Most of her childhood was spent hiding her identity and roots but now at 32, Naseema Khatoon today has no inhibition sharing her journey from a red light area to her new life of activism. She is happily married to a Dalit activist and is reaching out to other women in distress through her NGO Parcham. In a chat with Manjari Singh, she tells you how difficult it is to break away from the shackles of prostitution

Born to a family of prostitutes in Muzzaffarpur in Bihar, Naseema Khatoon had only one thing going for her. She knew she would never be pushed into this profession against her will. “I hated my life in that locality. I never wanted to be one of them and, luckily, I was not forced to join the brigade. That is the only solace for girls who live in this community,” Naseema tells you, adding that so many years later she still gets the shivers when she talks about her community.

“The problem is that even though we were not thrown into the flesh trade, we were ostrocised by society. We were not accepted anywhere. That felt worse,” she says.

Her father was a tea stall owner in the locality and was adopted by a sex worker. He was later married off to at an early age. “My mother was not a sex worker but my grandmother was a popular kotha wali. My sisters stayed away from the trade but they led a miserable life because they were married off to people working in the red light area. The other girls in our community were subject to all kinds of sexual torture,” Naseema recalls.

She tells you how her childhood was spent in pain and poverty, how education was not easy to come by and how sex for money was the only thing discussed around her. “It was painful witnessing those police raids. Whenever we heard the siren, my grandmother would wake us up and make us study so that the police didn’t get the wrong idea,” she tells you, adding that her mother eloped with another man from a different locality.

“In reality nothing much changed because my parents had never got along. With my mother gone, at least the fights stopped. We were not subject to physical abuse by our parents because of their frustration with each other,” she says.

But life changed for the better after 1995. “It was the year when IAS officer Rajbala Verma was posted in Muzzafarpur and came up with alternative programmes for sex workers. There were many things that prostitute children could do to earn a living. She coaxed sex workers to educate their children. Since I was made to sit at home after having completed Class VIII, I got myself enrolled for a crochet workshop, something I was very good at. I used to make Rs 250 a month which was enough for me,” Naseema recalls.

later, she enrolled for another programme called Better life Option which got her Rs 500 a month. “People in my locality didn’t want me to work as they believed I would drift away from our community’s tradition. But I wanted to continue and would go against their advice. People abused me and mocked at the small sum I used to make, but I did not let that deter me. I wanted to get away from the community as fast as I could,” Khatoon tells you, adding that people even used to call her names.

“I was called characterless. People said I was having an affair with someone so wanted to join the class as an excuse. My father, believed all the canard and packed me off to my maternal grandmother’s house in Sitamarhi’s infamous red light area, Boha Toli,” she recalls.

Those were the worst days of Naseema’s life. “I locked myself in a room and kept crying for days. It was only when I stopped eating and having water that my father came to visit me. I pleaded with my father to enroll me into another self-help organisation. He was not initially convinced but came around after the co-ordinator came to our house to talk to him about the NGO,” Naseema says, adding that it was the first time that a gentleman had come visiting their home. “The colony was very surprised and excited that a babu had come to our house in a big car. It was a big thing for them,” she says.

The co-ordinator’s persuasion worked and Naseema’s father agreed to send her to his organisation. But there, she was faced with more difficulties. “I used to feel out of place. Everything was different, right from the staff to the language and, of course, here also I had to conceal my identity. It was very difficult to mingle with girls from high societies. I had never been friendly with any such girls before,” Naseema tells you about her ordeal.

However, the idea of quitting and giving up never came to this then gritty 14-year-old. “I used to feel bad when I saw girls my age apply gaudy make-up and wear cheap clothes to serve a client when I was headed to a learning and more respectable job,” Naseema who was among the first to learn the ‘reflect methodology’ in Bihar, tells you.

This programme was designed to educate adults (in all subjects) in a short span of time. “I was feeling confident and there was no looking back for me. Within a year, I was taken by the NGO to Mumbai to attend this programme,” she recalls, adding that she was excited to be flying in a plane for the first time.

But the class was no fun. That trip to Mumbai cost Naseema a lot. The fact that she was doing well for herself was not taken well by her community. “A meeting was called the day I returned. People had spread rumours saying that I was serving clients outside Bihar. The mukhia said if I had to become a sex worker I should serve clients from within the communityIJ Some even linked me to a local goon whom I thrashed with my sandal out of frustration,” she remembers.

Boycotted by her family and community, Naseema led life in complete isolation and fear that the goon would attack her. “I decided to inform my seniors in the NGO about the person and how he was troubling me. The very next day, our group threatened the goon with dire consequences. That was the last I heard of him,” she says.

It was 2001 when Naseema decided to go back to her hometown in Muzzafarpur and much to her surprise nothing had changed there. “The police had continued to raid brothels. There was still no woman police in the police station. There were NGOs but they would only talk about issues related to children and women. No one was doing anything concrete to better the situation of the girls,” she recalls.

That was when Naseema decided to start something for the uplift of these girls. In 2002, Parcham, an NGO dedicated to the rehabilitation of sex workers and their families, came into being. “My first move was to form a nukkad natak group to educate sex workers about their rights. Then I started working towards education and alternative work for their benefit,” she says.

Her work was not restricted to the Chatrabhuj sthan alone. In 2008, Boha Tola was burnt down by some workers of the local Government on the pretext that the land was the birthplace of Janak Janki. “It was a horrifying sight to watch children and women running here and there for help. The NGOs came to their rescue and I appealed to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to arrest the culprits,” Naseema tells you, adding that she also requested Kumar to take care of sex workers as they were part of the society. “He asked me to prepare the data of sex workers residing all over Bihar. I submitted my research in 2011 and am eagerly awaiting his response,” Khatoon says.

Naseema is now happily married to a Hindu man and is a mother of a two-year-old son. She is actively engaged in social work and came into the limelight as an activist in the Sikar gangrape case where a 13-year-old girl was raped by three men. “My husband is a human rights activist and I met him at a conference in Patna in 2003. We married in 2008 after Parcham was fully established,” Naseema says.

Apart from a health and an education centre, Parcham also runs a 32-page monthly journal called Jugnu which is written and produced by the NGO members. “We have an IGNOU centre for sex workers’ children and I am pursuing my Bachelor of Arts from there too,” she concludes.

Parcham workings

• She set up an NGO for the uplift of sex worker's children and called it Parcham meaning flag
• Her house in Muzzafarpur became the first office of Parcham. She had very few volunteers early on
• Today she has more than 400 volunteers who help her spread the message of freedom from flesh trade
• To spread her thinking, Naseema brought out a hand-written magazine Jugnu. It soon became popular in red light areas in other districts
• Through Parcham she reaches out to deprived families and offers respectable jobs to their children.
• There is also an education centre, IGNOU where such children can study
• Parcham also provides free health assistance to the needy
• Naseema, is herself an active social worker and travels the length and breadth of the country trying to help people through their troubles