My first-ever attempt at writing on Bollywood. The edited version was published in Open Magazine.
Chinki Sinha
Bombay
“For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez'
Scene 1
There is a board with the shooting schedules, a television, and an ipad. And there is a star in the making.
He is waiting. The stage is set. There are the aviators. I wear them as a tribute to Faisal Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur, the Anurag Kashyap film, which has pitched Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the new anti-hero, the dark, lean man, a struggler with no pedigree, a commoner, against the starlets, the men with biceps, and bungalows, and women.
He smiles. We decide to get coffee. He tells me he is trying to build his body for his next role.
Then, a few minutes later, when he is reciting the stories of his days as a watchman, a struggler, he tells me he will never build his body, for he, the method actor from a nondescript village in Uttar Pradesh, is everything that a Bollywood hero isn't. He is an actor.
At the Yari Road seaside cafe, he must have met other reporters, too. At his house, he must have greeted the scribes who came looking for the story of the “dark knight rises”, a story of what dreams are made of. Nawazuddin wants to sell dreams, too.
“I want my roles to be what men would dream of,” he says.
“I want to be a gangster,” I say, because in the first encounter, I am smitten. The story is sold to me.
And like others, I hang on to every word, every detail of what he says. Because there is a rebuttal of
status quo, and there is a validation and celebration of daring fate.
The man, with the cigarette dangling from his dark, chapped lips, begins the tale, only the examples are different. Rejection, and then redemption, and then celebration.
In love and life, he had to learn to dare the mirror. He learned to make the most out of what stared back him him – a brooding man, with features that weren't striking. The rebel.
But if you looked long enough, things started to lose their meaning. In his case, he started to like what he saw. Or like the director who promised him one day he would cast him in a role that would redeem him.
When Kashyap saw him through the lens, and he looked long enough, he knew there was magic in the man.
“If you look at him long enough, you find him beautiful,” he said. “The French women went nuts after him at Cannes.”
“He is the invisible man, and that's his beauty,” he added.
I fell for the invisible man, and his stories of love and loss. Rehearsed, and recited. Real, and unreal. Saleable. Yes. But if you heard or saw for long, they started to change their meaning.
Because he occupies the middle ground. The stardom he rejects, and yet he his own PR machine, rejecting stereotypes, and surging ahead with stories of deprivation.
Scene 2
Past, and the Present
The girl in the doorway wouldn't remember and he couldn't provide any triggers to her memory of a
thin dark-skinned school boy walking past her house, sneaking looks at her.
He eventually lost her to television.
Many long years have passed since that encounter in an alley in his village Budhana as she rushed to watch a television serial at a neighbor's house that the first and only television set in the village.
He has carried her in his memory for too long and with much clarity.
She was fair, with large black eyes that followed him around, encouraging him, making him nervous, and he would try to read meaning in her glances. Twice, the eyes greeted him. At 10 am and again at 4:30 pm, and this continued for six months until he decided it was time to speak with her.
One night, he blocked her path as she hurried to watch television.
“I want to speak to you.”
“I am getting late for the television serial.”
“One day you will see me on television. I promise.”
A hurt lover returned to his house, frustrated and dejected.
But he kept his promise.
Eight years later, he called his friend Javed in the village.
“Please find her and tell her to watch television at 9 pm tonight.”
“The girl is now the third wife of a fanatic. There are many children in the house. Seven by second wife. Five or six by her. He doesn't let her watch television,” Javed told him over the phone.
In the little village in Muzzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, his face has been plastered on the walls. Faisal Khan of Gangs of Wasseypur I. His parents went to the film theater in the nearest town 40 kms away to watch him perform. But he is hopeful the lover would come across his face on one of the walls, and remember the promise.
On his facebook page, the year of birth is 1974. When I ask, he says it is 36. But those are just numbers. Consistency is a virtue of more exalted things. Everything contradicts itself, so I stick to 36.
Girls giggle when they see him in coffee shops, and men congratulate him.
“Wah brother, what acting. Kamaal kar diya tumne,” an astrologer walked up to him at a cafe in Versova, where the actor lives in a small apartment that he shares with his brother Shamas NAwab, a director, and a friend.
“Your stars are aligned. Universe is conspiring for your success,” the man, who said he predicted future only for NRIs, said.
“For you, no charge,” he added, and lit a cigarette.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui puffed away at his. He continued the narrative.
“But I never saw her again,” he said. “It was only her that I remembered when I got my first little break..”
The astrologer smiled.
“He is a real man,” he said.
Not the kind of love in the metros. Coffee dates, and holding hands. And then, everything else. Like the blinking dots on the digital watch.
Those years, when love was like the old dial on an old watch, were from a different world. Like the hands of the clock, it moved slowly. You'd watch, and you'd watch, and it wouldn't move. And then, in what seemed like a lifetime, it moved just a little. Just so that the hope was rekindled, he said.
A different love story. Real, and remote. Like him. Unlike Bollywood. He has pitched himself as against formula. So his story has been edited to fit the narrative.
For years after he left his village in 1990, Nawazuddin kept chasing the idea of love, he said.
“Of course I know that kind of love. I grew up in Bihar,” I said.
Not the kind of simmering love where one wrote letters for a year, and for fear of getting caught, got a friend to copy them in his handwriting, and wait with baited breath for a sign of acceptance. In his case, he wrote the letters, translated the sighs for his friends on paper and in legible language.
Got caught, got thrashed, and quit the love business. As a party, and as a facilitator.
That love existed in that world he left behind. Memory of things that weren't. Here's where rejection theme is woven through the narrative.
He was dark, and short, and lean. He was awkward, and confused. He was unsuccessful, and likely to remain so.
Love wanted more.
For a short time in 2002, he was dating a girl in Bombay.
For months, they'd meet, and speak over the phone. One night he texted her.
“Hum kafi dino se dost hai. I think we must marry now.”
No reply. For days he tried her number and there was no response. Finally, when she answered she said they shouldn't speak to each other.
On the walls of his apartment he shared with his friends, she had scribbled her name entwined in his. In his rage, and loneliness, he tried erasing those. But like the memory of his lover, the ink marks persisted.
Finally, he put a fresh coat of paint on the walls.
Those were the years of struggle, of doped out evenings, of a state of suspension between hope and dejection. Like a play.
He was the struggler. He would keep at it. In love, and in career.
He once asked a junior at NSD if she would like to go out with him.
“Ghumne chalogi mere saath?,” I asked.
The two of them went to a park in the CR Park area in Delhi, and sat on a bench.
They sat in silence waiting for the other to say something.
“I had never touched a girl before,” he said.
Evening was upon them. Some of the tension that he felt in his body was dissolved. His heart, he had suspected, was about to leap.
He looked around, and then slyly kept his hand over the girl's.
“Yeh kya hai,” the girl asked.
“Bas rakh diya,” he said.
“Kahin bhi rakh doge? Permission toh leni chahiye,” she answered.
In Gangs of Wasseypur I, Faisal Khan, the younger son of Sardar Khan, smitten by Mohsina, played by Huma Querishi, he revisits the scene.
“Anurag loved the idea. He wanted it in the film,” he said.
When he gingerly places his hand on Mohsina's while they sat on the banks of a river, the girl dares him to take “permission” first. The theatres resounded with laughter laced with nostalgia for the innocent and adventurous dating of small towns in those days.
“It is a slice of life from the past. I apologised, said I had committed crime and cried. She said if you want something, you must ask for permission,” he said.
“All my friends had girlfriends,” he said. “I also wanted one.”
He came to Mumbai 14 years ago. Struggle, and drudgery, and dreams and dope. Smoke billowing out of his mouth, his eyes.
