What happens when a prostitute gets old. Utpal Kumar meets one in Delhi’s GB Road
Reshma is sitting on the stairs near the road at GB road, with a gajra in her hands. Once a busy member of the society, she now survives by doing household works at kothas. “I am hardly into sexual activities now. I am expected to clean utensils and wash clothes of young colleagues of mine, besides doing household marketing for the kotha kitchen. Occasionally, I sell gajra,” she says, pointing at the stuff she is holding. At 54, Reshma is of very little use in an industry which thrives on youth and vigour. And, no customer asks for her anymore. “In my 20s I was in great demand. Now hardly anyone comes here looking for me. Occasionally, some of my oldaashiques (lovers) come. But that’s far and few,” she says with a cracking voice.
Reshma, who came here in the early 1970s at the young age of 14, believes that GB Road, like her, is dying a slow but steady death. “When I first came here after my husband left me at the Old Delhi Railway Station on the pretext of getting me food, things were not that bad. Here it wasn’t all about sex then. Though my malik (kotha owner), who was in his late 40s then, often complained about how things were different before Partition when the place would buzz with music and dance and when prostitutes were regarded as guardians of nawabi culture and not just sex symbols; things were quite fine for me till the late 1970s.” In his book, Nobody Can love You More, based on life in Delhi’s redlight areas, Mayank Austen Soofi indicates this. “Before Emergency, the police rarely stepped into a kotha. That exception ended with Emergency. The beat constables became as familiar as the pimps,” he says.
Post-Emergency, singing and dancing became a thing of the past in this part of Delhi. The city’s well-to-dos stopped coming altogether. The quality of customers, too, deteriorated. Customers today expect immediate sex, and nothing else. “Cells have become more important than our traditional dancing halls,” says Reshma. In fact, we now see the rise of what we call ‘escort services’, promising us a “girlfriend experience” at the click of a mouse. The need was first grasped by one Kanwaljit Singh, who launched the country’s first high-end escort service in Delhi in the late 1980s. Within a decade, Singh had a flourishing business of over Rs 10 lakh a month, with more than 100 prostitutes working for him. By 2005, when he was finally arrested by Delhi Police, the size of the capital’s high-priced sex trade was estimated to be around Rs 500 crore. Soon the vacuum was filled by Sonu Punjaban, a well-known pimp catering mostly to middle-class clients, before she too was grounded in April 2011.
What stops police from acting against such sex racketsIJ Theoretically, to have sex for money isn’t illegal in the country. But the law only forbids a series of connected acts, including soliciting customers in public, having sex with a prostitute in a public place, and arranging transactions between prostitutes and clients. A prostitute who conducts her trade privately, independently and voluntarily cannot be booked.
As I stand up to say goodbye to Reshma, who lives in one of the 80 kothas of GB Road’s 42 buildings, she gives me a gajra. I don’t know what to do with the ‘gift’, but I decide to accept it. As I put Rs 50 in her hand, she smiles and has a word of advice for me. “Be careful of pimps here. If you see them following you, try to ignore them and move fast,” Reshma says, adding: “They loot innocent people and this tarnishes our name and business.”
I feel sorry about the degeneration of the place which was once the centre of Delhi’s high culture. Such was the hold of the kothas over the city’s imagination that it was not uncommon for young sons of the nobility to be sent there — then situated in Chawri Bazar — for learning etiquette, Urdu poetry, the art of conversation and even the finer points of love-making.
The condition of the women in GB Road, stands in sharp contrast to the life lived by beautiful women during the late Mughal era — like Ad Begum, whose specialty was to appear naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one noticed; or Nur Bai, whose popularity was such that every night the elephants of the great amirs blocked the narrow lane outside her house. Writes Veena Talwar Oldenburg in her essay, ‘Afternoons in the Kothas of lucknow’: “I came across the city’s courtesans in the civic tax ledgers of 1858-77 and in the related official correspondence preserved in the Municipal Corporation record room in lucknow. listed as ‘dancing and singing girls’, they were in the highest tax bracket, with the largest individual incomes of any in the city!”
With these thoughts in mind, I move ahead and meet Neelu. Still in her mid-20s, she is worried about her future. “I am scared of the day I turn 35. I know I won’t get customers then.” She hopes the profession is legalised. And she asks: “Has the ban helped in any wayIJ” No, it hasn’t. Prostitution in the country has grown 17-times in the past decade-and-a-half. What the ban has done is that it has turned GB Road into a den for ‘furtive sexual encounters’. “If we get licences, then we will have ration cards, we can open bank accounts, and save ourselves from being exploited by kotha owners, pimps, moneylenders, etc,” says Neelu.
She, however, isn’t too optimistic of anything happening too soon. More so because of our fear, the fear of the so-called civilsed world. Maybe we are worried that brothels will show the true nature of our values. We visit them at night, but are ready to deny their very existence in the day. For us, they just don’t exist. So why bother about themIJ