How a street prostitute found pleasure in cutting herself
- As the night gets ready for its bridegroom, wounds begin to blossom
- Unending oceans of flowers roll out
- Peacocks continually dance and mate
- Here queue up they who want to taste
- Poison’s sweet or salt flavour
- Death gathers here, as do words,
- In just a minute, it will start pouring here ...
- Namdeo Dhasal
Suman was lying under a Maruti Omni. She didn't wake up. Munni had already shouted her name twice, maybe thrice. Then a man came, and kicked her, and she sat up swearing, cast a look around, and seemed confused.
Her eyes were large and dilated. She blinked in the afternoon sun. Soon, it would be evening. The streets would darken. Drunk men would start haggling for sex, and women and eunuchs would parade themselves, looking for customers.
***
These are not permanent places. The restlessness of the inhabitants rubs off on you as you wonder about their lives. The streetwalkers are the most temporary, and permanent.
Munni Bai was short of a few inches from being tagged a midget. She had an old face. Her hands were wrinkled. I met her one afternoon in 2012, with Zeenath Pasha - the eunuch inheritor of a brothel in Gulli No 1, as she was peeling vegetables.
She was sitting listlessly. Her own story resembled many others that one stumbles upon in these lanes. But hers is unique in the way she had responded to the cruel twists of her life. Her encounters with betrayals began a long ago in Kolkata from where she hails.
***
The despair of this old streetwalker was palpable. There were moments of awkward silence when she just stared, and I had nothing to ask her. She was 55 at that time. She had got pregnant at the age of 14, and her lover had disappeared, and the child was born, whom she had left behind in Kolkata.
She had taken a train to Bombay to find some way of living her life. When she was taken in by a madam, she was grateful because she knew her own limitations and understood the irony of fate. She could be sold, but only at a cheap rate.
She was dark. She had no features that could redeem her. Here, in these streets, supply was way more than the demand, and she offered herself for Rs 25. She took to drinking, and when I met her, she was unable to afford liquor, and so she still sold herself for whatever she could get.
She said she was HIV positive.
It didn't matter to her - these questions of dignity and morality. She left the brothel a long time ago, and began to live on the streets, and the fact that she kept alluding to her impending departure was enough to make one shudder with guilt, and sadness, and questions of right and wrong.
***
I remember I had wanted to buy her some liquor. Not out of some generosity, but because of my guilt at being the audience for a story that I wasn't even been looking for.
Like Zeenath, she was a repository of stories. She could go on talking. At one point, she mentioned Suman, whose body was so bruised and cut, it would leave you feeling disgusted. In spite of this, she would work in the streets, competing for clients.
So, we got up, and went to find Suman. She was considered immoral. She had sold her children to whoever would buy them, and would drink all the time.
***
"Only if you are interested," Munni said.
I couldn't help but smile.
My own romanticism of brothels was about to be turned on its head. The bulk of these themes of dark and despairing lives would eventually tumble over my own comfortable musings about them. These were women who were willing to lie, cheat, steal, and betray. In fact, they were capable of running contrary to the redeeming and guilt-ridden presumptions of an outsider, that they cut sorry figures.
They were survivors. They would change in an instant for a fix. The origins of my interest in squalor were until then unknown to me. It was perhaps emerging from somewhere deep within and I had no access to my own self. I was shocked, and disgusted when I encountered facts that I didn't dare to write because it would have diluted the "goodness" I was trying to find and exhibit.
Until then, I had only the deepest regard for prostitutes. For a while, I seemed to have deluded myself. It was self-indulgent. I know I was also being used in ways that were evident.
For instance, they were only telling me things that would make for excellent stories of suffering. Only later, when they actually opened up, did I discover the truth.
In any case, I had refused to write about the disgust I had felt at times because I didn't want to come across as insensitive. But that's for another time. For me, then they were like Madonnas who were mourning their degradation and wearing it on their sleeves. I was unwilling it strip it down to essentials. I was only fascinated with the repertoire of stories. It was like being on some salvation journey. That was when I met these streetwalkers of Kamathipura.
***
Zeenath was standing next to me, and we had walked from Gulli No 1 to look for Suman. Munni had continued the story, and said Suman was a strange woman: she would sleep with men, get pregnant, and then sell her newborns for money, which she would drink away. She was a street prostitute, and her body, Munni explained, was grotesque to the point where it could make you vomit if you saw it whole in the daylight.
"But in the dark, scars are not seen," she said.
***
She would slash her body with blades and knives. Her body had become a canvas of lines drawn sporadically. A few were dried, and cracking, and the rest were faint scars. Nothing had been erased permanently. That's what it is with scars. They are reminders.