In 2004, which was one of the worst years of his struggle, he couldn't pay rent so he asked a senior from NSD if he could stay with him. The senior said if Nawazuddin was willing to cook him two meals, he would let him share the apartment in Goregaon.
“It was such a sad time,” he said.
But except for small roles, he didn't land a “meaty enough role.” Such stories are scattered through the profiles of the actor, who has become media's darling.
“What's new? Tell me something that others don't know?” I said.
“Here it is,” he said.
He used to like a batch mate of his, another struggling actor, who lived in Goregaon East.
Her boyfriend was out of town. This our actor knew. Already, he had discovered the powers of marijuana and hash. Only if his mind was numbed enough, he could pull it off.
So he smoked hashish, and went to her house.
“Bharo, maang meri bharo ... karo, pyar mujhe karo,” Mamta Kulkarni, the former sex symbol, was on her fours, and urging a hesitant Akshay Kumar to love her in the famous song from Sabse Bada Khiladi. In her skimpy chiffon outfit, she heaved, and was the ultimate seductress. A celebration of Bollywood on television.
“It is a very sensuous song, isn't it?” the girl said.
“Tum bhi toh sensuous ho,” he said. “Can I ask for something? You won't mind, right?”
“I want to have sex with you,” egged on by the potency of hashish running in his veins, and head, he said.
The girl chased him out of the apartment.
We laughed.
He would turn away his face when he used to bump into her.
“And you convinced Anurag to incorporate this as well,” I asked.
“He liked it when I told him,” he said.
In GoW 2, Faisal climbs up the window to Mohsina's room. Same song. Mamta gyrating to the beats.
Mohsina is glued to the screen. Faisal tries to sneak a peek at her cleavage. Awkwardness. But hero is high strung on ganja.
He asks for “permission” for a question.
“I want to have sex with you.”
She looks at him, and says “Joota khaoge?”
She chases him out.
“Maybe the batch mate has seen the film. Maybe she will remember,” he said.
Scene 3
“Look nahi hai.” the non-conformist.
This he heard many times over.
For hours then he would stand in front of the mirror and study his face.
“Mera aisa face kyun hai?” he would ask.
Antithesis of the quintessential Bollywood hero.
Years went by. He was noticed. In Kahaani, he played an enigmatic cop, and women started texting him. But he was not used to the attention so when a girl kept messaging “I think I am falling in love with you” he decided to meet her. They fixed a time. When he arrived at Seven Bungalows, he called her phone. An attractive woman picked up, and he introduced himself.
“She didn't recognize me. I wasn't the macho police official. She had fallen in love with the character. Here I was, wearing chappals. No moustache. She looked as if she wanted to leave,” he said. “I have learned to take attention from women not so seriously.”
Scene 4
The 75 paise movie days and the crumbling house of memories.
Bharat Talkies. That's where he watched films in his village Budhana in Muzzaffarnagar district in UP.
An old tin shed that doubled up as a theatre.
He recalled living in a crumbling mud house that leaked during rains and through the nights, there would be the song of rain, and with it the melancholy, and the helplessness of poverty.
On those nights, he promised himself he would build a waterproof roof if he were to make money.
He later did. He sent me photos of the house. Neat.
His father is a farmer, and he had seven other siblings, including two sisters. He is the eldest.
The river flowed past the village. On mornings and evenings, he would take the cows and buffaloes to the banks. They'd get inside the water, and he would, too.
Idyllic. Or a life that had not known better. He was happy except when the raindrops danced on the floor of his house.
The world beyond was an unknown space.
The lone cinema theatre in the village – Bharat Talkies – used to play old Joginder movies.
He still swears by the C grade movies made by Joginder Shelly who directed and produced films like Ranga Khush and Bindiya aur Bandook.
In the tin shed by the river that showed such films for 75 paise and where they sat on bricks, he was first enthralled by the power of cinema. Cattle walked though the tin shed as they returned home, but Nawazuddin stayed put in his place.
Years later, in the early 2000s, he acted in a Joginder film called Bindiya Maange Bandook, a sequel. But the director passed away.
“The film never released,” he said. “I did it for free.”
In fact, his film Miss Lovely where he plays a C grade film director made it to the Cannes Film Festival, and is due to be released early next year. The two brothers fall for the same girl, he said.
“I can't tell more,” he said.
After his intermediate, he left for Haridwar where he studied at the Gurukul Kangri University, and then moved to Baroda to work as the chief chemist. A year passed. His heart was not in it.
Someone told him he should head to Delhi, and try theater. He trained at National School of Drama and joined street theater groups. On bus stops and railway stations and busy corners, they performed, trying to get messages across. Skits, he said. But performances nonetheless. But cinema lured him.
Then, Bombay.
Aamir Khan's Sarfarosh was his first break ever. That was in 1999. After that, he would hang out at
the studios, and at shootings, but got roles that were stereotypical. He was dark, had hollow cheeks, and lean. Fit the profile of a poor man. He was the dhobi, the watchman, the extra on the sets.
During his Delhi days, he worked as a watchman. In Bombay, when he came, life was tough. For a small blink-and-miss role, he would get around Rs. 1,000.
He was always in debt.
“Became negative. I was angry with the struggle. I was so angry with everything.”
There was a year when he had no money. He'd eat if someone offered food, or slept on an empty stomach. He'd travel in the local train without ticket, walk for hours, shared cigarettes. It was like he had walked over to the edge of the cliff.
“That gave me confidence that one can live without money. I had nothing to lose,” he said.
Scene 5
“Baap ka, dada ka, sabka badla lega re tera Phaijal.”
The younger son, who saw his mother in a weak moment, and ran away. The son, who was
struggling with inner demons, and found ganja to cope with life.
Always high strung on marijuana, he was the son who avenged his father's death by pelting dozens of bullets into the enemy as he sat helpless on a toilet seat. There he was, Faizal pumping bullets, with a smile of satisfaction lacing his face.
That's his favorite scene in the film, too. It was liberating.
“I guess it was all this pent up frustration. It all came out – 15 years of struggle. In most other roles,
I was the one beaten up. It was like my life. Down and out. But here, I was the one with the gun.
The smile was real,” he said.
As the blood and flesh oozed out of the enemy's body, the theatres resounded with applauses, and
whistles.
He was a man speaking to men.
When he used to say he would like to do lead roles, his friends dismissed him as “you are not hero material.”
“What is hero material?” he shot back, hurt, and angry.
“Take me and a hero in a frame. Ask us both to perform. I promise I will entertain you,” he told his friends.
“There is a universe within me, and I want to search within. Acting for me is that,” Nawazuddin said. “They won't accept me as a hero.”
Up a small flight of stairs, which are chipping away, the door on the extreme left leads into the small, seemingly uncomplicated world of our actor.
A mattress on the floor, a table against the wall.
Zohra Nagar on Yari Road. Across the alley, a beyond a wall of apartment buildings, the sea lashes
against the rocks.
“I want to be the highest paid actor in Bollywood. Not because I love money but because actors aren't paid well,” he said.
It is part of the act. This he insisted should be part of the story. Confrontation, challenge. The rise of the underdog.
Scene 6
“I am the leading man.”
Pointed patent leather shoes, a not-so-ironed shirt and flat front pants. A little grease paint on face.
At a busy Matunga East signal, the crew is busy shooting for Dabba or Lunchbox, a film he is doing with Irrfan Khan. They had acted together in Bypass, a short silent film.
Nawazuddin stands in a corner, smoking, while the actress, who plays the romantic lead against Irrfan Khan, adjusts her hair and makeup in an oval shaped wooden mirror held by a man, whose waist is girdled with a bag with brushes, and powder, and lipsticks and mascara.
