No Ground Beneath Their Feet

“Uski maa aisi hai!” she laughed. An adult laugh from a kid. “I don’t know how old I am. Even my mother does not know.” This was Lakshmi, with a face which Colette would describe as “inhuman innocence…angelic hardness”. She had learnt the tricks of saying things which she hoped would take her somewhere. Barely minutes into our conversation and she declared, “I have a mother, a brother and a sister, but I like you the best!” She already knew how to be provocative: Sidelong glances, batting lashes, finger on chin were her patented poses. All come-hither, talk-to-me stances. She also turned out to be the one to reveal the least.

We were sitting on the mat one late evening. This was a crèche for the children of commercial sex workers. It was an assignment that changed my life and that did not end there. Every little finger that reached for my hand, every eye that looked for comfort in my eyes, has been deeply imprinted. I could not stop with merely writing about it, and I did not.

But, for now, let me take you back to that evening.

They have nowhere to go. Only a mother to call their own. But even their mothers have too many men to cater too. ‘Fathers’ who keep coming in and out of the mother’s room as the children sit back and watch life being played out. They can call none of these men their father. No man will take the child away from here to lead them into the sunlight, the bright world where other children live. They are unable to comprehend why in the darkness of those rooms the men are using their mothers. Nor do they understand why their mothers have to see so many men each day.

The biggest problem was: how do you ask a five-year-old what prostitution is?

I need not have worried. Going through a circuitous route was far more rewarding, getting tangential insights along the way – a family history that kept changing, a holding forth on life, and a few tantrums. Everyone here lived for the moment.

What was it really like to be forced to see life beyond the capacity of normal vision, to scrape reality a little and call what is beneath it the truth? “My mother works,” said Lakshmi, with a deadpan expression. What work? The dark eyes pierced accusingly: “She washes clothes.” Clothes – their washing, their drying, their wearing, their tearing – became an oft-repeated conversation piece and camouflage.

Shift attention to money. “Money? I can get all I want with it,” squealed Shabana with delight who, at five, had very few needs because she had knowledge of few of them.

We are not talking about high-flying sex workers who can pack off their children to boarding schools. This was an area where a child’s dreams got stripped even as the mother was being otherwise humiliated. A child who may not convey it but who knew that even if the mother made just 20 rupees in a time of distress, half of it went to the gharwalli, the pimp or the police.

That they managed to even articulate anything was amazing. When Sanjay, squeaky clean, bathed, brushed, smelling of child sweat, said, “Paisa to Bhagwan deta hai”, he immediately smiled at his own naiveté. It is better to give credit to god than a drunken man he did not know. “I know the word dhanda, but what does it really mean?” he asked as he hid his face in my lap.

I had been told that these kids would play on sympathy. An outsider would be given only innocent glimpses. The real thing, like everything with a sordid history, is pushed out of memory. It is enough to have to groan with it, day and night.

Till one met Mamta, who dropped all defences. “I’ll tell you everything,” she announced. By the age of 10, she had grown out of both, her clothes and skin. “So many men come to my house. I tell my mother to stop all this. But what can she do? All day she is drunk. I hate her and what she does and my only fear is that when she dies, then what will happen to me?”

Not an unusual question. Where bodies are bought and sold, where human dignity walks a tight-rope, the mother-child relationship works on a barter system. A woman will be granted maternal status only if she can provide for her child. She has to fight between the two words that have come to define her existence – mother and whore.

People often ask her why she wants a child. It is simple. In a chameleon-like world she needs something more tangible than stinking sheets and changing men to get attached to. Her offspring are the answer. Someone to share her tears with, someone to take her frustrations out on, someone, she hopes, who will remember her by her real name.

“My mother’s name is Rehmat Banu. What else can I say about her? Yes, once when I was hit by a motorcycle she rushed me to the doctor. I like her though she drinks a lot. I’m really worried. These days no man comes to her. They don't like her anymore.” Sabina’s voice did not crack with emotion when she said this. That starkness made it all the more poignant, like the sound of a nail in the coffin. Her sparse body held an indomitable spirit. For her, recognition of her situation was only the beginning of reconciling to it. “I know what happens around here is bad. I know my mother does it for money, but we need it, don’t we? My father left us and went away.”

