As is the practice, upon arrival in the new country, the employer would take away the immigrant’s passport for a year or more, depending on the work contract. Usually, for multiple-year contracts, an annual leave of a few weeks was permitted, but the labourers would hardly have enough savings for a return air ticket to home and back. This meant that they were forced to be away from their families at home in Nizamabad for extended periods.
‘The wives left behind by their husbands get lonely,’ explained Rajvi.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘They feel deprived of sexual pleasure because their husbands are away in the Gulf for one or two years at a stretch,’ she said, ‘and so they seek it from other men in the locality.’
‘And then they have unwanted pregnancies?’ I checked.
‘Exactly. These men and women do not practise safe sex; they are not aware of contraception measures. Many of them are uneducated, but then there is no concept of sex education at schools anyway. Also, the women cannot be seen buying condoms at the pharmacy, especially if their husbands are away!’ Rajvi said.
‘Getting an abortion is not easy either, maa,’ Rajvi continued. ‘The women do not have the money for abortions, and we have very poor medical services here in Nizamabad and the surrounding areas.’
‘So they deliver the baby, and then give it away?’
‘Yes, and worse. The women have several sexual partners, and since people here do not have protected sex, HIV/AIDS spreads easily. So many innocent children are born with AIDS. What is the fault of these children, maa? They are dumped in the orphanages here.’
I understood that in this way, the social sanctity of these long-distance marriages remained intact, whereas the sexual relations among the locals became secrets buried deep within the community. Indeed, their innocent children were the ones who bore the burden of shame and paid the price of it all.
This high social pressure of keeping up the Ram–Sita image in public has created double standards in our attitude to sex. Chastity before marriage is assumed to be the norm and divorce rates in India are very low—0.3 per cent, as compared to 50 per cent in the US as of 2015.18 Yet, a conservative estimate of the number of sex workers in India is around five million,19 which is almost as large as the entire population of Switzerland! Who is giving sex workers business in India—an unmarried Indian who is expected to be a virgin, or the married one who is supposedly monogamous?
To find answers to these questions, I took a friend who was also visiting Kolkata at that time along with me to meet the 10,000 and more sex workers of Sonagachi, an area in north Kolkata, and Asia’s largest red-light area, beating even the Kamathipura red-light area in Mumbai. I was curious to meet the ladies of Sonagachi. Where did they come from? What was their life like? Who were their clients—bored husbands, unlucky singles, sexually experimental folks? What was the attitude of their clients towards them? Were the clients obnoxious? I found it incredibly ironic that red-light areas of such a gigantic size would thrive in a country that is prudish about sex.
It can be slightly tricky to find the mouth of the narrow lane that leads into the maze of brothels in Sonagachi. My friend and I were told that it was right off the main road, but so tiny that we would probably miss it. Around the area, we rolled down the window of our taxi to ask the two men standing at the bend of the road for directions. We wanted to go to a brothel called Neel Kanth, we told them.
The two men, almost identically dressed in checked lungis and white cotton vests, stared hard at our faces, as if in doubt or suspicion. Our taxi driver honked, impatient to be done with the ride. Then one of the men limped forward towards us, mumbling that a couple does not come seeking a sex worker in Sonagachi. The friend accompanying me was a man. I had deliberately picked him to accompany me in my ‘sting operation’ at Sonagachi, so that he could pose as a client in the brothels. But the men in the lungis were still suspicious.
We ignored the comment and instead asked the man our question again. Standing very close by now and peering into our taxi window, his eyes fixed on me, he told us to get off the taxi there, which we did.
He pointed to a lane behind us, which he said would take us to Sonagachi. There would be plenty of people in that area to help us around, he said, and take us to Neel Kanth.
In the research for my trip to Sonagachi, I had read that the brothel Neel Kanth was something of a mystery. One person who wrote about Neel Kanth mentioned that it was ‘hidden’ and extremely difficult to locate. Another wrote of it as an elusive brothel that housed the Agrawalis (girls from Agra), who were apparently descendants of the courtesans in the Mughal courts. The Agrawalis were the wealthiest and most influential community in Sonagachi, we had heard. Their community had a norm that barred male members from earning a living. Men would be supported by their sisters. One particular person had written passionately about the beauty of the Agrawalis, especially their white skin, in a blog. In fact, we had also read a contradicting report that said only a lucky few had seen the Agrawalis as they did not step out of Neel Kanth and were picky about customers.
We set off on our search. It was a wet, muddy road—even though it had not rained—lit up with the lights in the six-storey buildings sticking to each other on both sides of the narrow lane. With each step we took, pebbles and small stones turned over and made a crackling sound, which was drowned out by the music floating out of
