by Sally Howard
It all changed for Juhu Beach in November 2008, when 50 Pakistani terrorists gained land at Bombay in inflatable speedboats, having sailed from Karachi and hijacked an Indian trawler en route. Cocaine and steroid drugged and armed with incendiary bombs and AK-47 rifles, they went on a three-day killing spree that resulted in 166 fatalities. Indian authorities now attribute the attack to Pakistani terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In the aftermath of the Bombay bombings, the Indian government promised a wholesale overhaul of the city’s military and police protection mechanisms. However, few Bombayites trust that efficiency will win out over the city’s dyed-in-the-wool corruption. Most fear that terrorists will come again and, when they do, will land via Bombay’s beaches and ports – and the result is that tourists and fun-seeking Bombayites don’t come to Juhu Beach in the numbers they once did.
‘Strugglers still come here, though,’ says Menen.
We’ve taken a seat on the sands in front of a rustic chai stall run by one of Menen’s friends, a wiry man from Uttar Pradesh who wears a stained white muscle T-shirt and checked dhoti.
It’s now dark, the sky lit by a waning crescent moon; before us, the Arabian Sea is a fathomless navy blue. The chai is cloyingly sweet.
‘Who are the strugglers?’ I ask Menen.
‘The strugglers are the boys or girls who come from the small towns in India where Hindi cinema is the only thing that gives people reason to live. You’ve got 260 million illiterates in India, remember? Half of Indians shit outside, but 47 per cent have a TV at home. So they congregate around their shared TV and you give them what they want.
‘What they want is Bollywood and rippling torsos and jiggling bosoms. You give them Katerina Kaif with her toushie out and 300 million boys masturbate.
‘And what happens then?’ he continues. ‘Naturally you give them dreams of becoming their screen heroes. They’re mesmerised. So they come to Bombay with no connections. Bombay is cruel to them; so they end up as prostitutes and gigolos, their looks fading along with their dreams. They come to the beach to recharge those failing dreams, to rehearse their Oscar acceptance speeches; sometimes just to find a bed for the night on the sand.’
Beside us on the beach, two wild dogs begin an energetic, and impeccably timed, bout of coitus. Dimple flinches. Rajendar observes them intently.
‘Dogs, hookers, strugglers: they all have their territory around here,’ he says. ‘There are dogs like these and dogs they’ve castrated for population control. They get plump when they’re castrated, like the hijra do.’
After a moment’s silence, Menen continues. ‘For sex workers, moonless nights like these are the busiest nights. Sexual excursions take place openly in the brush at the back of the beach. There’s a big space crunch, so everyone understands.’
A small man passes by, a couple of greying towels slung over his left shoulder. Menen points at him. ‘See this man? He’s a masseur. Maailishwalas walk around with their bottles of oil and soiled bed sheets. They lay them out on the sand and perform foot massages or oil or dry body massages. Of course, there’s more on offer if you want it. Homosexual sex, usually… It’s all for sale at Juhu.’
Menen spits between his teeth towards the sea like a mafioso’s gesture of disrespect, and then throws his spent plastic water bottle in the direction of the spit trail. He catches my flicker of disapproval.
‘Remember, Sally, that Indians are the world’s first and finest recyclers. I know a man will earn his dal and rice by walking up the beach later, collecting these bottles, selling them by the kay gee.
‘It’s time. Let’s go,’ he says.
It’s 11 p.m. when Menen, Dimple and I reach the underbelly of modern Bombay. It takes us 20 minutes to find a cab driver willing to drive us there; most look us up and down, with narrowed eyes, then quickly drive away.
‘They think you’re prize prostitutes and I’m your pimp,’ says Menen, his smile showing how much he enjoys this idea.
Kamathipura was the underbelly of old Bombay, too. One of the low-lying marshes created by the land-reclamation projects of the late eighteenth century, the quarter was first home to migrant workers from Andra Pradesh. By the 1880s, Kamathipura had developed the personality it has today, having become an official ‘comfort zone’ for British troops in the Raj army. Other areas of Bombay housed more prostitutes by number, but it was at Kamathipura that the consorts were understood to be at their most exotic.
