India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  The Cadillac Pimp had an unremarkable past. He was born in Allahabad, his father was a government accounts officer and his mother a schoolteacher. He graduated with a degree in English from an obscure university in Kanpur. After graduating, he moved to Delhi to set up a small business supplying automotive parts which went bust after a while. His reasons for entering the sex trade are unclear, but some say that it was through a prostitute he met who also provided him with his initial stake.92 Singh had first mover’s advantage in a fledgling market; his business prospered and by the end of the decade, he ran India’s most extensive prostitution ring which included top models, actresses, bar dancers, and his biggest money spinner—a bevy of foreign escorts. According to one police officer, ‘He could get any girl… From Bollywood actors to top models, he had the best women.’93 Singh had even managed to tap a growing international market, and supplied women to Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.

  When he grew too big for his boots, the police raided his operation. At the time of his arrest in 2005, Singh had over 300 women working for him and was estimated to make over 10 lakh a month. He was charged and prosecuted under MCOCA, but after spending five years in prison, he was acquitted of all charges on the basis of insufficient evidence. Beyond confessions and a few cell phone and hotel bills found at his residence, there was no hard evidence against India’s most infamous pimp.94 After his release, Singh has gone underground. Some say that he moved to Dubai, others say he has changed his identity. Whatever the truth is, I am unable to trace him.

  To get a better understanding of the high-end sex trade today, I speak with Mumbai’s top pimp. Arif Khan is a well-oiled, well-spoken man who cuts a slightly menacing figure with his black-leather Armani jacket, gelled hair, and tattooed neck. He arrives for the interview in a luxury sedan accompanied by a personal security guard dressed in a smart navy blue safari suit. He claims to have thirty girls working for him full-time, personally hand-picked from across the globe. He has over a hundred girls who operate part-time. He also tells me that Indian men prefer girls from Eastern Europe.

  Immigration officials estimate that of the 50,000-odd Indian tourist visas granted in the Central Asian countries of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan every year, nearly 5,000 visitors are part of the sex trade.95 There has been such a surge of women from these countries to India that in 2011 the Indian government issued an official note to its embassies to carefully screen visa applications of women aged between fifteen and forty entering the country. This notice created such an uproar that it led to a protest in Kiev where women demonstrated topless in front of the Indian embassy.96

  The prostitution racket involving foreign women, particularly from CIS countries began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Young women looking for a quick buck ended up in Dubai as high-end hookers. Over the past five years, the racket has been diverted to India because of the financial crisis in Dubai and the flush of new money in India.

  Eastern European women form the highest end of the sex trade, charging up to 10 lakh an hour for their services and an average of 40 per cent more than their Indian counterparts—a premium they can charge because of the colour of their skin, reflecting the Indian obsession with fair skin. According to Pramada Menon, a Delhi-based gender activist, ‘Sex with light-skinned women is aspirational for some men.’97

  Additional Deputy Police Commissioner Joy Tirkey, Delhi Crime Branch, says that the racket has become so professional that many pimps have begun to arrange paper marriages between foreign women and Indian nationals. ‘In paper marriages, the husband is someone like a salesman at a local kirana shop. Once the visa issues are sorted, these women start living like normal people, they feel like they are free, and they go out to shops and malls without nervousness.’98

  Just last year, Tirkey shut down three agencies that employed sixteen women from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. To avoid suspicion, their handlers worked on rotation, bringing a girl for six months, then sending her back and replacing her with another.

  Indian women find it difficult to counter the ‘white cult’ that is taking over the premium flesh trade. If it’s an Indian woman, the advertisement reads: she is a ‘Punjabi’ (read intense and fair), ‘model’ (slim and beautiful), ‘air hostess’ (suave and smart), ‘hygienic’ (clean), ‘broadminded’, and ‘sober’. Broadminded assures clients that the women will play out their fantasies, while ‘sober’ indicates that they will be professional about it.99

  Arif Khan’s clients include top politicians, businessmen, and a slew of foreigners who visit the city regularly and pay up to 10 lakh for his top girls. Khan’s business has grown exponentially in the past five years. After the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, there was a crackdown on prostitution in Delhi, so many girls moved to Mumbai. Many of the girls harbour ‘romantic Bollywood dreams’ and hope that by servicing famous producers and actors they may land a role in one of their films. I ask Khan if any of his girls has managed to do this. He laughs loudly and says that a few of them have landed roles as extras on Bollywood sets. One of the girls, an exceptionally good dancer, became a back-up dancer, in the ‘back row since she was so tall’. He adds that he could barely spot her during the film though he watched the song many times. He tells me that many of his girls stop their association with him when someone plants Bollywood dreams in their head.

  With an ominous note of finality, Khan tells me, ‘When they think they are going to become stars, they want to stop being prostitutes. But these women are not actresses, they are here to be fucked, and if they don’t do what they have come here to do, they will be sent back to where they came from.’ I ask Khan about the Cadillac Pimp. Khan looks awestruck as he talks about Singh and his operations. Khan was one of a kind, and no pimp has yet been able to take over his pedestal. Singh built a national, even international, network which would be unimaginable at this time. It is rumoured that Singh got into a tiff with a chief minister who then brought him down. The problem, Khan says, is that Singh got too big for his own shoes. ‘You have to be smart to run a business like this. The people who get caught are the ones who become too big.’

