‘Are you here to work?’ one of them asked me in Bengali.
‘I am here just accompanying him,’ I replied, pointing to my friend.
‘Why accompanying?’ she giggled. ‘Does he want to try me out? Ask him. I am around for a few more hours.’ She had guessed by then that my friend did not comprehend the language of our conversation.
‘Where will you go after that?’ I asked.
‘Home.’
‘You don’t stay here?’
‘No, no, this is my day job. I go back to my husband. I have two children at home.’
‘Ah, okay. Would you know where the Agrawalis are?’
‘They live in expensive flats around here,’ she said, pointing to the buildings.
Her answer did not help at all. The road ahead curved to the right and then branched off into several narrower streets. We randomly took a turn into a street where there were only residential buildings, with women and men sitting on plastic chairs and charpoys outside, but the ambience did not seem very familial. Hardly had we stepped into this street when a small, feeble man dressed in a crushed white cotton dhoti and a cream-coloured old, half-sleeved kurta came hobbling towards us. He was bald and the skin on his face was dark brown and wrinkled.
‘What type are you looking for?’ he asked my friend, his beady eyes searching his face.
‘We are looking for a girl to do a threesome with us,’ my friend replied, putting his arm around my shoulder.
‘All types available,’ the man continued, without pausing to comprehend what my friend had just said. ‘High class, low class, Marwari, Nepali, Rajasthani, Baangali, Agrawali . . .’
‘Can you take us to Neel Kanth?’ I asked, ecstatic that he had mentioned the Agrawalis in his offer.
‘Yes, Neel Kanth is right here. Come, follow me,’ said the man to us.
He took us through dark, dingy, nameless, criss-crossing lanes with buildings. Each building seemed to have a winding staircase, and was made up of small single rooms only, partitioned by curtains. It was intriguing and disturbing at the same time because of the questions they raised about the abundance of sexuality in India and the disrespect for it. How much violence and abuse will take place when the curtains are drawn, thanks to the centuries of sexual repression? As we walked, I looked at the men and women around me and wondered how many had lied at home and come here looking to get or to give sexual pleasure? How many were sex workers under the legal age of eighteen? Were they duped and forced to work here? The exchange of sexual services for money in India is legal for adults, although soliciting in a public place, owning or managing a brothel and child prostitution are crimes. Also, it is legal only if sexual services are provided in a private residence, but many brothels thrive illegally in India, and pimps, such as the man leading us, do business.
‘This building here has Marwari girls,’ our pimp told us, pointing at the building next to us. ‘And this one here has Nepali girls,’ he continued excitedly, pointing at another one.
‘Okay, let us take a look at the Marwari one,’ I said.
We met more than fifty sex workers at the Marwari, Nepali and Bengali buildings during the course of the evening as we walked to Neel Kanth. Among these, I could speak in detail to only about two dozen women. I asked them where they came from, why they were here, and the attitude of their customers. Most of the others wanted us to get to the point and agree on a price.
The diversity at Sonagachi, I found, was as astonishingly and perversely stratified as in the rest of India. Class and community ranking here underpinned even the common objective of sexual pleasure. Girls belonging to the same caste, class or regional community lived in the same building, separated from the rest who lived in similarly culturally homogeneous groups. Sex workers hailing from different regions in India moved to live with their community here because it gave them a greater sense of comfort and community support. Some of them were brought here by deceit, but slowly, they adjusted. Consequently, the residents of different buildings in Sonagachi spoke languages that were each distinct from the other. Every building reflected the native culture of its inhabitants. The ghetto effect in the area reinforced community stereotypes. Each girl in the business was acutely aware of not only her professional but also her cultural, linguistic and regional identity, and used these different strands according to the profile and taste of a potential customer to earn her living. If the customer spoke her language she would speak to him in it. If he had a fetish for women from her region, then she would accentuate her cultural affiliations, they told me. There were no inhibitions among them to be exhibitive of cultural and ethnic origins, or to use those as a differentiating factor from the rest for profit.
They were not poor any more, but they all had once been so. Customers of all backgrounds came to Sonagachi. The girls labelled ‘high class’ had higher rates and offered better rooms, whereas ‘low class’ girls meant a budget score on a straw mat. Many of these customers were married, the girls told me. A few had peculiar sexual fantasies while others were violent. There were cases of abuse and some of the girls said they had been beaten. The majority of the customers did not like protected sex. Business on most days was lucrative, and so, they told me, they did not care about the occasional violence or the dangers of catching a deadly virus. Money was the only factor that drove them to become sex workers. As we spoke, the children of some of the girls I met peeped into the bedrooms.
India’s rapid but unequal economic growth has had a profound and mixed impact on the personal lives
