edited out Matarasi’s tortured labour. The Asian tsunami and then the Pakistani earthquake. It was the end of our year of disasters, and neither we, London nor our viewers could bear much more. Alas, there was no respite for the victims we left behind.

  To be dispatched to the subcontinent as an unmarried correspondent was to embark upon a journey pregnant with romantic possibility. The BBC had long offered a nuptial variant of Nehru’s tryst with destiny: the almost certain prospect of finding an Indian bride.

  Folklore had it that every bachelor who crossed the threshold of the Delhi bureau had departed, three or so years later, with an Indian wife – a happy custom that stretched back to the founding days of the Indian Republic. And lest this sound like some matrimonial leftover from the British Raj, the women in question had been not only exceptionally beautiful but also especially feisty – character traits rendered in even sharper relief as city-based career women became full participants in India’s economic revolution. Approaching Indira Gandhi International Airport late in 2003 on my first trip to the country, with the lights of Diwali flashing by underneath, I naturally wondered if my prospective wife was somewhere down below.

  Alas, I had arrived in a country more engrossed with sex than with love. An Indian version of the British lads’ mag Maxim was about to make its subcontinental debut, featuring in its inaugural issue a buxom Bollywood star with an hourglass figure pouting on its cover, two bikini-clad models helpfully demonstrating how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, and, more incongruously, the story of a police inspector from Uttar Pradesh who was convinced he was the modern-day reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Radha, who dressed during his off-duty hours in a sari.

  Bollywood directors, who at moments of cinematic passion had traditionally cut away to shots of blooming flowers or gently swaying trees, now allowed the 12 million Indians who went each day to the movies to see couples not only kiss on the screen but also embrace each other with lustrous passion – perhaps even to shed a layer or two of clothing. The first lesbian-themed movie, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, had already hit the screens, with an Indian version of Brokeback Mountain just a few years down the track. Cleavage jutted out from almost every other billboard, and just as the flesh-quotient of Indian advertising had hit new highs, so, too, had the scandal-quotient of Indian journalism.

  Rarely a week would pass without some plump, 50-something politician being caught on hidden camera in a state of semi-undress and semi-arousal, with his trousers around his ankles and his off-white vest still struggling to withhold his cascading rolls of flab. It was one of those unwritten rules of Indian politics: not even the most libidinous parliamentarian would ever remove his vest.

  Tempting though it was to insert these stories into the ‘new India’ file, it was not where they belonged. As anyone familiar with the Kama Sutra, the ecclesiastical eroticism of the sculptures carved into the temples at Khajuraho or the rampant promiscuity of the Indian gods and goddesses, who made their Greek cousins
look like shrinking violets, the licentiousness of the Indians was anything but new. Had it not been for the intervention of those three great passion killers, the Mogul invaders in the tenth century, the Britishers in the nineteenth, and the puritans of the Indian freedom movement in the twentieth, this age-old debauchery would have gone on uninterrupted and uninhibited for the last thousand or so years. Now, it was back in full swing.

  In releasing its first nationwide sex survey, Outlook, a respectable current-affairs magazine, spoke of ‘a continent of unfulfilled desires that awaken disturbing lust and longing’. Its poll on ‘forbidden sex’ produced data to prove it. Over 92 per cent of the respondents in Ahmedabad admitted to having sex with their boss or the boss’s spouse; 31 per cent of women in Bangalore revealed they would like to experiment with a threesome; and 46 per cent of women from Mumbai confessed they would like to attend male stripper shows. Some of the findings were staggering. In Delhi, 12 per cent of women admitted to watching a pornographic film with their boss. Others simply confirmed what everyone had long suspected: the inexorable horniness of Indian men, 80 per cent of whom said they would ‘agree to have casual sex with anyone they find attractive’.

  If the survey made for sparkling reading, the letters page in Outlook the following week was still more entertaining. ‘The latest issue of Outlook is nothing short of pornography,’ an enraged reader had emailed. ‘We would like to unsubscribe if this is to go on, since we have children and working staff at home.’

  Later, these sex surveys also came under fire from the Financial Times, not on moral grounds but for their statistical probity. Sticklers for the figures, the FT had crunched the numbers of another sex survey in a rival current-affairs magazine, India Today, and uncovered discrepancies. While 47 per cent of women claimed to have enjoyed multiple orgasms, only a third knew what was actually meant by the term. From an anthropological perspective, what was also illuminating about the sex surveys was the urge to quantify debauchery, because it combined two of India’s great passions: sex and statistical measurement (this same fascination with numbers also helped explain some of cricket’s popularity). For mathematically minded Indians, it did not get much better.

  Alongside essays on the latest moves in the Indo–Pak peace process and the Naxalite–Maoist rebellion in central India, the current-affairs magazines also reported on a new breed of sexual entrepreneur, the Indian gigolos, or ‘Aunty’s Lovers’, as they were sometimes dubbed. Their client base was the middle-aged ‘desperate housewives’ – one of an increasing number of phrases imported from America – who lived in the more well-to-do suburbs of Delhi and Mumbai.

  ‘Their world is about desire and passion. Of frustrated and loveless women,’ noted Outlook, which illustrated its exposé with a full-length picture showing a primed Indian gigolo standing on a double bed astride a single rose, wearing nothing more than a medallion, a skimpy pair of scarlet briefs and a look of wild abandon. To complete this seductive look, his head was thrust back, as if writhing with ecstasy, and the tips of his fingers had made a slight incursion into the top of his knicker elastic.