  ♦

  In Chennai, I speak to Ram, named after the virtuous Hindu God who is described in various Hindu scriptures as the perfect man. My Ram though is far from perfect, at least when it comes to the virtuous part. Ram has a face that is difficult to recall. The only distinctive thing about him is the look of caution that he bears. He works in his family business, a small leather goods import-export venture. Ram is dating Leela, whom he first met through an escort service. Leela is from Ukraine, where she tried unsuccessfully for many years to be a model. At the behest of Arif Khan, she moved to India, where she works as a model while moonlighting as an escort. In Chennai, Leela is a minor celebrity. She is invited to all the hot and happening parties of the city, occasionally even gracing the society pages of the newspapers.

  Though Leela’s rise to fame is fascinating, I am here to speak with Ram and to explore the mentality of a client. Ram talks to me about the women he has dated, one of whom he loved and almost married. His family was dead-set against the marriage because she was Muslim and he Hindu. Succumbing to family pressure, he had to call it off. Since that horrible experience, he doesn’t want to get involved in a serious affair that could end in marriage, or in the words of Ram, ‘a life-long imprisonment’.

  Ram opens up to me after a few drinks (he only drinks Black Label, on the rocks) at a trendy Chennai bar. He relaxes and speaks to me candidly about sex. Ram’s first sexual experience was at eighteen with a prostitute in Mumbai. He had never had a girlfriend; he didn’t even have many friends who were girls. The only women he knew were his cousins, who were strictly off limits. Since those early years, he has had girlfriends whom he has had sex with, but he continues to pay for sex. Today, though, Ram would never think about going to a brothel, and no one in his circle of friends would ever use down-market local or Nepali hookers who, ‘you can bang for
300 bucks in a 200 rupee joint’. He ‘only goes for white girls’ whom he can afford due to his rising income and flourishing business.

  As he continues tossing back glasses, Ram opens up about himself. ‘In my teenage years, I was frustrated because there were no girls. They are kept in their houses with the single aim of marriage. That is why I went to that hooker on my eighteenth birthday. I was sick of being a virgin.’

  I ask him why he continued to go to prostitutes even when he had girlfriends.

  He considers, ‘It’s not the same with Indian girls. Most won’t have sex with me, not till many months into the relationship when they feel it is “serious” or that I may marry them, so I am forced to go to hookers.’

  Ram is not alone in his sexual pursuits: 49 per cent of young men in metro cities have had sex with sex workers.100

  ‘Do your girlfriends know?’ I ask curiously.

  ‘I don’t think so, but then shouldn’t they expect it? I am a man and I have my needs.’

  Ram tells me that he loves Leela, but that he could never marry her.

  ‘She is not the sort of girl that I would marry, but I treat her like my queen, and she gives me the sort of pleasure that an Indian woman would never be able to give me.’

  Does Leela, his present girlfriend, take clients on the side? How does he feel about that? I ask.

  He replies in a reflective vein. ‘She takes clients sometimes. It is her job, it is her need, and I don’t want to stop her. It’s like the time I was with my Indian girlfriend. I had my needs, so I went to hookers. Leela is a good girl, she is not the hooker type, but she too has her needs and I understand that.’

  LOUNGE AND PLAY, LAP

  At the bacchanalia that is meant to be New Delhi’s hottest night-club, the jeunesse dorée of the country guzzle astronomically priced bottles of vintage champagne—prices that would put the best nightclubs in Europe to shame. The cavernous nightclub is decorated in deep reds and luscious purples with heavy velvet curtains, outrageous chandeliers and blowzy Moroccan rococo festooning the walls.

  Tonight Stephanie is stationed at the bar. She serves drinks expertly, occasionally glaring if someone gets too loud. Although she doesn’t work full-time at LAP any longer, she sometimes comes in on a big night to do some bartending. I wait for her in a small room behind the bar, watching her work: she pours drinks swiftly, and never smiles, barely making eye contact with her customers. One man touches her arm, she moves away without a word. Another man leans over and taps her shoulder, she takes a step backward. She comes to take a break and lights up a cigarette. She looks angry and frustrated and pulls hard on her cigarette. She tells me that she’s happy she doesn’t do this any longer.

  How does she maintain her cool, I ask. She shrugs and tells me that when she is on edge, on the verge of losing her cool and lashing out at these drunken demons, she remembers the much publicized case of Jessica Lal, the young model who was shot dead by a politician’s son at a socialite’s bar only because she refused to serve him a drink. What terrifies her most is that any of these men in this club could easily be that man. That case showed the dark side of India’s nightlife. The sudden influx of money and unbridled hedonism into the country’s once impoverished nightlife has led to sometimes unrestrained debauchery. Today nightclubs like LAP are an integral part of India’s party culture and are filled with over the top and often obscene revelry. Brothels have always represented sensualism and a dissolute lifestyle, but this new form is often violent because it is too much too soon.