In her case, she had been dying to get her lovers to stay. She thought if she would cut herself, they would stay. But they would leave. And then, she would cut herself in agony, and in desperation to numb another pain - of absence, and abandonment.
She reached out and rested her hand against the side of the van, and got up. She took a long time, and pointed to a small stone slab across the street outside a shuttered store and said we could sit there. She was wearing a red maxi and the bulge of her stomach showed. Her lover, a ragpicker, stood next to us.
He was drunk and dishevelled. His hair was unruly, and full of dust, and his fingers were almost blackish. Suman herself had not washed that day. She ordered tea. Munni asked her to narrate her story. This she did. And she didn't ask who we were, or why we had come to hear her story.
***
The truth is, we don't know what it is. Munni is a short, dark woman who had taken to drinking to escape the bad and the ugly of her life as a street prostitute. But that's what desperation does to you, she said.
Suman said she didn't do any such thing. And threw up her hands in despair. She is from Karnataka. She was brought her by a man she had trusted, and ended up on the streets.
Kamathipura, the red light district of Bombay, is no longer what it used to be. There are a few brothels left here, and the women wear a weary look when they stand outside on the streets through the evenings and the afternoons, waiting for clients.
Suman, Munni and others like them, who are discarded, rent pigeonhole kind of rooms if they manage to find a client for small amounts of money, and are back on the streets again. The red light districts have their own ecosystems and everybody manages until they can.
Suman seemed like she was still dizzy. She was not old, but not young either. She was perhaps in her mid-30s. She said she didn't know how old she was. She muttered things but not everything was audible, and it took a long time to make sense of what she was saying. She wore a red nightie, and carried a shawl to hide the bump of her stomach. The only delicate, beautiful thing were the anklets that she wore.
***
Munni said she was high on garda, a form of brown sugar. The drug was easily available here, and came cheap. I looked at her bare arms, and it looked like the skin was boiling, like water with bubbles. And I kept looking at her. Her face wasn't beautiful. But it was not an unpleasant face. The nose and the eyes fitted her well, and if it wasn't for the boils, she would still be a desirable woman. She was neither plump nor thin. It was her body that made me coil in horror. And to think it was all self-inflicted was a feeling that I can't describe even now. It was pity, loathing, sympathy, and despair. I just couldn't make sense of it. Not then. Not now.
I remember asking her why she cut herself with a blade.
“To get my lovers to stay," she had said.
“Do they?”
“Sometimes," she said, and looked at me with her sad, mocking eyes.
She then pointed to Pinto Suman Singh, the man who woke her up.
"He stayed," she said.
The man was shooting himself high across the street. He wasn't bothered. He wasn't in his senses to be bothered about the ramblings of Suman's minds.
She opened up in bits. She said she was sold off by her husband years ago. She was initiated into sex trade in Gulli No 14, which is infamous for crime and mugging, and the crass ways of its inhabitants.
They said Suman was a notorious masochist. She was also self-indulgent in the way she kept marking her body with scars. Scars, many say, are reminders, but hers were far too many. Or perhaps the incidents of her life that she needed to remember were far too many. They were almost like tattoos for keepsake memories.
***
Where we were sitting is called Naka, a place infested with lumpen elements and addicts.
HIV-AIDS was first detected in 1985 in Kamathipura, and this changed many things. Business wasn't brisk anymore. Only the fearless came here. And the ones who got the disease were pushed out on the streets like ageing people who had completed their shelf lives in a brothel and had nowhere but the streets to turn to. Like Munni, and like Suman.
She said she had a few children. She didn't say she sold them, but said she lost one girl to the streets. She never found her again. She said she didn't remember the number of children she had produced. They could be seven or six. She didn't want to remember. She said she had given a boy, whom she had given birth, to someone else. But she didn't say more. A doctor told her to not bear any more children. She said she wasn't pregnant.
Her life then was a series of broken events. None were interesting enough to be woven into a story, she said. Whenever she woke up, she walked around in search of food, and a joint, and some liquor. Then, she looked for customers, and when they were done with her, she would sit against the shuttered front of a store and smoke a cigarette she had asked for from one of the men she had serviced. That's all there was to her life.
She was abandoned, she said. Even with all her scars, none of the men stayed, and even the man who was across the street left. This, she knew. She had lost her trust in men. The delusion that they would stay with her was her solace in this those hours and days. She worked hard to forget these encounters in the dark. Every man was a lover, or not so. She didn't know their features too. She was too high to even remember. She sold herself cheaply. For Rs 20 or Rs 30.
***
Munni walked me back. I put some money in her hand. I knew it was unethical, and perhaps patronising. But she was glad. It wasn't much. But it would have saved her that night from selling herself. That was enough for then. I wasn't looking for more.