A teenager walks up to him.
“Autograph, please,” he says, thrusting his notebook at him.
He obliges.
A bunch of college girls walk by. They steal glances at him. He is awkward.
For the umpteenth time, he rides the scooter adorned with roses, which by now have wilted. They had been shooting since 6 am. A man walks around with a thermos and pours milky sugary tea in small plastic cups. There's vada pav for those that are hungry. He knows it would take hours before they could get a shot without someone peering into the camera. Filming on streets is a difficult deal, he says.
The scene has him dropping actress Nimrat Kaur and a little girl to a taxi stand in Matunga. He learned how to ride the scooty in the morning and looked at ease.
Dabba or Lunchbox, an Anurag Kashyap co-production, is a film on everyday life in Mumbai.
Someone calls him junior artist. But he doesn't let it affect him.
“I am the leading man, Irrfan and Nimrat are the other leading roles,” he says.
He has paid his dues. He is no more the junior artist.
Ketan Mehta has signed on the actor to play the iconic Dashrath Manjhi, who chiseled away at a mountain for more than two decades so his village could access school, and other amenities with ease. Else, they would have to walk for 10 kms to get to a nearby school.
“Manjhi, who is so inspiring. It is also in many ways a story of my life. I am prepared to go through it all again,” he says.
For the method actor, it is important that he goes to the village, and stay there for a few days until he gets the character.
Perhaps he is the first Indian actor to have two films that went to Cannes Film Festival this year –
Miss Lovely (directed by Ashim Ahluwalia) was selected in the competitive Un Certain Regard section) and GoW. In the upcoming movies – Patang, Talaash, Dabba, etc. - he has played different kinds of characters.
“If I had been successful in love, I wouldn't have become an actor. It takes up too much of time,” he says. “I am all for exploring. I have no desires except that I want to address the issue of honour killing and dacoity in my village.”
Cause and effect. I tell him this is awesome.
He tells me black is back.
When he walks towards Huma Querishi aka Mohsina in the second part of the film, with a pager hanging from his belt, a handkerchief tied in his neck, wearing a striped shirt with dog collars, and hairstyle fashioned after Amitabh Bachchan in Trishul, which celebrated the underdog, he smiles a sarcastic smile.
“Kaala rey ... Saiyaan kaala rey
Tann kaala rey, mann kaala rey
Kaali
jabaan ki kaali gaari
Kaale din ki, kaali shaamein ... Kaali mitti kutta kaala
Kaala bilkul surme waala
... Kaala badal girne wala
Kaala moti girne wala
...” the background score plays.
He flips a cigarette, misses it, pops another one and lights it. Walks toward the glamourous Mohsina.
In the theater, a dark skinned man rises, and claps.
“This is the celebration of blackness,” Nawazuddin said.
Except that in this role reversal, he is acting out his part. Of the anti-hero. But with precision. In the same Yari Road cafe and apartment. The stage is set, and the actor plays his part.
Except that this a dangerous territory.
“An actor should never believe in the myth of himself,” Anurag Kashyap said. “That Nawazuddin never finds perfect is what is good for him.”
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Thursday, July 05, 2012
The most fantastic mothers
This is a story I have always wanted to write. It is disturbing, and I have been up nights in a row thinking about Zeenath Pasha.
Here is the link to the song they played at the Kamathipura brothel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVhOKaRXHc
And here is the link to a Granta story I read many months ago.
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Monas-Story
Chinki Sinha
Kamathipura, Bombay
Like stars hung from a black sky, the chandelier earrings touched her shoulders almost. Her face, black and beautiful, and dark eyes lined with kohl, Zeenath Pasha sat on an old bed, an inheritance at the Ramabai Chawl in Kamathipura. Evening light, mostly the sickly beams from the street lamps, trickled in from the window against her back.
Like a beam of moonlight on the folds of black clouds Saleha lay on Zeenath's lap. Her black saree, on which she had stitched up a border of fake diamonds, fell in folds around her.
A young woman, thin and pale, but full of smiles, sat on the edge of the bed. She is Saleha's mother. The woman who had the womb, and the eunuch who only wanted to be a mother, who was neither a man nor a woman.
The woman calls her Shonali. The half-woman, who holds the milk bottle in her hand, calls her Sallu.
The eunuch, who cut off her genitals to become a woman, knows she would be an incomplete woman always. Castration at best rids you of the burden of maleness, Zeenath says.
“We are like sisters. We went on the dhandha together. We slept with the same men. She wanted to abort Saleha. She has two daughters already. I counselled her, told her I wanted a child, and paid for everything from her vitamins to her operation. The baby is not HIV positive,” Zeenath said.
Saleha means pious. In the little brothel, the little child is being brought up by Zeenath, the Maalak of the household, who entered into a contract with the mother, a poor sex worker from Bengal, and rented out the womb. The delivery of the child happened in Zeenath's name and one evening when Saleha was just a few days old, she came to live with the 10 odd eunuchs in the three-story chawl with its bunker beds where the eunuchs traded sex for a few rupees.
Zeenath runs the brothel. Almost 20 years ago, she had run away from Hyderabad and her friends brought her to Sushila Ma, the stern proprietor who offered refuge to battered souls like her. For days, Zeenath sat under the tree outside the brothel, and cried. She was young, and broken. So broken that she entered the flesh trade without much resistance. Sometimes you just let destiny take over. You can't go on daring fate over and over again, she said.
She couldn't have gone back to her abusive husband. Ahmed, the man she loved, abused her. They had got married against the collective will of their respective families.
“A man can't get married to a man,” the grandmother announced.
The couple consumed poison, and spent their days in the hospital recuperating. Zeenath, born as Mehraj, was consumed by the idea of love. She uncovered her feet, and there they were – tiny scars. Cigarette burns. She stubbed so many of them on her feet in an act of rebellion.
Finally, they were married. Zeenath's family disowned her. They arranged for the wedding, gave her some jewelry, and a bed, and some utensils, and even celebrated with a feast. But that was it. Beyond that, Zeenath would have to forget she had a family, and brothers and a sister.
The first seven months were good. They went for movies, made love, and talked about a future together. But the future also had its bearings in the past. Zeenath couldn't give birth. In fact, she wasn't even castrated then. They would taunt her, and she would cry. At the time, she didn't know she was transgender. She only knew she loved Ahmed.
One night, as they were returning from the theatre after watching the film Chandni, they heard a child's muffled cries. Near a kabristan in the Charminar area of Hyderabad where they lived, they stumbled upon a newborn girl. An abandoned child. Zeenath carried her home.
In the morning she announced she would bring her up.
As she goes back in time, her eyes are restless. But she tries. It isn't easy recalling the hurt.
Replay, revisit. The forbidden land. You step carefully. You travel but in a vaporous land. And you know you can't reclaim things, people and moments that lie wrapped in cotton balls. Preserved, and yet tinted with so much more. Memory is never pure. It is a complex set of images that are tied to the state of being. Anything can trigger a set of images - smells, sounds, sights, cities.
“He beat me up, and when my money was finished, they would just hurt me so much,” Zeenath said.
She looked away. Tears fell. She wiped the corners of her eyes, but continued. After all, she owns her memories.
“I begged for my child. I couldn't go back to my family,” she goes on in a crackled voice. “Then one night, as he beat me up, and I fought back, my two-year-old Saleha died. We killed her.”
She had named the baby she found that night Saleha – pure, pious, upright.
Zeenath was arrested. They took her to the police station and blamed for killing her child.
One night, she escaped. Her friends got her to Bombay. Straight to the streets of Kamathipura, the red light area of the city. In the room, where she now lives with her children, and offers refuge to others running away from grim pasts, is where she first met Sushila Ma, the hijra guru who was in charge.
