Looking up for love

At Garstin Bastion Road,or Swami Shradhanand Marg,the name given to the red light district in the city’s capital in 1965,the prostitutes—around 1,000 of them—were getting ready for business. After the auto parts shops lining the street would down their shutters,it would be their domain.

The girl,her cheap silver earrings dangling from her ears,and her lips painted a loud pink,was searching,scanning the streets till her eyes rested on a young man—he wore a striped shirt and jeans that had too many zip pockets,and sported longish hair,streaked like hers.

And he looked back at her from where he was standing,squeezed between cars,a little nala behind him,and started to sing,pausing and blowing a million kisses her way.

He called her Preeti. Preeti only smiled,and turned away,then looked at him again.

That’s love and longing at GB Road,where according to those who live and work there in closet-size rooms,love is what they can’t let in. Because that corrupts,they say.

As we waited for Charsi Bai,one of the kotha mistresses,we looked up at the landing of the staircase. A woman looked down at us. We were intruders.

She disappeared in the maze of rooms inside,and another one stuck her head outside. Her eyes,pumped with cheap mascara,and her eyelids smeared with bright bronze shadow,looked past us to the streets. At that hour,there weren’t many buyers around.

Because it is illegal to solicit,the women never came out. Their pimps,and there were plenty of them—young boys from Bihar,old paunchy men who chewed betel leaves and spat everywhere,moved around,eyeing the passersby.

There are girls from Andhra Pradesh,who were rounded up by the state police and dragged and put in a van and deported to their villages last year and have come back since,there are the fair women from Nepal who are modern,wear fashionable clothes,and there are the Rajasthanis.

One woman stood at the landing. She was annoyed. The business in GB Road is not booming anymore. The rates range from Rs 100 to Rs 500,but then the usual customers,the rickshaw pullers,the students,couldn’t pay them more.

Recession has had its after effects too—the “beautiful up-market prostitutes” from Russia,Dubai and other countries are on sale,too.

According to Suraj Singh,who has worked in one of the hundreds of shops on the ground floors of the 20 buildings of GB Road for 27 years,the place has remained unchanged. The women maintain their distance and shop owners respect them.

“They call us ‘bhaiya’ and we don’t have any problems with them. But it is sad to see them being exploited,” he says. “The day the Andhra Police came and dragged 179 of those girls out,we felt bad. They had children with them,they were crying but they just put them in a van and drove away. Some people come and sell their wives and you hear the commotion,and the wailing. It’s sad.”

In one of the kothas,in what looked like a small reception area,more than a dozen women were waiting for their turn. The young ones,with their plunging necklines,and fluttering eyelashes,ran to the landing,whispering,adjusting their hair. This was their moment. They had to make the most of their youth before diseases claimed them. It will be a while before they paid off their debts to the naikas,the women who purchased them.

The air was abuzz with anticipation,and competition.

A middle-aged woman,with thick glasses,wrapped in a shawl,was waiting,too. “My life is spent now. Over these years,I did the same thing. There’s no respite,” she says.

There were other women too,huddled under the parapets of the old buildings. Their days are over. They were members of the kothas,then became housemaids to the younger queens,and then when they couldn’t do that,they descended those staircases and were out on the streets.

“Every girl has a love story. Puja fell in love with her customer,a young man of 25 years. It lasted for 6-7 months and then she realised he was abusing her,drinking off her earnings,” says Rishi Kant,an activist with Shakti Vahini,an NGO working for the sex workers.

So,love is an infection they guard against.

Preeti went inside. The young lover stood alone,waiting for her to reappear.