Why I went back to visit a brothel
"...in her lifetime it was not to be. I am not to blame.
Literature is a summons to descend to hell,
Which I obeyed joyfully, I'll not deny it,
And from which no one finds a way back again
I am not to blame. How much pain in the world.
But neither do I blame you for anything.
Everything happens by accident, by fate.
How marvellous life is. How badly we live it."
-Boris Pasternak
But you could even ascend to hell. That afternoon, I climbed the dark staircase again, paused at the first floor. There used to be an old man ironing clothes near the landing. There were dark rooms with untold personal histories. But now, they have broken the walls. The light hurt. I touched the grimy walls. It had been years since I last ventured into these rooms where they lived splitting time and religions, identities and emotions. Over the years that I have known them, I know they even puncture truths.
I tried to re-imagine Kamathipura’s Gully Number 1 and these three rooms where I first met them. I learnt that one should never abandon stories. Five years later, I returned again. Time lapse. Does time lapse ever? Memories are another thing.
It was a place of cheap sex and strange truths. It was the space you went to find something unavailable in the other world. I came once again to disorganise my sense. I like disruptions. Literature is indeed summons to hell. And I never found a way back again.
An anonymous person once wrote to me saying a story of mine set in this brothel led to loss of innocence. I remember he had referred to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Sonia Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. The novel had tested the moral issues of urban life in St Petersburg in the 19th century.
For so long that I have met the prostitutes, I have remembered the character of Sonia. I have been accused of having contempt for my subjects. But then, how do we discount the impact of external forces in perceptions and perspectives of a character? The world, so far as I know it, has existed in shades of grey. I could have written to the writer that I lost my innocence, too. That’s why I know there’s no going back.
“The world of Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry - the world known as Golpitha in the city of Mumbai - begins where the frontier of Mumbai’s white-collar world ends and a no-man’s land opens up. This is a world where the night is reversed into the day, where stomachs are empty or half-empty, of desperation against death, of the next day’s anxieties, of bodies left over after being consumed by shame and sensibility, of insufferably flowing sewages, of diseased young bodies lying by the gutters braving the cold by folding up their knees to their bellies, of the jobless, of beggars, of pickpockets, of holy mendicants, of neighbourhood tough guys and pimps,” writes Dilip Chitre.
This is that world. The poet, who loved in these parts, lived here. He was a witness and a chronicler. Suffering isn’t about victims and perpetrators. It is more about reflections in the aftermath of events and impulses.
I hadn’t gone there to write a story this time. That afternoon I stepped out of a hotel room on the 14th floor in Lower Parel where I had been staying to attend the fashion week. Glamour, glitter, gossip and headaches. Each night that I found myself alone in my room, I looked out of the window. The sea stretched in the horizon. I saw Haji Ali’s shrine and was reminded of those who had once prayed with me at the shrine. So many times I had been in the city but never turned into these lanes. It is okay to disappear for sometime. At least I wasn’t guilty of the crime of forgetting.
In 2012, I first went to Kamathipura with Gauri Sawant, a transgender who had adopted a little girl. She lived in Malvani suburb of Bombay. Over the next couple of years, I kept going to the brothel where eight eunuchs lived together.
At the time, the redevelopment had just started. Towers were coming up. The beginning of the end of an era. I am not making a case for nostalgia. It would be a weak one in any case.
Bombay is a city that eats up the sea. It is always hungry, forever looking to expand but sometimes, the sea surges forward in its fury.
The waves crashing against the rocks…
The waves... they are unbound and strong and yet frustrate themselves trying to take over the city.
The city, its buildings stand tall overlooking, assessing the waves.
The sea is never calm.
Maybe it takes from the city's throbbing energy. So full that it engulfs all that come into that ever-sprawling city, adding suburbs after suburbs to its expanse, claiming the sea, too.
Those who come to this city are to be consumed, taken away, swept away. The sea does not end. Nor does the ambition of land.
Inwards, it gobbles up what remains of the past. It is forever redeveloping, overwriting stories and histories. Kamathipura is almost bilocated. From its crumbling chawls, one can see the tall glass and steel structures almost piercing the clouds. But perhaps land-starved cities like Bombay must reclaim in order to go on.
They know no other way. Here, nothing is subtle. Flyovers cut through buildings almost. So much so that if you stretched your hand from one of the windows, you could touch the gravel, almost touch the cars as they whizzed past. It is not for me to dissect the lives of the migrants. I am one of them.