She was initiated into the sex trade. She hated it. But she was grateful for the lodgings. In the nights, when they tore through her body, and ravaged it, she cried silently. For Ahmed, and for Saleha.
She never called Ahmed. She doesn't know if he is alive. Or if he married again. Sometimes, it is best to close the doors.
When Sushila Ma died, the members of the brothel broke their bangles as per the rituals of the community and over the dead body, they unanimously chose Zeenath as their leader. Zeenath took an oath to pay off the debts of Sushila Ma. In her will, Sushila Ma, who had two adopted sons, made Zeenath the Maalak. The two sons, who live in another part of the city, inherited part of the property but the control of the brothel was bequeathed to Zeenath Pasha, the eunuch who once sought refuge here.
Green, and grimy staircase. Narrow and full of last night's leftover smells. Stale, cheap perfume, the bits that couldn't escape through the apertures, hung in the dark corridors. It mixed with the smell of cooking, and of sweat, and made the air heavy. Smell of defeat.
Pitiful eyes, pits of darkness, and holding within them tales of abuse, and losses, looked up from the bunkers. This is where they serviced the clients – on cheap blue tarpaulin sheets, and only a tattered piece of clothing gave them some privacy. But in these stacked berths, privacy wasn't even needed.
These are the infamous pinjras, the ones where the eight eunuchs spent their nights whoring their bodies, which were like cages holding the soul of women. During the day, they slept on the same plastic sheets resting their bodies that hurt like that of any prostitute. Swollen, abused, and filthy. Evenings, they would shower, and get ready for the night.
Sometimes, Saleha would be wrapped in their arms in these cages as they stole their own moments of motherhood. Nisha, Kajal and Kashish adore the little girl. She runs around, crosses the threshold of the room, and is held back by Zeenath. Not that side of the world for her.
“She will study, and she will get out of these streets,” she says.
Her seven-year-old son Asif, whose mother, a sex worker died of HIV AIDS soon after he was born, leaves the brothel at around 4:30 pm for what they refer to as a night school run by an NGO in the locality for the children of the sex workers. He returns at around 8 am to a rearranged house. Before he comes, Zeenath sweeps the corridors, and the staircase, and removes the used condoms, the cigarette butts, and the alcohol bottles.
“Perhaps he knows. He doesn't ask,” she said. “It is just difficult bringing up children in a brothel. They are young now. But they will grow up one day.”
Saleha smiles. She is a quiet child. Her mother takes her away. There is a birthday party and DJs are playing music on the roof. New Bollywood songs. Zeenath, resplendent in her black chiffon, climbs upstairs, and surveys the men who have perched themselves on the roofs to witness the party. She hangs tattered curtains to block the view. But this is Kamathipura. You can't hide anything. Everything is on display here, and is for consumption.
For more than 20 years, she has lived in the building. This is where she fell in love the second time. Salim, who worked in a hotel, would stand in the doorway and tease them as they went in and out of the building. He would throw letters, flowers, at them. He once gave her a watch. She would always be late for their meetings.
“This way you'd be able to keep time, he told me,” she said.
Vortex of pain, the labyrinths of betrayals that she had lost herself into, and the waves of pain that swelled up and flowed freely from her weary eyes, formed the narrative of her life. Broken by the losses she had borne, by the million mutinies exploding inside her, she sings songs from yesteryears to express what she can't in her own words.
“Nighaen mila kar badal jane wale, mujhe tujhse koi shikayat nahi hai. Yeh duniya bari sangdil hai, yahan par kisi ko kisi se mohabbat nahin hai ... Main ashkon mein sare jahan ko bahan doon, magar mujhko rone ki aadat nahi hai.”
Gauri Sawant, a transgender who came to visit her, played the Pakistani singer Noor Jehan's famous song from the 1962 film on her mobile.
Zeenath sat next to her. She sang along. Both of them sang along. Perhaps the song said it all. A song of betrayal, and a song of acceptance, and of forgiveness, and of strength, of picking up the pieces and moving on.
Tucked into the cramped lanes of this red light area are many sad lives, and in the lit windows of its chawls, where the women sit, their lips flaming and eyes dark and inviting.
She was born a son to her parents. Her father was in the police, and mother a lecturer. She was brought up by her grandmother just outside Hyderabad. Almost blind, and very ashamed of her eunuch grandchild, the grandmother kept mostly aloof. They wouldn't take her to the neighborhood celebrations, or even to family functions, and she happily led a secluded life, cooking, and cleaning and loving her pets.
“I had a dog, and nani had goats and cows, and I loved them,” she says.
One day, her friends adorned her hair with gajras, and pumped her eyelashes with mascara and shaped her eyebrows. They tied the chocolate brown lace saree that belonged to her mother, and painted her lips. They were playing their usual games when her brothers walked in. They gasped and called her names. Her uncle was a hijra, and the family couldn't bear the thought of another son yearning to be a woman.
Zeenath continued to sweep the backyard in her saree through the flurry of abuses. She stood her ground. She was sent to live with her grandmother.
Ahmed lived across the street. Dusky and broad, he was taller than others. Zeenath fell for him at an early age. They used to meet at the paan shop, and exchanged letters.
When she refused to be reformed, she was sent to Dubai to work as a domestic help. Her aunt lived in dubai and she arranged for her nephew's new job.
As soon as the daughter's of the household finished with their bath, Zeenath would wear their salwars and come out. The family gave up on her and she was kicked out. In the meantime, she had written letters to Ahmed and had called him to Dubai. They spent eight months there, and then returned to Hyderabad. The families tried hard to keep them from marrying each other.
“Even the police was fed up of us. Each time, we would be taken to the thana, they would be 'oh, again' and they'd just rfuse to register anything,” she said.
But Ahmed betrayed her trust.
“If it wasn't for him, and if my family would have accepted me the way I was, I would not have to wait to die every day,” she adds.
Another song. A happy song.
“Pankh hote toh ud aati main ...”
And Zeenath spreads her arms. She flaps them just like a bird, and Gauri joins in. Two lonely birds, beating their wings in a cage.
For a while, they play songs. They alternate between sad numbers and happy numbers. The night ends with Sufi songs. The mortals are incapable of love. Only the God deserves this devotion. For him, this eternal thirst is justified. He can't hurt them. He will eventually redeem them. That's the hope.
There’s no moonlight anywhere. And there's no sky anywhere. It is a small room in a brothel with the photos of the last four eunuch leaders that ran the Ramabai Chawl.
This is their world. The world of the dispossessed.
Inferno, and now purgatorio, and then you go to paradiso, as per Dante’s framework.
Namdeo Dhasal, the lumpen poet, who wrote Golpitha, which was published in 1972, sums it all up.
“Here queue up they who want to taste Poison’s sweet or salt flavour Death gathers here, as do words, In just a minute, it will start pouring here”
And death lurks in the shadows. A will has been prepared. Her inheritance and her earnings have been divided into three. Nisha, the hijra who she has chosen over others to be the next Maalak, will get the control of the brothel. Her son will get a room in another part of the town. For Saleha, she has kept away jewelry, cash and a some part of the brothel is also in her name.
Although, in a couple of years, the brothel will be demolished and in its place, a high rise will come up. They would get an apartment there, Zeenath said. But those are the promises. And from her life, she has learned that promises are never kept.
“I always wanted to be a mother. I always wanted a girl after the baby died. I have always blamed myself. Saleha is the reason I want to live. For her, I can die,” she says. “Look how innocent she is. She completes me.”
