The love songs of prostitutes composed in dark rooms of despair

"There will be a pond a little way from the house. It will be full of lotus leaves and flowers. Ducks will swim in it."

Shenaz, who was 13 then, also wrote she would have a parrot, a dog, and a mongoose at home. She wrote there would be a river at a short distance, fisherman would catch fish, and there would be many trees along the banks.

She wrote these lines under "My Dreams" for Red Light Despatch, a newsletter by Apne Aap Women Worldwide. I don't know if Shenaz had been trafficked, or if she is the daughter of a prostitute. The dateline said Khidderpore in Sundarbans.

This was published in 2006. I flipped through the pages of a compilation of the Red Light Despatch, and a little charcoal drawing caught my eyes. It was undersigned Sapna, and she came from Bhiwandi. It had a little hut, mountains, palm trees, and lots of fun. There was a bird in flight. She must be 22 now.

Their imagined homes had no boundaries. They had dreamt of freedom. From the dark, stinky rooms of the brothels. One of them named Tamanna had written, "The outside world is safer. The inside world we live in is frightening".

I flipped through more pages, and there was this.

• Looking outside the tiny window of my room,
• I see the world as a light of bliss and think...
• Is there any scene which is more beautiful than this? Anywhere in this world?
• There are meadows all around bedecked with the golden paddy grains
• ... looking ravishing.
• There are the trees inundated by the lovely tunes of the birds.
• There are beautiful lovely friends around.
• The birds are flying high in the sky spreading their wings...
• And I?
• I am sitting inside the room.
•  
• - Sandhya Parbat, 11.
• Red Light Despatch, April, 2008.

I tried to imagine the room as I sat under a lone bulb in my room in Delhi. It must be dark, and must smell of so many things. Bodies, and stale food, and cooking. Her tomorrows and a "forever" would start here. Inside the room with a window, and she, who had magic eyes, would see the meadows and the world as a blissful place.

Also read: How a street prostitute found pleasure in cutting herself

There must be a little window at which she must stand and look outside at odd hours. Must see the birds "spread out their wings" as she writes the poem, and the paddy fields that she describes as "ravishing". She speaks of "beautiful lovely friends around" and then she ends it abruptly. She says she sits inside the room. The world might be beautiful, but it exists out of the window. It is beyond her.

She must have been trafficked. At 11, when she should have been doing other things like other children, Sandhya was grappling with her life as a prostitute. She must have been coming to terms with the pain, and the loss of innocence that such a life eventually leads to, and in giant leaps. At first, you are bewildered, and then you become a survivor and learn to sleep with men with no moral qualms. Later, she would become nonchalant. But at 11, the melancholic child was looking out of a window at the birds in flight. She knew she couldn't get out the room. There could be a million reasons for her being here. Poverty, exploitation, trafficking, and failure of agencies.

What was haunting was the maturity of the words, and the grief and despair that were palpable in the way she had strung together the sentences to portray her captivity. She wasn't bitter but the sadness in the few words was overwhelming when she wrote about looking at the meadows. Whether the meadows existed outside the tiny window is incidental. In all probability, they did not. But that is what she saw. I tried to find her.

Also read: How my brothel visits set me free

I wanted to ask if she remembered the poem she wrote. Other prostitutes would read it, and speak about it, and write more about their lives. And through these translated jottings, we'd know the poems they conceived. But translations impose limitations. But we'd have to do with it for now. There's no larger point I am making than just recounting a few fragments from what I call the prostitutes' literature. They may not know the cadence, and the rhythm, but poetry, they says, is what you write when you can't do anything else. A sentence can contain an eternity. Imagine being in a dark room, and looking out at the meadows. Freedom only becomes so precious when there is no way of getting out of a dark room. I call these the poems of unfreedom.

Later, in the bound volume of the issues of the newsletter that was started in Forbesganj in Bihar where the prostitutes would write their stories and read those that others in other cities and towns wrote, there was a small poem by Gulzar titled "Prostitute".

• Trampled in the midst of a lush field
• lies
• The corpse of a pagdandi...
•  
• If my womb had not been trampled by these
• wayfarers
• My sons might have grown up
• And my daughter too ready for marriage
• by now.

Pregnancies here were occupational hazards. Like diseases and addictions. They may not know the father, but they are mostly protective about their sons and daughters and want them to escape from the drudgery of sex trade. But some fall through the cracks.

I kept returning to the bound volume of Red Light Despatch to attempt a compilation of the notes written by the prostitutes. But I keep getting lost in their stories, and trying to imagine young girls 11 and 14 years of age writing with such dreamlike fantasies about a home they dream of, and writing with such suffering about the betrayals of men who said they loved them, and then sold them at brothels, or tortured them for money. At 14, I hadn't known about such betrayals.

Also read: How we raided a GB Road brothel to rescue her

When I had first climbed the staircase that was walled in from both sides, I was afraid of what I'd see. At the landing, the women were sitting, and they had crowded around me. This was years ago in GB Road in Delhi, and towards the evening when the hardware shops that lined the ground floor had begun to shut down, the first and the second floors had begun to assert themselves. Women stood at the windows, and in the balconies. And men glanced up at them, and I would have called it love, except that it wasn't.