As we saw at Shimla, marriage was frowned on for lower-ranking soldiers in Raj-era India. So the choice, as the British authorities saw it, was between two evils: the increasing of marriage quotas, leading to the expense of marriage allowances and family quarters; or condoning the ‘deplorable evils’ of inter-barrack sodomy and prostitution, the latter coming with the concomitant risk of a venereal disease epidemic caused by the ‘sand rag’ brothels of the Indian bazaars.
The only solution, in the mind of Viceroy Elgin, was to establish ‘regimental brothels’. Through the late 1890s, Elgin regulated prostitution in 75 cantonments and set up 2000 lock hospitals to treat prostitutes with venereal disease, as well as a servicing army of travelling Indian prostitutes in regimental brothels, or chaklas, who were reserved, supposedly, for white male use. By the early 1900s it was impossible, said Frank Richards, a soldier stationed at Agra in the early 1900s, to leave barracks without being offered a ‘jiggy–jig’. For many men, sexual sport with Indian prostitutes was an antidote to the loneliness of the soldier’s life; indeed, for some it was an antidote to the type of women they might have met back home.
There was a marked taste, too, among these men for these ‘succulent houris of the East’. Captain Edward Sellon, a writer and translator of erotica, describes the kid-in-a-sweetshop gusto with which he threw himself into liaisons with Indian women during the ten years (from 16 to 26 years old) in which he served in the Indian Army. In his diaries and correspondence he praises the ‘cleanliness, dress, temperance and feminine accomplishments’ of high-class Indian courtesans.
Indeed, prostitution was a much more honourable occupation in India than it was in the capital city of the British Empire back in London. Asian prostitutes, including the pliant Hindus and the crème de la crème, the Japanese prostitute, were erudite and playful hostesses, trained for their art. In the 1900s, an Anglo-Indian prostitute, her name unrecorded, announced her retirement at 50, after 36 years’ service. She kept an open house for four hours where ‘enormous numbers’ turned out to pay her their respects.
Meanwhile, British prostitutes of the time were considered unexportable on the sex–trafficking routes (which spiderwebbed across the globe and were expanded after the opening of the Suez Canal) due to a ‘degraded character’ and ignorance of the finer skills (that is, oral and anal) of their trade. In the diaries of another Indian Raj soldier, G.R., we learn that after mastering the ‘Indian method’ he found himself able to ‘open the eyes’ of white European lovers as to the pleasures and possibilities of sex. It didn’t work both ways with regard to the enjoyment of sex between white men and Indian women, though. Indian women seldom thought much of British men as lovers, considering them nonchalant and insensitive to female sexual needs.
Burton makes a similar distinction between Eastern and Western sex workers in his introduction to the Kama Sutra’s Book Six, On Courtesans (which, as we’ve seen, is tellingly respectful to the Gupta Empire’s courtesan class):
The Hindus have ever had the good sense to recognize courtesans as a part and portion of human society and, so long as they behaved themselves with decency and propriety, they were regarded with certain respect. They have never been treated with that brutality and contempt so common in the West, while their education has always been of a superior kind to that bestowed upon the rest of womankind in Oriental countries.
It’s a different story for the sex workers of modern India.
The streets of Kamithpura seem freighted with this colourful history. In the pale light bleeding from
the open doorways of its shabby low rises, I can make out the silhouettes of small women in sarees, a few in Western clothes, alongside taller forms in exaggerated female poses: the telltale lineaments of the hijra. Knots of men stand around at the streetside, in darkness, while a few desultory women, more scantily dressed, sit on the loose and jutting stones of the kerb.
Our taxi had left us near to central Bombay station, at the edge of the district, so we’re on foot. There’s a definite air of menace in the air and – unusually for me – I’m feeling nervous.
‘You two, stay close to me,’ says Menen. ‘They don’t see white people down here that much, apart from white tourists ogling from taxis. But those never get out, unless they’re buying.’
‘How do they get cabs to drive around here?’ I ask, remembering our struggle.
‘They pay four times the going rate. Or they transfer at Bombay Central into the Kamathpura fleet. They’re the cabs that work this district, turning a blind eye to sex acts in the back seat. I don’t much like to sit on those seats, as you can imagine.’
‘How much do these girls charge?’ asks Dimple in low tones.