  Stephanie takes me for a walk around the club. I am alarmed by how many foreign women there are in the club—at the door, at the bar, flitting around the tables. We pass by a large table on which many bottles of alcohol sit like proud trophies. There is a flurry of young, foreign girls mingling with the men and women at the table.

  I ask tentatively, ‘Are they…?’

  ‘No, they are not. They are models who will eventually become,’ she says with a small smile, ‘like me.’

  In many ways the girls at LAP are rather like Mughal tawaifs: beautiful seductresses. The courtesans of today are young foreign girls who may not be adept in the sixty-four kalas, but who have their own set of credentials. They look good, dress well, flirt expertly and titillate professionally. I ask her something that I have had on my mind for a while now. Why does she do this when she has other options?

  ‘How can I go back to serving drinks?’ she says wryly. ‘I am addicted, I guess. Like an addict is to cocaine.’

  It then becomes clear to me. Prostitution may have taken on a new look, but it remains a primeval game. Though a new form of prostitution was brewing where sex work took place in five-star hotels instead of brothels and girls solicited in nightclubs instead of on the streets, the mentality, the economics, the desperation, the addiction and the darkness too were as old as desire.

  THE DARK SIDE*

  Her violent death made headlines around the world. On 16 December 2012, a young woman the media called Nirbhaya (or fearless) was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus in New Delhi. The rapists were men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, new migrants from Bihar. The young woman too was from a migrant family from UP. Her father worked as a loader at the airport. While the woman epitomized an upward economic trajectory, and seemed set to enter the ranks of the great Indian middle class, her rapists—sex-starved, repressed and horrifically violent—were mired at the very bottom of Indian society and seemed doomed to enact the roles that had been waiting for them.

  Beyond the barbarous bodily injuries that included broken ribs and limbs and acute damage to the abdomen, over three-fourths of Nirbhaya’s intestines had been pulled out of her body through her vagina. The physicians on duty at AIIMS (The All India Institute of Medical Sciences) where she was first taken that night told me that they had never seen such brutal and horrific violence inflicted on a human body.

  This time the rape struck home, more than any that had preceded it, because many of the nation’s young people, many of its young women in particular, found it easy to identify with the young woman. She was young, she was bright; they admired her grit and determination to better herself, her free-spirited ways, the fact that she loved high heels and going to the mall with her boyfriend to watch movies. The truth was that Nirbhaya could have been any one of us, and any one of us could have been her, and perhaps this is what scared us all and finally brought us out on the streets.

  Nirbhaya’s brutal rape drew more attention to the status of women in India than any other event in the country’s recent history. The Indian government promised justice, the capital would be safer they said, they would take action against these criminals and many others. The then chief minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit broke down on national television after a visit to the hospital, the leader of the ruling party, Sonia Gandhi, cancelled her New Year’s plans and mourned the death of this young woman who had done no wrong but board a bus.

  Parents ordered their daughters to remain indoors for safety’s sake, but that didn’t stop the young from taking to the streets. The country rippled with anger and dissent as people poured out in droves, demanding the death of the rapists. I joined them, one of the thousands of young people who protested against antiquated legal systems, a lax police force, and the awful patriarchal mentality that has infested the nation from time immemorial.

  Two weeks after the brutal rape, Nirbhaya died in Singapore where she had been flown for treatment. The nation mourned her death with silent vigils and in young hearts across the country a single resolution was made—the violence, the savagery would have to end.

  ♦

  As we have seen in earlier chapters, India’s rapid economic growth has been a mixed blessing to the country. While there is no doubt that it has had a profound impact on the personal lives of hundreds of millions—the 315 million101 and growing youth demographic—the change that has resulted has often been for the worse. This is true of the sexual revolution as well.

  Why thi
s is so is not hard to see. It has happened too quickly with little or no time for the participants in the revolution to grasp what is going on, to settle down, to socialize, to internalize the change. The state has done little or nothing to help, and when it has tried it has been less than successful. The dark side then is a manifestation of what has gone wrong, what is going wrong and what will go wrong when people, who are not ready for it, have new ideas, visions and, above all, freedoms thrust upon their existing patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal thought processes.

  Megamalls are erupting next to maize farms. A young woman buys a mojito at a bar; a young man, who has never seen a woman other than his sister or mother, is shaking up the cocktail for her. Young men and women are uprooted from their homes, and in the process, unknowingly at times, lose their social anchoring.

  The uneven and unwieldy growth has also meant huge numbers of people moving across the country in search of work. According to a report by McKinsey, the geographic pattern of India’s income and consumption growth is shifting too. In a decade, the Indian consumer market will ‘largely be an urban story, with 62 per cent of consumption in urban areas versus 42 per cent today’.102

  This great migration has meant layers of India’s super-stratified society are forced to mix; people are intermingling like never before and are gentrifying the same spaces. All is seemingly healthy here, until the discrepancies and inequalities become apparent.

  The resultant rapid urbanization is juxtaposed with an even faster influx of ideas. Bombarded with new ideas and sexualized content, generations are wrapped in chaos and confusion. This is India’s challenge: aspirations gone sour, frustrations come alive.