In the fading sun, the women looked like caged birds. Their hair had been dyed, and only the most presentable were made to stand at the windows. A few aged prostitutes had been sitting at the entrance, and they said it wasn't a good time, but let us in anyways. The establishment was garish and the floors and walls were tiled. Women were sitting on benches, or standing against the walls, and at the time, I saw only a couple of men. There was a sliding door that I saw getting shut, and they said there were bunker beds inside and that's where they serviced their clients. But I didn't venture that far. I saw from where I stood a little balcony that looked down upon the street. On the other side there was a huge tree, some sort of a railway compound, and a police station. The street lights threw up their yellow light which mixed with the stark white light of the brothel. The older women complained about lack of business, and gout and bad vision, and other problems. They sat on little stools, and guarded the entrance like bouncers. But they offered tea, and some conversation, although they were uninterested in my questions, and kept asking if the article would get them any benefits, or retirement pension, or anything at all. Yet, they were not unwelcoming. I was only interested to see how a brothel looks like from the inside.

In Bombay, the lanes of Kamathipura, the red light district were packed with women standing at the corners, at the intersections, or just anywhere. Nights and days merged here. When I first walked up the bluish fray staircase of Ramabai Chawl in Gulli No 1, I was not prepared to face the bunker beds with tarpaulin sheets. These were planks of woods stacked on top of each other. These were enclosures that could only fit in one body. And the other could be on top, or underneath. These reminded me of the train berths. These lined the corridor, and at the other end where the staircase led to, was the room where there was a little aquarium with goldfish. There was an old bed next to a window. The bed was an inheritance and had intricate carving on it. This is where Zeenath Pasha slept, and the others sat on the tiled floor when they needed a break. The adjoining kitchen was where they cooked their meals. They would come and hand over the money to Zeenath which she would place under the pillow. She ran the house of the whores. Here, the eunuchs stayed. But they said most brothels had similar arrangements. They took me to a few, and most had an outside waiting room where the madams and the whores sat, and made conversations. It must be stuffy inside, I thought. So much so that they had little beds outside on the streets, and sat there during the evenings. Bombay is a city that is forever filling in. There is no space, and they make do with what they have. This struck me when I looked at the shawls in awe. Where was the place for love here?

Some afternoons, as I sat with them, they spoke of loneliness. Only a man could redeem them. But they were like "passengers", they said. They rode them, and were gone.

Rumana Sheikh from Kidderpore in Kolkata wrote in her "My Dream" in one of the issues that only when they fall in love with a man and he rescues them can their lives change.

"We need a man for emotional support. Loneliness is a big feeling. We desire to find someone (man) to call us our own. We are helpless; we do not know the outside world," she wrote.

For them, trapped as they were, they thought a man might rescue them. That hope alone carried them. But then, they also knew they were hoping for the impossible. Most men who came by, and stayed were abusive, and addicts, and they muttered words of love, and longing, and passed out. They latched on to these men as their saviours. But they were still here.

Maisoon, who lived in Khawaspur in Bihar, wrote that she hated this work, and didn't want to do anything that was wrong. She wrote she was raped, and stabbed because she had refused to open her door at midnight for prostitution once. She was 12 or 13 at the time, and she had fainted.

"All kinds of men come here; good, bad, criminal. I can't distinguish. I just want a life of peace," she wrote at the end.

And as I rummaged through the pages once again, I was reminded of the songs they sang at the brothel, and how they had dyed their hands with henna on the eve of Eid once in Bombay. I had been sitting in my customary place across the dressing table, and one of them had come out and shed her clothes, and I could see her reflection in the mirror. She stood behind me, and looked at me challenging me if I could deal with this. I stayed. That night, they danced on the streets, and asked me to take their pictures, and we went through the market and bought bangles and gold sandals.

They burned incense, and recited shayari. And on the way back, I knew that literature, it had to be worth its salt, had to emerge from the darkest recesses of the soul, and who would know the darkness better than those who lived inside rooms and looked out of the window and saw mountains, and a bright sun, and a house with no fence, meadows and gold fields of barley.

I had read authors, and poets who wrote about prostitutes. For instance, Geroge Orwell, Guy de Maupassant, Namdeo Dhasal, and Saadat Hasan Manto.

Manto, I know, used to stand near Falkland Road in Bombay and observe the goings-on in the streets. They entered the heads and souls of these women. But then, we can only open a few doors. They keys to the rest belong only to them, and only sometimes when they wrote or spoke, could you glimpse the uncorrupted beauty, and agony of their being.

They remain the most poetic people of my life. They hoped, and wrote. Despite the despair, and their sentences - unformed, and rudimentary - were never lacking in depth of imagination. Their loneliness wasn't bitter. It was just poetic.

They were selling their bodies, and who are we to judge the trade that they must do in order to live? We prostitute our words for money, and we sell others' stories. They only write for the sake of writing. They don't have readers, or money in their mind when they set out to scribble those lines. Simple and profound, and free of others' judgments.