‘These days,’ continues Menen, ‘the girls cost 100 rupees. It’s gone down since the AIDS epidemic. You have to think, that’s less than a coffee at one of the uptown coffee shops. The charge is more at Congress House across town. There the girls come from the old tawaif families, or they have very white skin; they can usually speak English. A businessman can pick up a Congress girl and take her to a party as his girlfriend. She’ll charge up to 10,000 rupees for the privilege. But it’s very different here at Kamithpura.’
‘Is the AIDS epidemic under control?’ I ask.
‘Yes, the HIV message has got through,’ Menen rejoins. ‘The girls call it “AIDSee”. I ask them, “Do you have sex without a condom, if it’s a clean-looking man?” They say “no”, firmly; they know you can’t see AIDSee.
‘I used to stay overnight in one of the brothels on this street in my old reporting days,’ he continues, pointing to a narrow thoroughfare to our immediate right. Close up, at the head of the road, a small spry man stands, smoking a strong-smelling clove cigarette that’s clamped between his two remaining front teeth.
‘The thing about prostitutes – about any Indians who are on their knees – is that they’ll give you their last chapatti. There was one girl working this street, Sumitra I’ll call her. She’d had razorblades put to her throat on too many occasions to mention; she’d had one of her nipples sliced off by a client… But still she would cook a homely meal for me, in a small kitchen behind the bed where she serviced her clients. She’d lend me her last 50 rupees if I needed it. She made me cry with gratitude.’
‘How had she come to be in Kamithpura?’ I say, as we follow our guide onto a better-lit main street that’s filled with parked cab drivers shooting the breeze.
‘You know what, Sally,’ says Menen, ‘the story is the same for most of the Kamithpura girls. She’s a girl who comes from nothing. She’ll get raped at 12 unless she’s married, probably by a family member. So she’s married off young; at least if she’s married her baby is legitimised.
‘When she’s 15 her 20-year-old husband leaves her. He goes to another city to look for work, or to live out his youth. He leaves her with no money and a kid to support. So what does she do? She goes into prostitution, probably in a big city where no one knows her. She leaves the kid with her mother, sends all of her earnings back. She tells herself she’ll do it for a few years, earn enough to set up a business back home, or find a husband. But she doesn’t. She gets stuck here in Kamithpura. Her kid doesn’t know her. And she earns less and less, of course, working against the tick-tick-ticking clock of her fading looks.’
Another blight on these girls’ desperate lives, and it’s one shared by India’s rape victims, is the struggle to achieve justice against civil service corruption. Take this, the anonymous complaint of an Indian sex worker to the Hindustan Times in the wake of the 2013 rape uprisings:
My most cruel assaulters are often the men in uniform. Yes, the cops who blackmail us to pay bribes so that we can carry on with our jobs as sex workers. Refusal to please them means lathis [beatings with Indian truncheons], kicks in the mouth, abuses and, finally, rape… I have often been raped by cops in parks, and even inside lock-ups. Some often stop me on the road and ask for a quick oral sex. Even when I step out from home for personal work, they insist on sex. Any resistance is met with abuses and torture. At times, I try and run away from the cops. I once bit their hand in a bid to escape.
Menen leads us into an ancient-looking chai house that’s filled with autorickshaw drivers. They’re all in their uniforms of beige polyester shirts and trousers, some in mismatched shades of cream-beige. Forty pairs of eyes bore into us.
Seeing us, the owner, a middle-aged Muslim with a vibrant, henna-dyed beard, leaps up and wipes a table down for us, with a dingy rag.
‘What happens next?’ I ask Menen. ‘When her looks fade, I mean?’
‘If she’s shrewd she becomes a madam,’ he explains. ‘Some girls become cleaners in brothels. Many die of disease. Not just venereal: there’s a big problem with tuberculosis in Kamithpura. The lucky, and rare, ones will marry a customer. When I worked with NGOs here a few of the white guys from the US and Europe married prostitutes. I keep in touch with two of the couples. They’re happy, you know, all things considered.’
He lifts an index finger, signalling the owner to bring us three cups of chai. ‘Nine rupees it costs for chai now,’ he says, ‘used to be five. Gone up four rupees in five years… Incredible India, eh?’