Many years ago, a eunuch had walked the streets of Ajmer, and had fasted and prayed in the court of Khwaja Garib Nawaz Moinuddin Chishti. He wanted motherhood. On the mountain, as the legend goes, the eunuch delivered a son. Zeenath won't take the name. It is forbidden. But she has been there, and has eaten the little berries that grow on a tree at his shrine. They refer to it as the Maji. It is said if you pay homage to the shrine, a eunuch will be blessed with a child.
“I have prayed at many shrines. Saleha is my reward,” she said.
And she recounts other stories from the Hindu mythology. About the ardhnareshwar avatar of Lord Shiva, and how Lord Rama, when he was going into the 14-year-long exile, he was followed by men and women and the eunuchs.
He sent the men and the women home when he entered the forest. But the eunuchs he asked to wait. They waited for years. When he returned, he asked them why they were still there. And they said they were waiting to hear from him. He blessed them with motherhood.
But these are stories. They repeat it to themselves to elevate their situation. But the truth is that they have suffered for having been born in the wrong gender, and then claiming it at the cost of so much.
Saleha calls her “ma”. The child is fair unlike Zeenath, who is dark as the night.
Underneath the bed, Saleha's toys are scattered. A red deer, a green horse. On the dressing table, there bangles, and pencil liners and lipsticks. For a eunuch, it is always a competition.
“We should look better than the women. We, the incomplete, women try to be the most fantastic. We decorate ourselves,” Zeenath said.
On the side, her wig and her flowers are arranged neatly. For another time. On Friday, after prayers, and her hair tied in a piece of cloth, she squats on the floor with Saleha.
“Sallu, you make too many demands on your poor mother,” she says.
A few old clippings and magazines stand testimony to her glorious past as Bombay's first hijra to have worked with an NGO Asha Mahila in a saree. It was in 1993.
On the cover of a Tamil Post, a magazine, from almost a decade ago, there is a photo of Zeenath. Juxtaposed with it is a picture of a popular Tamil actress Priyanka.
“Ek hijra khoobsurat hai ya ek heroine, this is what it says,” she said.
And in her albums, she has her engagement pictures. She fell in love once again. Same fanatic sort of love. Salim, who worked in a restaurant, and claimed to love her is her husband. His family lives in Uttar Pradesh and they gave her the name Zeenath, which means beautiful. They married eight years ago. The family didn't know much about her gender. She was castrated and she wore her sarees. When they adopted Asif, they thought Zeenath had produced the baby. But Zeenath had always wanted her Saleha back. She adopted again.
The waves made a crashing noise. They hit the rocks and rolled back, disappointed, angry, and then they hit back. Silver drops flew in the air, and again they retreated. Yet again, they struck.
The qawals clapped their hands and sang songs of devotion. On this island, under a tree that was wrapped in red threads the faithful, and the hopeful had tied for the saint to remember their wishes and grant them, and would one day return to untie them when they would have been fulfilled, Jeenath Pasha sat, facing the shrine. The dargah contains the tomb of Sayed Peer Haji Ali Shah Bukhari, the way to whom is a narrow street through the brackish sea water. Across the waters, there's yet another shrine. Of the saint's mother.
“You visit her first and then come here,” Zeenath said.
In her arms, she held Saleha. The pigeons flew, and the song reverberated across the courtyard. song of faith, of love, and of yearning, and of eternal hope. She never could hold on to love. It eluded her. The cigarette burns on her feet are testimony to the truth that she loved, and she lost.
She looked up again at the shrine.
"Salim hurt me. He is an alcoholic now. He was nice in the first few months. He needed money. They all think that we make a lot of money. My family claims their share, and they come to collect money. I give. I don't want curses. My life is too cursed. Salim doesn't come home too often," Zeenath Pasha said. “First, I lost to a misplaced gender, and second time, I lost to alcohol. I am used to losing now.”
That evening, sitting in the courtyard, with her feet with all the scars of lost love dangling, she said she was HIV Positive.
Six years ago, the doctors had given up. They had said she wouldn't survive beyond two weeks. She miraculously made it. But the fear of death remains. For the last eight months, she has not been able to do much. Jeenath Pasha, the hijra who is so full of love and life, is slowly fading away. She is now fighting tuberculosis, and knows she won't live for too long, not till Saleha is grown young woman and out in the world making her own choices where she is free to be whoever she want to be. Unlike her, who couldn't be male, female, other or neither but an in-between.
"I did dhandha. Who would have fed me otherwise? I was young and I didn't know anything. Bombay scared me. It was an ugly city. To me Bombay was Kamathipura,” she said.
She wiped away a tear.
"I look at her and I cry through the nights. What is going to be her fate? I fought mine and I have given up," she said. "She is so fragile.”
And then she hums the song. The song they sang the other night. The song that sums up her life.
“Yeh duniya bari sangdil hai yahan par kisi ko kisi se mohabbat nahi hai ... karoon jo main fariyad apni jubaan se, gire toot kar bijliyan aasman se ...”
“Bahut takleef uthae hai,” she says, as she disappears into the staircase of the subway. The shrine to her right, and Saleha to her left.
Gauri Sawant, the other mother
She alternates between a mother and the role of a grandmother, who tells her adopted daughter that she shouldn't clap like the hijras, and the one who shows Mandwa, a young transgender, how to sing, and dance, and clap. She is on the threshold. On one side, there is the world she has always craved for, and on the other, a universe of misplaced sexual identities, of suffering, and of letting go.
With Gayatri, she is gentle. She scoops her hair, ties them in a pony tail, feeds her food, morsels carefully wrapped and slowly pushed into the girl's mouth. Mandwa, who wears her hair short, is a young transgender who has chosen Gauri to be lead her through her new life, transformation from male to female.
Gauri Sawant, a 30-year-old transgender, and the director of Sakhi Char Chowghi Trust in Malvani in Mumbai, adopted Gayatri four years ago. She was a six year old. Her mother, a sex worker, who had green eyes and a fair complexion, died of HIV AIDS. Gauri and her had been friends. In the network of sex workers, most of them know each other.
“I became a mother by accident,” Gauri said, as she inched closer to Gayatri.
She brought the child home, cut her nails, and fed her food. Gayatri attended school in the neighborhood, and spent most afternoons after school in the little room in Malvani with her mother and a group of hijra community members, who played with her and pampered her.
It hasn't been easy bringing her up in this environment. At the shelter, which offers refuge to those that are fighting abuses, or are trying to mostly survive in a world where their gender identity is still an unacceptable, uncomfortable truth, Gayatri is an innocent 10-year-old who is trying hard to differentiate between “uncles” and “aunties”.
Those who have grown their hair, and wear salwars and sarees, the girl refers to as aunty. But Mandwa, who has short hair, and has the voice of a man, is an uncle. They don't mind. For in the child's conformist world, the spectrum of gender has not been confronted. Of course, she picks up some of the ways of the other world she inhabits.
Once, Gayatri got into a fight with other girls from school. Within minutes, she had started clapping, and abusing.
“That's when I knew I had to get her to a boarding school,” Gauri said.
Now, Gayatri is studying in Pune. She comes home for holidays, wraps herself around her new mother in the nights, and sleeps soundly. When she had first come to live with Gauri, she was a withdrawn child, still dealing with the loss of her mother. Now, she calls Gauri her mother.
Gauri was born in Pune. Her father was in the police, and she had an elder sister. Her mother died when she was around nine years old. They lived with their grandmother, and one day she was found sleeping wearing a bra underneath her shirt.
She was made to urinate with the door open so her uncles could ensure she wasn't squatting like a woman and relieving herself. All those things were such tortures, she said.