***
I called Zeenath Pasha, who I had first met in 2012 in the brothel as she sat in her bed holding a baby and dressed in black. I called her after I had paid homage to the saint who lies buried in the sea. I tied a knot. Do I wish for things? I don't know.
That voice. The brutal tone of it at hearing my name.
"How can I forget you? You made my life hell?" she said.
"Can I come?" I asked.
"Yes. I live in the same place," she said.
Gully Number 1 in Kamathipura is no longer the same. There's the construction. There are those out of context glass and steel towers rising out of nowhere. And then, there is this underworld.
For its denizens, an era is almost closing in. Small clay Ganpati statues inside a small workshop, blue tarpaulin sheets lying around in anticipation of rain. A few women waiting for customers. We got lost in the maze of lanes that are lined with crumbling chawls or tiled living quarters that are packed with women unaware of another looking out of the car window.
But I have been here before. I am scanning for familiar faces. It is a Friday. And then I noticed the little shop and the staircase. It was here. I hesitated at the landing. A voice called from the window.
"Come up," it said.
Things of memory. I noticed the black and the gold fish in the aquarium. Three years and a little more isn't a long time. But how can one measure time? Do you measure it by the clock or by the scale of memories?
They might have replaced the old fish with the new. But then, all fish swim the same way in limited oceans - the aquarium. I didn't tap on it. Nothing had changed in the room. Not even the photo of Zeenath in her youth wearing a wig and a sari. The two babies on the poster that hangs above the door are still smiling. So many things frozen in the gap of time. Why waste time clock-watching?
She offered me black tea. I gladly accepted. I asked her if she was doing okay. Over the years, I have suspected that Zeenath was tipping over towards the other world - of the unreal, that which is not bound by longitudes that bind the earth from spilling over into black holes of the infinite appetite. She spoke of gold and silver and of lovers and betrayals. The grand emotions of those that are left behind to imagine. She spoke of the magnificent palaces that belonged to eunuchs in Hyderabad, her native city. She spoke of the gold jewellery a filmmaker promised her. She spoke of everything in a dazed state.
In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky describes Sonia’s dress at her father’s deathbed as "strange indeed was her sudden appearance in that room, in the middle of beggary, rags, death, and desperation. She, too, was in rags. She was cheaply dressed, but tricked out gutter-fashion, according to the rules and taste of that special world whose shameful purpose was all too apparent".
Zeenath wasn’t wearing her wig. The rest were dressed in “gutter-fashion” according to the tastes of that special world.
Khaja Bi walked in. She stood and smiled.
"Where had you gone?" she asked.
"Away," I said.
Others came in. Kajal, whose lover who lived upstairs died. She said the floods washed him away. She has a new lover.
Replacements. Substitutes.
"You can't mourn forever," she said.
But in one of the berths in the brothel, Khaja Bi was lying down.
"Why don't you switch on the fan?" I asked.
"I don't feel very well," she said.
She is still in mourning. Her story was told to me by Zeenath when I had wanted to chronicle the lovers of the whores. She had been in love with a local shopkeeper and they lived together until he passed away and then she returned to the Ramabai Chawl. He had wanted to marry her. She had refused saying he could live with her but eunuchs who have "transgressed the natural order of sexuality" had no right to ruin a man's life. Love was another thing. It was wild and untrammelled in its freedom. Love was bound by gender.
Over the years, many of the brothels in this lane shut down. I remembered the evenings of business as usual when eunuchs lined the street in their garish clothes. They looked beautiful in the diffused light, which softened the coarseness of the skin. They looked invincible then.
But they were vulnerable during the day. Like Zeenath, who wore no wig and was dressed in a purple maxi. There was a time when I was granted an audience after she had dressed. She looked like an "almost woman" but on an afternoon many years ago, I had walked in and there was nobody except Khaja Bi and on the walls, I first noticed the wigs hanging. Truths are mundane. Deceptions are grand.
I was told "never abandon a story" in college long ago. That's what I have followed through the years. It has been five years since I first went to meet in this infamous red light area of Bombay. A hijra, she would wear a wig before appearing in front of me. Over the years, she stopped that ritual. This meant I had been accepted. That's what stories demand. But acceptance is a painful process. We are also at the mercy of the others.