All eyes continue to burrow into us, apart from those belonging to a man at an adjacent table. He has a shrunken right arm. With four webbed fingers he’s scooping dal into his mouth, using half a chapatti as a shovel.
The tea arrives, served by the red-bearded man, slopped onto the table unceremoniously. I notice a couple of young men with shaved heads in the far corner of the room and ask Menen about them.
‘They’re marines,’ he says, as he noisily slurps his chai. ‘They will get into a lot of trouble with their superiors if they’re known to be here at Kamithpura.
‘Look at them. They’re staring at you. Shall I tell you what they’re thinking? All they’re thinking about is how they’d like to fuck you. That’s what women don’t understand. Young men have this snake in their pants; it’s all they can think about. It’s all I ever thought about until I got to my 40s. It makes us imbeciles. We can’t function; so why do Indian families treat young men like gods? They’re imbeciles!’
We’re distracted now by a hijra sashaying past the café window, all long limbs and self-assuredness. Her face is scarred and coated in yellow-looking make-up.
‘I saw a hijra castration once, you know,’ confides Menen, ‘in one of the brothels around here. The Dai Mas, or senior eunuchs, perform it.’
‘I’ve always wanted to know what happens,’ says Dimple.
I’d always wanted to know, too. Now, as Menen starts to answer, I’m not so sure I do.
‘The patient will fast and pray for ten days to the Goddess Amba and castration is performed on the eleventh day with those attending the ceremony standing naked,’ he tells us. ‘The operation is primitive: a little alcohol, but no anaesthesia to numb the pain. The penis and testicles are sliced off the body with a knife, or a black silk thread; then hot oil is poured on the wound to stop the bleeding. Next they insert a neem stick into the opening to the urethra to prevent it closing, and hot oil is poured down this opening.
‘It sounds gory, but there’s a beautiful spiritual beauty to the ritual. It’s like delivering a new child. On the sixth day, the eunuch will be given her new name.’
We sit silently for a minute or so, contemplating this.
‘You girls, you look depressed. But I no longer get depressed about these facts of life,’ said Menen.
‘I read an interview with Madonna a couple of years ago. A
s a teenager she fucked for profit, for her career, to hang out with rich guys; she had no shame in admitting it. And what are most Indian marriages but legalised prostitution? It’s only the lucky girls in India who get to afford the luxury of shame. It’s the same story everywhere.
‘Eight million people a day use Bombay trains, and one million people fuck for a living. That’s just the way it is…’
15 | LOVE BYTES, Bombay
One who relates to both partners, and is open-minded towards both, specially the woman; such a person can be used with confidence as the messenger. The qualities desirable in such a person are eloquence, pertness, an understanding of the signals of emotion, a knowledge of the right time for deception, a feel for what is possible, quick grasp and resourcefulness.
—Kama Sutra, Book One, General, A.N.D. Haksar translation, 2011
Oh pearl of the nose-ring, thrice blessed are you; there is no limit to your good fortune!
No enquiries have been made into your lineage, your rank, and yet day or night you taste the nectar of her lips.
—Bihari Lal (1595–1663), Mughal poet
A week later and we have an appointment with a Bombayite who trades in those ancient commodities of love and lust on a global scale. Dimple’s excited by the prospect of meeting the man behind the marital matchmaking site Shaadi.com (shaadi being Hindi for wedding).
‘I see it among my younger cousins,’ she tells me excitedly, as we sit in a taxi in rush-hour traffic, battling the long slog south along the Bombay peninsula in the daily bumper-to-bumper grind.
A young, barefoot hawker boy presses himself against the window; the lowest rung of entrepreneurship in this nation of tooth-and-claw entrepreneurs. I notice, with a smile, that he’s selling pirate editions of Steve Jobs: An Autobiography.
‘I had little choice, and no power, when it came to choosing my match,’ continues Dimple. ‘But my cousins, they’re 10, 15 years younger, and it’s all in their hands. They say: ‘Ammi, we will find a good homely boy, an engineer, Ammi; we will do it on Shaadi,’ and Ammi agrees, as she cannot use the internet, and the village matchmakers are going down, so her daughter has the power, for the first time in, aaah, a thousand years.’