Her father, the assistant police commissioner, carefully chose her clothes – pants, and shirts. He forced her to keep a moustache, and she hated it.
She lived a closet existence. She fell for a boy in school. Tall and dusky, and she would stand outside his class waiting for him to emerge from the doors. She would write him letters, and made little hearts on paper. She cut her hands, and with the ink of blood, wrote to Sachin, who she imagined to be her lover.
One day, she was having dinner with her father, and her tears fell into the dal. She cried. She was inconsolable. Sachin hadn't come to school and she was shaken. She had seen him at the bus stop with another girl and she was jealous.
She moved on to others. A boy who slid his hands under her trousers, asked her to undress, and they discovered, and explored each other. She knew she wasn't attracted to women. She had taken a divergent path.
One night, her father held the door open for her, and asked her to leave. She had nowhere to go. Finally, she came to Ashok Row Kavi, the gay rights activist, and he gave her shelter. She worked with him, and went through sex reassignment surgeries to transition from male to female.
“Cutting off your genitals is not easy. It is a part of you that you are letting go of. The truth is, we will always be incomplete women. Not here, not there,” she said.
She left her family, and moved in with te hijra community. Once, outside the Borivli station, she saw her father. He looked worn, and weary.
She wanted to call out his name. But she didn't.
“Kya paaya, kya khoya,” she said, and looks away.
Now, she has a partner, and they live near Malvani.
Gayatri is a thin, wiry girl.
“Mummy tells me many stories. About queens and kings and princes and palaces,” she said.
Ever since Gayatri came into her life, Gauri's life has changed. She wears traditional clothes because that's what Gayatri likes, and cooks for her. Together, they go to the beaches or to movies.
Some of the childhood that she missed out on, Gauri is now reclaiming through her. They play with dolls, and pretend to cook food in miniature vessels. Here, there is a role reversal. Gauri plays the daughter, and Gayatri plays the mother, who cooks food for her daughter and send her to college.
Simple plots, and uncomplicated narratives in a child's play. They laugh easily, the mother and the daughter.
“I didn't want to be a mother. But I wanted to do something for her. She is so innocent. The community has been very helpful,” she said.
Brining up a girl child is like holding a glass doll, she said.
“You must be very careful,” she said. “We are in an environment where we have all sorts of people coming in.”
In the narrow lanes of Malavani, a poor neighborhood, there are many hijras. Like Chandani, a haji, who has adopted two children. They live in the village, and Chandni won't talk about them. She is afraid of the stereotypes that others associate with such adoptions.
In Delhi, another transgender talks about her daughter, whose mother is a sex worker from Kamathipura. She doesn't visit her daughter because she is afraid of forming attachment. There are too many stories of children who have been brought up by the eunuchs who have walked out on them. For instance, the famous eunuch Tikku Hijra who lived at the Mahim Dargah, and was shunned by the girl she brought up, or another, an elderly woman, whose adopted daughter abandoned her. But she provides for her.
Shahnaz Nani, a hijra Guru, married off one of the adopted daughters recently. The neighborhood in Malvani is full of stories about the lavish wedding feast Shahnaz threw. The daughter lives across the street and is married to a man who drives an auto rickshaw.
Gauri has ensured Gayatri recieves a good education and gets a good career.
“She says she wants to be one of those that give injections. Nurse or doctor, we still have to decide,” she chuckled.
Gauri, who lives in a residential area, and works for an NGO, is a respectable member of the community.
But it is difficult truth to explain why the hijras would want to be mothers.
“My eyes are always hungry. They look at your face and move down, and we long for that complete body. We are a sandwich. We are just buried between the two genders,” she said. “It is a strong urge to be a woman, and to look better than any woman. We want to be mothers, too. That is an inherent part of being a woman. All our lives, we have only wanted to be a woman.”
It is not for the fulfillment of the ambition of womanhood that she should do this, Gauri's guru had warned her.
“Take on the responsibility only if you can do it, she had told me,” Gauri said.
Gauri is forever switching. To Gayatri, she is the doting mother who buys her white fairy-like frocks and throws parties for her.
For Mandwa, she is the hijra nani, the one who will ensure the 19-year-old transitions smoothly and adopts the hijra ways.
So Mandwa accompanied her to Kamathipura. And Gayatri stayed home.
The streets were full of women, and men haggling over prices. Men stumbled out of dark staircases, spat out, and seldom looked back. In the tiny rooms, the women must have smoothened their saris, fixed their makeup, and were already waiting for the next customer. Business has gone down ever since the deaths because of HIV AIDS. There's a fear. But there's also the need. So, they continue.
Gauri tells Mandwa, who is a trained Lavni dancer, all of this.
“This isn't your future,” she says.
She teases Mandwa. And Zeenath joins in.
“Parde mein rehne do, parda na uthao. Parda jo oth gaya toh bhed khul jayega,” they sing.
“We sing this to tease others,” she says. “Mandwa isn't castrated yet. She is on her apprenticeship.”
The other life, the other daughter. She teaches Mandwa the nakhras, and Mandwa imitates her.
As they walk downstairs, they see a young eunuch standing in the doorway. They call after her. She comes.
“So you decided to choose this,” Gauri says to her.
The young hijra only smiles.
“Mandwa, jab tak phool mein color rahega, tab tak noch ke khayenge,” she says. “Yeh Bombay hai. Yahan sab kuch milta hai. You don't fall for this.”
The young hijra is just 18-years-old and they had thought of getting her a job at some NGO. But she ran away and is now into the sex trade.
“It is just a dangerous life she has chosen. But we can only do so much. There are not many alternatives for her,” Gauri says.
The streets of Kamathipura were bustling at night time. And in that diffused light, this world had a certain charm, a certain temptation. Eunuchs and women were on display. They looked beautiful. But if you looked closely, their eyes had a hunted look.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Who is Sonu Punjaban?
An edited version of the story was published in Open Magazine. I first saw Sonu Punjaban outside the court in Saket and wanted to meet her. For a year, I tired to see if I could meet her inside the prison but I couldn't. Finally, I wrote the story ... reconstructing her life with the bits of information collected over months - interviews with her family, reading through her confessions, speaking to the police, and just about anything that I could find.
The fallen
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 2012
She was spent. Moments ago she was standing in front of the judge in a crowded courtroom, almost pleading.
The accused had been tagged as a dangerous woman. An exploiter. A fallen woman.
Supporting herself against the wall, she tried to avoid the gaze of those who sat in the air-conditioned courtroom - lawyers, witnesses, victims, perpetrators, and spectators. But her face had been flashed on television screens many times over, and in newspapers. In a pink jumper, and jeans, surrounded by cops.
Her hands were limp in the policewoman's grip. The judge sat diagonally across from her on a high platform. In her exalted state, the judge didn't have the time to look at the woman. She, the custodian of justice, and the madam, who broke the rules. She had no apparent guilt.
The bail plea was rejected. Parole was out of question. In the courts, all she got were dates. In the hearing, the judge hardly heard her, dismissed the pleas and moved on to the other cases.
In the bus that shielded its occupants from the prying eyes with barbed wire that covered its windows, she veered towards the back, and then sat by the window.
A few men and women lingered on. In the minute-long window where the inmates climbed on to the bus to take them back to the Tihar Prisons in West Delhi, they could wave goodbyes, or shout out messages.
That afternoon, she looked like the most beautiful criminal I'd seen outside of an imaginary world of sensational stories about prostitutes I had read.
“She is pretty. Looks like she comes from a good family. Who is she?” a woman asked.
"She is a pimp.”
"Oh, how unfortunate,” she said. “Yeh sab kane ki kya zaroorat thi.”
Through the barbed wire, she stared into the parking lot. I called out her name.
