# Born and raised in Kolkata’s red-light district, Avijit Halder looked at his world through a lens and saw a way out Avijit Halder’s 12-year-old face betrays no emotion. “I will not opt for a grade lower than the one I am in,” he says with steely resolve. He turn his face away from the camera and stares out of the window. The squalor of Sonagachi, Kolkata’s red-light district whizzes past. Thirteen years later, Halder is video chatting with me from his tidy apartment in New York. He has an infectious smile. When he is talking about his life, work and dreams, he is articulate, speaking in a polished, pan-Indian accent that sounds like it came from what he was not born into — privilege. In 2004, Halder and a few children of sex workers in Sonagachi became the focus of Born into Brothels, a documentary by Zana Briski, a British documentary photographer. She gave the children disposable cameras and the film followed their attempts to document their world. The film won an Oscar and other accolades but attracted brickbats in equal measure. Many lauded its portrayal of Asia’s largest red-light district, while others criticised the film for showing the children’s parents in a negative light, and for ignoring their efforts to provide an education and career-building activities for their children. “For me, there is a bit of a white lie in the film. I did live in a brothel, but my mother was not a sex worker,” says Halder. When Briski came to Sonagachi in the early 2000s, Halder was living with his mother, father (“an abusive drug addict who didn’t want me to attend school”) and his grandfather. “My grandfather ran a small-time bootlegging business in the brothel. Eight of us shared a 10X10 feet room,” says Halder. His mother had got him a government scholarship. “She would keep insisting that education is the only way to escape that hell. I developed a love for drawing in school. In Kolkata, there are many sit-and-draw competitions for children. I would rush from one to another with my friend Manik, who is also in the film. We would do anything to stay away from home,” he says. He shone in the photography tutorials Briski conducted in Sonagachi. His sense of aesthetics and colour helped him develop a unique visual language and soon, Halder was invited to participate in a photo talent contest in Amsterdam, Holland. “That was when I realised how different the outside world is. I realised that this life was also a possibility,” he says. “Of that group, I was the most determined to change my life. Others, like Kochi (one of the girls who was featured in the documentary), were talented but not motivated enough. I knew I had to learn English and impress everyone,” says Halder. Two years after the documentary was released, Briski returned to Kolkata with a proposal. “The documentary had received universal acclaim and she had collected some funds for us. I was doing well in school and she asked me if I wanted to study in the US,” says Halder. By then, he had shifted from his Bengali-medium school to an English-medium school in central Kolkata with the help of an NGO. “I’d lost my mother by then and was even more determined to make her dreams come true. Though the NGO that was funding my education was against my move to the US, I knew I had to do this,” says Halder, who would scale the walls of his hostel to appear for visa and passport interviews. “I applied to a preparatory school and got through. I asked Zana and the film’s producers to help me with the funds, which they did and then, there was no looking back,” he says. But life in the quietude of New Hampshire after spending most of his life in the bustle of Sonagachi was disorienting. “I couldn’t stand the isolation of the small town. I consulted a few sleep therapists, they suggested I buy those sleep-inducers which play the sound of the ocean. Except, in my case, it had to be the cacophony of Sonagachi,” says Halder with a laugh. His classmates were not very intrusive, which was a blessing. “But I was quite confused about the American concept of space. When people greeted me with ‘wassup’, I thought they were interested in my life and would ready myself for a conversation,” says Halder, who completed high school and applied to New York University to study cinema. “I dabbled with photography for a while, but I realised that cinema is my true calling,” he says. Halder visits home often and is in touch with almost all his friends. “I’m helping Manik with photography, he is studying in a college in south Kolkata now. Kochi, who had come to the US to study, returned within a year because she got married and now lives in north Kolkata. Most of the other girls in the group are also married and settled,” he says. While Halder wants to help those he has grown up with, he doesn’t feel “equipped enough” to do so. “There is a girl who was three when I left for the US; she is13 now. The last time I came home and hugged her, she recoiled. She told me that she is afraid of any kind of male touch because her mother is trying to get her into the business. I spoke to her mother but she wouldn’t budge from her position. I couldn’t report this to the authorities because they haven’t done anything illegal yet. Reporting her to the police is not the answer anyway; people need to start believing that there is a possibility of a life beyond this little ghetto,” he says. Today, Halder is a green card holder and freelances as a cinematographer in NYC. “I am saving to make my own film,” he says. He is writing a film based in Songachi. “I have the responsibility to tell our story effectively. I don’t want to resort to cliches or convenient lies. I want my film to be honest,” he says.