Father. Who is this man? Usually a regular customer. When a sex worker decides that she wants a child (accidental pregnancies are different), she waits for the right man to come along. Then she stops taking precautions. Since this man may have taken a fancy to her, he could as a token gesture accept the child for genuine reasons (rare), with a nothing-to-lose shrug, or more likely, because he can get serviced without having to pay for it. After all, “Bachchey ka baap hoon”.

How does a child react to such a father? Sanjay said with fondness, “Mera baap taxi driver hai. He gives my mother money and takes me for drives.”

Raja, with slight confusion, mumbled, “I have two fathers, I think.”

Shabana was helpless and angry. “He beats me up and I can’t say anything.” She lifted her frock up to show me two large red welts on her back.

Mamta was indifferent: “He does not allow me to go to school.” I discovered that when some representatives had approached her father, he denied it. He also could not send the younger child to school because she had TB.

Besides this, the other statements too could not be taken at face value. Each was trying to say a thing within a thing. Going for joy rides and talking about it – and just that – as Sanjay did is the typical reaction of a boy who has discovered that men don’t cry.

Then there is the acceptance of a situation and yet the sense of being unaware. They instinctively sift bad from worse. Having two men to call father is no big deal as long as they remain two. When Mamta said later, “My mother also sleeps with my father”, it was almost with a sigh of relief. Whatever be his faults, he still had ‘status’. That is the reason why much before she had shown me her welts, Shabana spoke of the man who beat her up as a “nice man who works on the machine”.

An ideal is created and all acts that don’t fit in are made provisions for in a breath-of-booze image. That Man. It is this man, always on the brink of their lives, who sets the tone of what they think of men. And women.

“I don’t like all these other females, they talk bad words,” spat out Mamta. “Men?” The smirk would have sufficed even had she not wanted to elaborate. “I am scared of them. They do dirty things with my mother. If I am around, mujhe bhi chhedte hai. If I give gaalis, then they beat me.”

That is the beginning of insecurity. To be dependent on the men who are using you. So they crave attention. Shabana runs to a corner, her petulance exaggerated because her observations have shown her that you’ve got to come on strong. Or be relegated to the dingy realms.

Nuances get picked up from the obvious. Their description of their mothers clearly demarcates them. While the boys used words like “beautiful”, “fat”, “nice”, the girls had more verbal images – “gives food”, “washes clothes”, “takes care”. From this it would seem that the boys find security in what is expected of them and the girls in what they expect.

The interaction between the children themselves is revealing. Play involves a lot of touching. It is almost sexual. Asha, whose communication until then had been monosyllabic, pushed a doll under her dress. “Peit mein bachcha daal doongi,” she teased. You like playing mother? I asked, trying to veer her away. “No, no,” she said, pushing the doll further inside.

How they view the world around is evident from what they think of the future, and what their aspirations are. “What is there to become?” Sabina wants to know. “Maybe I will go away from here, get married and have kids. Pataa nahin.”

Their role models are like those of any other child – doctor, police officer – but for different reasons. They are authority figures within the community, and in a place where the kids are not sure about escape, they find solace in the familiar. They are around at that late hour and interact with their mothers. One child even said he wanted to be a “Sharaabi” without a blink. Not one girl talked about following in her mother’s footsteps.

Being their mother’s child here is not a paved path. They are because she is. They do not matter because she does not matter. How must it feel to know that everytime the door creaks open to claim a bit of flesh, it also ensures the next meal? They know a lot, which is why they act as masters of their territory and become protective. They tell you not to walk alone in the street. Since it was dark when I was leaving, they wanted to know how I’d reach home. As I tried to hold back the tears, I realised that home for them was so fragmented, often just curtains dividing one depleted life from another.

Hope gets associated with outside elements. So they cling to you. The two-year-old Jyoti was wailing and would not let go of the end of my kurta. It wasn’t me she was holding on to. It was hope. For one evening.