“Sonu.”
The bus started moving.
“Put my name on the list of visitors that are allowed to meet you inside the prison.”
“What's your name?”
I repeated thrice.
For days after that hot afternoon in July in 2011 when I first saw her, I kept checking with the prison if I could meet her.
“She has six people on her list. You are not one of them.”
When Geeta Arora alias Sonu Punjaban, the notorious Delhi pimp who is alleged to have been involved in running an organized sex racket worth hundreds of crores, walked inside the courtroom escorted by the police officials, she chose a quiet corner by the window with a view of the mall.
Her lawyer took a seat beside her. At odd intervals, the woman cop who held her hand, would release the fingers and wipe off the sweat on her kurta.
She leaned towards her lawyer. He flipped through some papers and whispered in her ear. Her face looked tense. She was up against many odds.
At the end of the row of seats, her young lover Arun Thakral and her mother sat.
Thakral, a wiry man with a bony face, was watching her. He used to work for her, driving her car and ferrying the girls to their clients, and he was intimidated by Sonu. He had been arrested along with her but was later released on bail.
A few others, their hands in policemen's grips, were scattered through the three rows of chairs. A young man with his injured hand, and a tense face. Yet another man sat with a grim face waiting for the judge to arrive. They were petty criminals and looked their part. Greasy, dirty pants, and torn shirts, and hollow eyes.
Sonu wore black sweat pants that fell slightly below her knees leaving her calves exposed. In another time, she was high-maintainence, lining her eyebrows, pumping her lashes with mascara, and painting her lips a deep shade of red, her golden hair framing her face.
Here, in the courtroom, her lips looked chapped, her eyes looked sunken, and she hadn't shaved her legs in months. The rigors of prison life were evident.
She had been undergoing drug rehabilitation routine inside the prison and spent most afternoons sleeping in her cell because of medication.
“Cocaine. She was an addict. It is a lonely life out there. Substance abuse is common,” a police official said on conditions of anonymity.
Sonu wanted to be home for her son's birthday. The eight-year-old son, whose school fee receipts were used as evidence in the charge sheet filed against her by the Delhi police.
She was a victim of perceptions. She was seen as an oppressor, an outlaw and an immoral woman, a pimp, and a former prostitute by most.
In Custody
"What I do doesn't make me who I am," she had told the police official when she narrated her story. "I can't be defined by my trade."
The night was long and lay before her as a dangerous, tricky proposition. She must keep her wits about herself. The alertness and the anxiety the numerous cigarettes and cups of tea induced were her weapons against the confession she was about to make as a peddler of sex, a confession she would be forced to make.
But no matter what she said, or how she said it, the police would use it against her in the court. Under the MCOCA provisions, the confessions made in police custody are admissible in the court as evidence.
Sonu's hands trembled as she reached out for yet another cigarette the police official held in his hands through the grated iron door.
On the other side of the iron grill, Kailash Chand, the sub-inspector with Delhi Police who was used as a decoy along with another cop Narpat Singh in the sting operation that night in April in Mehrauli, sat.
On April 2, an informer told the Mehrauli police station staff that he had seen men, who worked for Sonu Punjaban, pimping women. He told the SHO the men would scratch their right ears as indication. The decoys would need to approach the two men and negotiate.
Kailash Chand and Narpat Singh, the other decoy, rushed out.
When they approached the men, they were offered two women for Rs. 5000 each. For rooms, it would be an extra Rs. 2000 per room. The two women - Khushi and Rashmi - were seated inside a black Scorpio.
But they said they wanted to see more women. They were taken to an apartment in Anupam Enclave where the men met with other women. The madam walked in, imposing and charming in her jeans and shirt.
Kailash Chand slipped out, signaled to the officials waiting nearby and the four women and four men who worked as pimps were arrested along with Sonu.
He had stocked up on packets of cigarettes and a constant supply of tea. He would have liked to provide alcohol, too. But he was a new recruit and he was unsure.
In those hours that made up the night, she said many things that were recorded and then annexed to the charge sheet the Delhi police filed against her invoking the MCOCA Act, which Delhi adopted in 2002. In fact, as per reports, the crime branch decided to book repeat offenders under MCOCA, which prescribes a minimum sentence of three years, in order to curb organized crime in the city.
Originally used by the Maharashtra government to rein in the organized crime racket in the city, the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) is a stringent act that makes getting bail very difficult.
The police was determined to put her behind bars. The three pimps booked under MCOCA in Delhi include Sonu Punjaban, Ichadhari Baba, her biggest rival, and Kamaljit, a high class pimp, who was arrested in 2005 and is now out of the prison.
MCOCA requires proof of running a criminal syndicate and at least two charges “in the nature of organized crime” before the charges under the stringent act designed for underworld in Mumbai can be invoked.
When Sonu Punjaban told the police that after her father's death in 2003, all her earnings came from the flesh trade, where she first entered as a sex worker and later operated as a pimp, it was duly recorded and attached to the lengthy chargesheet running into hundreds of pages, and filed in a thick binder.
“We will see to it that she doesn't get out so easily,” a police official said. “We have done our homework.”
Sonu's hands were fidgety, her eyes restless.
Kailash Chand, who is now the Information Officer in the case, thought he saw no remorse in her. Only defiance. That's what made him sit outside the cell through the five nights the pimp spent in police custody listening to her story, and her arguments against the moral high ground of her detractors who often saw her as a criminal, a woman who used sex to fund her lavish lifestyle.
That's what the police press release stated - "lavish lifestyle". Then they listed the various sections of the ITP Act under which she had been booked. There was also a murder case against her but she was released later. Enough to press MCOCA charges.
He wanted to understand the criminal mindset.
"Prostitution is public service," she declared. "We provide an escape route, a release to men. We also help women realize their dreams. If you have nothing else to sell but your body, you must do it. All the time, people are selling something."
Sonu, who gave up prostituting herself a few years ago, had a business model where most girls were contractual workers who charged as per the number of clients they serviced.
Some of these were university students. They needed extra pocket cash to keep a flamboyant lifestyle.
All of this was in a diary that the police recovered from Sonu's apartment. She also a slew of women who worked for her on monthly wages like Rashmi whose husband beat her up, forced her to have sex with him, and didn't give her any money. She has a child and she wanted him to get a good education, Sonu told the police officer.
"And why shouldn't she?," she said. “She had no degrees, no capital. Only her body to sell.”
Prostitution, like any other industry, needs to be run efficiently. Unlike many other industries, it had a conscience. It offered a refuge to battered women, she reasoned.
A part of him, he said, was surprised to see that she had justified her “sins” to herself. Both were operating in parallel universes. She, who believed that in doing what she did, she was serving a larger purpose, empowering women who were either in abusive relationships, or were too poor to realize their ambitions. She was a facilitator. And he, who thought that it was an amoral act, an unlawful activity.
Sonu had done away with the questions of morality long ago. In her world where opulence and indulgence dictated everything, masking the real world under the veneer of desire, sex and love were distinct functions. Sex was an opportunity and must be used to get to where one wanted.
He also thought she was beautiful. Well-defined brows, black sparkling eyes, and fair complexion. A straight nose.
"She is beautiful," he said. "You give them what they want, fuel their addictions, and they are ready to talk. But you have to wait it out, and watch for the moment when they reach that point where the weaknesses start to overpower them and they would be glad if you offered them a cigarette. In return, they would tell you everything.”
Sonu, born as Geeta Arora in Delhi's underbelly, smoked incessantly as she bared her life to a stranger, her captor.
On his cell phone, he had saved pictures of the raid. A red-colored bed, women with head scarves wrapped around their faces to protect their identity among the others.
