How sex workers in Mumbai’s Kamathipura live with exploitation

During the day, Kamathipura looks just like any other south Mumbai locality, with higgledy-piggledy buildings crowding a narrow street and a winding bylane jammed with traffic and vendors. But, come evening, Asia’s second-largest red light area puts out the mat for customers. The women come out to the pavements in front of the dilapidated, cheek-by-jowl buildings around 6 in the evening. Some can be seen smearing lipstick and wearing bangles. They also give a smile that mostly never touches their eyes. Tamanna and Pinki, trafficked here seven years ago, are among the thousands of girls and women who work and live in Kamathipura with two rules that they can never violate – they cannot leave the brothel, or refuse a customer. Tamanna says their clients don’t consider them to be human beings, just flesh. The stories of Pinki and Tamanna are like the stories of millions of women across the world forced to sell their bodies for a living. A tale of poverty, hunger and exploitation. No one back home knows what they do. They only know that they work in Mumbai, the city of dreams. And the dreams of women like Pinki and Tamanna were shattered by people they trusted. For Pinki, who is from West Bengal, it was her own husband. “My husband brought me here. He sold me off. He went away with another woman. I have a younger brother, our father died long back. Who will feed my children? What should I do?” says Pinki. For Tamanna, it was a man in her village in Assam who offered her help to earn money after her mother fell too ill to work. The man told Tamanna he would get her a job in a tailor's shop. He took Tamanna to Mumbai. For six months, she was confined to a cage – a wooden cell where new girls are kept until their spirit breaks, and they give in to the demands of their job. The torture is not just physical. Every day the girls are told to accept their fate, that they can never return. Pinki is the mother of two children. A boy who is ten years old and a girl who is six. She says both her children study in an English medium school in Kolkata and live with her mother. Pinki dreams that her daughter will become a doctor one day. Pinki's children, of course, don't know what their mother's job is. Her son keeps asking her what she does. She never gives him a direct answer. What keeps Tamanna and Pinki in Kamathipura is what brought them here — the need to earn money and support their families. Pinki says she earns around Rs 80,000 a month and can fulfil all her family’s needs. She sends around half the amount to her mother, gives Rs 10,000 to the pimp and pays Rs 5,000 as rent. The rest, she keeps with herself. Pinki says she is ready to leave the brothel. She has pinned her hopes on her children. But Tamanna says that even if she leaves Kamathipura, society will not accept her. And those moralising will not pay their bills either. So she keeps working. Voice: Pallavi Bharti Audio Production: Sahil Gupta