***
I remembered the afternoons of lying on the old bed with Nisha and Zeenath and talking about fashion and boyfriends. They asked me once again if I found someone.
"Get married," they said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it is a lonely life," Zeenath said.
It is the existential humdrum of such conversations that have forever led me to these rooms. I know that I was afraid once for a long time of hitting the end all by myself. But then, my mother said that some of us are meant to be on our own. Solitude is an inheritance.
I asked about Saleha, her adopted daughter. She is now at a boarding school in a Mumbai distant suburb. She is now seven and sports a bob. She is doing well, Nisha said.
Their identities are mutually incompatible. Even then as she sat in front of me in a purple maxi, her bald head and the little traces of stubble were giveaways to the bridge her life has been between this and that. Her approximation of Zeenath's identity is through a wig and makeup and a soul that defied gender binaries, oscillated between the possibility of reinventing her own body and the impossibility of the endeavours. Is there a vocabulary to understand such creations?
The transition from one gender identity construct to another is looked upon with disgust. The immutability of the rights of people like her reveals our own fears of the unknown. Forever I tried to understand what it meant to be Zeenath. I couldn’t.
I found authors who had pushed boundaries. Like William T Vollmann. Dolores - a woman whom Vollmann created and thereby controlled, was the writer’s way of understanding a sex worker’s life. Writers are often accused of patronising the prostitutes.
Dolores was his alter ego. He once said: “Dolores belonged entirely to me - was in fact my construct.”
And yet Dolores broke free from her creator. The way Zeenath broke free from me although I wasn’t her creator. I had only found her.
I couldn’t understand her sadness. It was alien to me. Like how Dolores became alien to Vollmann, who cross-dressed as an act of dare. Yet he couldn’t be that woman he created. Like how Zeenath couldn’t be the man she had been or the woman she had wanted to be.
I couldn’t be the reporter. I couldn’t be one of them. I wasn’t from their world. I was getting crushed in between identities. That was the only way I connected with them.
“In the backyard of love, all you find is fruits of fear and disgust. An infinite and sovereign nothingness stalks us all,” Dhasal writes.
***
The cages and windows where sex workers displayed themselves are no longer there. In fact, a lot of things are no longer there in this fading red light district set up in 1785 by the British. A few hundred prostitutes remain in the 16 lanes. From Zeenath’s window, you can see the high rises.
“Nobody comes here anymore,” she said. “Everything is over.”
They had lived in this terminal ward for too long. Zeenath lost too many friends to HIV AIDS. Brothels like these were places where men came to release themselves of the burden of their fetishes. There were abuses and scars. There was love and loss. There was also a strange kind of peace in these rooms.
There were in these lanes all kinds of people - pimps and prostitutes, hijras, drug addicts, petty criminals, gangsters, mujra dancers, beauticians, immigrant labourers, householders, etc. I asked Zeenath about Suman and Munni, the two street prostitutes she had made me meet once. Munni was still around. Suman could have died, she said.
I looked for others. One had rescued me from a room where an old man, who was believed to be a police informer, had tried to lock me in saying only he could lead me to whores and their lovers.
Dhasal’s Golpitha reminded me of a prison I once went to in Buxar in Bihar where men on death row or serving life imprisonment waited for nothing in particular. That was the prison where they made the noose. They said the moisture in the air was perfect for it.
It also reminded me of graveyards where metaphors abound. When the new world takes over as part of the ambitious redevelopment of the city, these stories will be buried here. Zeenath and her eight hijras would move out. For now, they are here because this is the only place that gave them refuge.
For a long time, we sat in that room facing each other. I took my leave.
I remembered the poet. He is dead now.
He had once written, “This is do number ki dunia. This is bottom of the world. This is where my poems come from… I’ll show it to anyone that wants to know what life is like here. I grew up here. I have a bond with these people. They are my people - these lumpen; I am one of them. My poetry is about life here.”
At least, I had tried.
Zeenath and her eight hijras would be gone soon. We promised to meet each other in Ajmer for the Urs. There is always a way of finding each other. Last year, she had asked a filmmaker in Ajmer while he was filming Kinnar Qawwali if he knew me. He did and he messaged me about the encounter.
It was enough that Zeenath remembered me. And when anyone remembers you, it is important that you find them again. That is an act of faith. We must always keep the faith.