  Gigolos could apparently make anything from 5000 to 20,000 rupees a night – good money – and the more accomplished among them were ‘SMS and net-friendly’ and could ‘eat with a fork and knife or chopsticks’. Their online advertisements, which offered to cater to every craving and vice, were a delight. Take Roshan, who punched in his credentials in bold capital letters, presumably to offer proof of his virility. He wrote:

  I am well educated/well bred with good etiquette. I am looking for well bred/well educated ladies with real erotic/sexual drive. Complete satisfaction assured with specialised foreplay/after play techniques. Long enduring performance dotted with soft caress/kisses. Special emphasis on lower back and g-spot. Oral action, deep penetration, doggie position, table edge stroke … and much more.

  Whether able to perform table-edge strokes or not, if these gigolos were even half as entertaining in bed as they were online, it was easy to see why so many aunties had become slaves to their sexual desires.

  Though reports of this burst of licentiousness were no doubt exaggerated, sex had become one of India’s fastest growing industries. That made many Indians happy, but it was also making many of them sick. With the rates of HIV infection soaring, India ran the risk of surpassing South Africa as the global hub of Aids. To drive along the new highway linking Delhi and Jaipur in Rajasthan was to witness how quickly the disease could spread. All along, temptation lined the route, and there were long stretches where virtually every house was a brothel. In certain villages, all but the most dowdy of girls grew up to be prostitutes. Long-distance truckers looked upon these roadside hookers like Western travellers would regard a motorway services station. Sex was the easiest of sells and the cheapest of thrills – less than a dollar a time.

  Nagma possessed the kind of sultry beauty that could easily have made her an actress or a model, but she had grown up in a village alongside the highway and from a very early age had been groomed for prostitution. We interviewed her at the end of a long working day, but still she was striking in her lilac sari with her chestnut hair gathered up in a neat ponytail. It was easy to see why she was both a truck driver’s favourite and a public-health official’s worst nightmare.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to matter if you use a condom or not,’ she told us. ‘I don’t know anyone who’s died of Aids.’

  Whether Nagma was simply lying or in denial, it was hard to tell. But a quarter of the prostitutes in India were thought to be carriers of the HIV virus, and even if she did not personally know any victims yet she would do so soon.

  Here was another instance, as with female foeticide, where India’s rapid economic development had exacerbated the problem. Mile by mile, the government had embarked upon a massive highway-construction program – its biggest infrastructure project since independence. Yet new roads acted like poisoned arteries and were spreading Aids around the country almost as quickly as the drivers could travel from one town to the next.

  Harmeet Singh, a long-distance truck driver from South India, who usually spent three out of every four weeks on the road, was at high risk of becoming a carrier. A regular client of the sex workers of Rajasthan, he refused to wear a condom because he hated rubber-insulated sex. How we managed to persuade him to appear on camera I cannot quite recall, but Harmeet admitted to cheating on his wife, and he explained that he much preferred sex without safeguards, even though he understood the risks. ‘When you’re drunk and in a hurry,’ said the father of two, ‘it’s easy to forget to use a condom.’ Harmeet said he could not help himself, even though he was aware he might one day infect his wife with the HIV virus.

  The grubbiest, most sordid side of India’s thriving sex industry was found in the whorehouses of Falkland Road, or the cages of Mumbai, as they were aptly known. Here, girls as young as nine years old were forced into prostitution, since the younger the child the higher the price the brothel owners could charge. Locked up like hostages and rarely allowed to step outside their filth-ridden workplaces, they were forced to have sex as many as 30 times a day, seven days a week. Most were daubed with heavy make-up – crimson lipstick, thick mascara, false eyelashes – to make them more alluring.

  Outside the barred windows, Mumbai police officers patrolled the street but did nothing to stop this underage sex or to help free the girls. Instead, the girls’ only hope of liberation came from charity workers who monitored the brothels and occasionally mounted raids. Even then, the girls often hid under their mattresses and beds as the raids unfolded, because they were so frightened of the brothel owners and fearful of being set free.

  Filming on Falkland Road always came with risks, because the brothel owners often dispatched henchmen armed with guns, knives and hot chilli peppers, which they rubbed in the eyes of prying cameramen and journalists. And again, the police offered no protection, since they were commonly in cahoots with the racketeers.

  Given that Mumba
i had become so protective of its international image, we managed once to persuade the local authorities to mount a raid on one of the brothels where spotters from the main rescue charity knew young girls were being held captive. Yet, for three consecutive nights, we waited for the go-ahead from police but were given excuses each time – a delay that gave corrupt officers more than enough time to tip-off the brothel owners and for the girls to be spirited away. Sure enough, by the third day our spotters from the rescue charity reported that the girls had been taken to another of Mumbai’s cages, and shortly afterwards the police rang to tell us, with phoney apologies, that the raid had been cancelled. We left Mumbai with barely a picture in the can.

  Determined not to be thwarted by corrupt policemen, we decided to come at the story from a different angle. By far the most popular girls on Falkland Road came from Nepal. Indian men preferred their light-coloured skin to the darker complexions of home-grown prostitutes and were prepared to pay a premium. Some 40 per cent of the prostitutes in Mumbai had been spirited over the border from the mountain kingdom as victims of human trafficking. So the next time we went to Kathmandu to cover the latest skirmishes in the Maoist rebellion, we tried to find out how easily the girls were trafficked.

  Our starting point was a refuge in the Nepalese capital that took in girls rescued from sex slavery in India. Its dorms and classrooms were packed with teenagers, the majority of whom had become virtual orphans since returning to their homeland. Most families disowned them after discovering they had worked as prostitutes. Tragically, the refuge also doubled as a hospice, because more than 80 per cent of the girls and young women rescued from India returned infected with HIV. In one room, we were shown a beautiful 24-year-old woman, whose face was drained of colour, whose body was contorted in pain and whose frail hands quivered uncontrollably. With only a few weeks left to live, she could not even summon up the strength to utter a single word. Another victim of Falkland Road, she could hardly even blink.