| |
|
|
|
"Now I live with my mother. We have four-rooms: two for living and two for the affis. Girls in our community are now so spoiled that they work for two days and take four off. It was different before. Everyone used to work very hard. Life is still tough for me. I work a lot, but still can hardly make ends meet. Just imagine, we pay 4000 rupees for rent and 3000 for the electricity bill! With such rising prices, we’re lucky to feed and clothe our children. “I have four brothers: Two work with the famous dancing girls, Salma and Sitara, as their agents; two just roam around, like the Kanjar boys often do. I live upstairs with my children and my mother lives downstairs with my sister. “With God's help, my work is enough for my children and me to survive. At times, I get very rowdy customers who get drunk and make a lot of noise. They grab me roughly and push me around. I have to be very firm to control them. I say, ‘Me tere nikah wich nain, (I’m not married to you) so you can’t throw me around like that.
See, I will only tolerate so much. I’m sitting in my own house after all. They come for my services. Sometimes, I just have to draw the line. If they get violent, I stop singing and ask them to leave immediately.
Soon after I arrived, a tall, dark and very slim young woman walked into Sadiq’s baithak. I was surprised because she looked very different from the other women I had seen there. At first, I took her for someone’s mistress, a higher class of prostitute. She seemed mature and well taken care of. Her long black hair was brushed back nicely, flowing over her shoulders. She walked with a rhythm. Intriguingly, she walked straight into the baithak, without knocking at the door or saying anything, and sat down on the floor. She looked stunning.
Ustad Sadiq looked at her and said, ‘Aa gai oon! (You have come!).’ He introduced her to me in an elaborate manner. She was apparently one of his best students, one he frequently used as a singer in the shows he organized. A junior musician sitting close by and listening to the elaborate praise, decided to tease her and said to Sadiq, ‘kuch kaht karo, bot ucha pucha dita e (Cut it down a bit, you’ve gone too far).’ There was laughter in the room. The woman also laughed and lovingly yelled at the boy in a deep, hoarse voice. When she opened her mouth to speak, I saw that her teeth were orange from eating paan. Her voice was loud and her retort was just a long string of profanity that ended in a hard slap on his back. I was shocked. This was Chanda!
‘Okay, so if we dispel these myths…then what?’ he asked.
‘I was going into the reality behind the myths just to prove that they are only myths. My point is that we must recognize that by generating and maintaining the myths and stopping anyone from uncovering the truth, we keep the focus only on the community that provides the prostitution services. We have to include the other side to get a full picture of the issue,’ I said.
Raising one eyebrow, Amjad looked at me and asked, ‘Which is…?’
‘The rest of the society! The focus should be on us! Who do the prostitutes serve? Who has a stake in their activities? What function has society entrusted to them? Do we really want to deal with it? Do we want to know about it? Do we want to start an open debate on it? Do we want to analyse it? Or do we want to continue in denial, blaming those other, mysterious people out there in the Mohalla for being so “bad” and corrupting our men?’
‘I’m not sure I buy your argument,’ he said, looking sideways out the window.
‘Well, why this secrecy and resistance? Why this fear of the topic? Might we uncover our own contradictions and hypocrisy? Don’t tell me that you also think we should continue pretending that prostitution doesn’t exist in this country.’
‘I’ll have to think more about it’, he answered.
|
|