When he caught her from Mehrauli, he was taken aback by her beauty. At 30, she was already an old hand in the business. This was the only profession perhaps where a new apprentice got paid more wages. She did her time as a sex worker and networked enough to secure a client base that she would later use to expand her own business.
Vijay, her first husband who was a small time gangster and a carjacker, died in a police encounter in 2003.
She was madly in love with Vijay. In her old albums, there's a picture of him against the backdrop of mountains.
“If he hadn't died, Sonu wouldn't have become what has. She wouldn't have destroyed herself,” her mother Veena said. “I found her crying once and she told me how she had become a sex worker. There were all these blue pills she used to take. Paras' birth was a difficult one. She was a drug addict by then. I have brought up the child. She didn't even breastfeed him. She wasn't able to. But she used to come regularly to meet her son, brought him toys, sweets and took him out for movies.”
Geeta Arora was born in 1981 in Delhi's Geeta Colony. Her grandfather, a refugee from Pakistan, settled in Rohtak in Haryana. Her father Om Prakash moved to Delhi and started driving an auto rickshaw. The family then lived on rent in Geeta Colony, an unauthorized colony in East Delhi.
Sonu's elder sister Bala got married to Satish alias Bobby, who was also the son of her aunt.
Satish and his younger brother Vijay, who Geeta liked, murdered the man their sister Nisha was having an affair with and were arrested in an honor killing case.
When Vijay got out on parole in 1996, Geeta married him. He jumped the parole and seven years later, he was killed by the UP police in an encounter, as per Sonu's confessions.
At the time of Vijay's encounter, Geeta was pregnant. She gave birth to a son who lives with her mother in the small tenement on the second floor in Geeta Colony.
A dark flight of steps lead to the second floor home.
"If she was making so much money, we would have been living in a better place," her mother said.
On the days when Arun would go to meet Sonu in the prison, she would pack her daughter's favorite curry - cottage cheese and vegetables - so he could take it to her.
Veena came to the court on most hearings, and would complain about the police being lenient towards Nagma Khan alias Ariba, who used to work for Sonu when she started out, and then established her own network of escorts, and was much more flamboyant than Sonu driving an Audi.
After Vijay died, Geeta became friendly with Vijay's friend Deepak, a vehicle thief, who also got killed in an encounter in Guwahati. The police refer to her as a dangerous women, who allegedly tipped off the cops about her lovers, and got them killed.
"She had many lovers," Kailash Chand said. "She lives life to the fullest. She spent a lot of money on her lovers."
After Deepak was killed, she moved in with Deepak's brother Hemant alias Sonu, a criminal who killed a man in Bahadurgarh suspecting him to be behind his brother's death. Geeta also got arrested in the case but was later released. In 2006 Hemant was killed in an encounter.
"She had a criminal mind. She liked adventures," Kailash Chand said. "Her lovers were dangerous men."
After Hemant's death, Geeta found herself without support. Her father had passed away. Bala's husband was in the prison and there was nobody to provide for the family. Her two younger brothers didn't have jobs.
Geeta had joined a beauty parlour to provide for her family. She had only studied up to Class 7 and couldn't get other jobs that demanded more educational qualifications or some vocational training or experience. She was also pregnant with her son from Vijay at the time.
While working as a beautician in Preet Vihar she met a colleague named Neetu, who introduced her to flesh trade, telling her how she could use her beauty to get ahead and make money. Later, she worked for a woman called Kiran in Rohini as a prostitute. That's when she came across pimps in various localities of Delhi - Lajpat Nagar, Vasant Kunj, Safdarjang.
She adopted Hemant's name when she entered the flesh trade as a pimp and suffixed it with "Punjaban”. It conjured the image of a full-bodied woman from the plains, dangerous and coy at the same time. A perfect combination for her new avatar.
Feminists often claim that prostitutes are powerful beings. They aren't the victims of men but rather their conquerors, withholding so much and only giving what the money can purchase.
As her mother said, Sonu Punjaban had a no holds bar policy for those that she took a liking too. Perhaps the men she was with were only means of engaging herself, a break from the monotony and melancholy of her life besides the drugs that she took.
Sonu Punjaban took many lovers.
Love and Life - the shrewd operator
Thakral, her lover, is seven years younger than her. A pimp, who also got arrested along with Sonu Punjaban and her girls, lived at her mother's house in Geeta Colony.
"She is pretty. I like her. The day I saw her, I fell for her," he said. "I am a pimp. We are from the same world. I am not going to get a good girl anyways. I get bored without her," he said.
In her confessions, it is not clear whether she was already running a prostitution racket while she was with Hemant. But by 2005, a year before he died, she had set up brothels in various parts of the city.
She recounted the names of the pimps who were in charge of these areas - Bobby Chakka, Pooja, Pradeep, Azad, Govind, Nagma alias Ariba, who came from Saudi Arabia and later became her rival.
"I knew them all and met them personally but in this business, we don't give out too much information to each other. It is strictly professional," Sonu's confession with the police reads. "Once I got a hang of the business and had made my own clients, I set up my own brothels around 2005."
With the money she earned from prostituting herself, she bought a Wagon R and a Maruti Alto but did the transactions in her mother Veena's name. Later, she bought a Santro. She went on to buy more cars in her family members' names and hired a few for business.
She set up her first brothel in Paryavaran Complex in B block and then rented out apartments in Freedom Fighter Colony, Malviya Nagar and Shivalik for her work. Four years ago, she bought an apartment in Anupam Enclave in Saidullajab in Delhi in the name of one Sanjay Makhija, an old friend. Throughout her career, first as a prostitute and later as a high class pimp, Raju Sharma alias Ajay was her accomplice. He was first her cook and later became her driver. He also worked as a pimp and was arrested twice with Sonu Punjaban.
It was a well run enterprise. She hired cooks and cleaners to service the clients and paid them monthly wages of around Rs. 25,000.
She paid the women on a weekly basis - Rs. 50,000.
She was the new age woman pimp who was sharp and calculative. She understood the market and she knew who to target in Delhi, a city with many villages, an urban pind with aspirations and quick money, a city that promised adventure and sexual liberation to its inhabitants.
She pitched her girls to the middle classes, an expanding demographic with disposable incomes.
Managing elite escorts was not her modus operandi. She couldn't use the internet. With her limited education, she knew she would not be able to procure very elite clients who look for the "girlfriend" experience where they could use the girls to show them off at parties, whisk them to the farmhouses where the girls would pour out drinks and indulge in “conversations.”
Yet she would provide for more than just sex. Her girls often were university students and well-groomed. They did it as a part time job to earn good pocket money.
Only sex, devoid of any romance, didn't sell in the market she was targeting. That was reserved for the very poor who usually went up the dark, narrow staircases leading up to hovels with trafficked women from poor states and neighboring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh on GB Road near the New Delhi Railway Station. Sex here cost much less - Rs. 100 if the girls were young.
As the business expanded, Raju Sharma, her accomplice, took charge of the outstation clients and the duo operated through agents in other cities.
But what became the chink in her armour were her two arests under ITP Act twice. On August 31, 2007, she was first arrested under Sections 4,5 and 8 of the ITP Act. She got bail but got booked under the same provisions in November 2008.
When she was arrested in April 2011 under the ITP Act, she had already been booked for the same offense twice, which is one of the preconditions for invoking MCOCA.
While the other eight, who were arrested along with Sonu, were released, she remains in judicial custody.
Her mother is still fighting to get her out of the prison. While the trial continues, Sonu has approached the high court for a bail, Veena said.
Meanwhile, her lover has left. He was tired of waiting for her.
“When she returns, she will return to an empty house. Her lover is gone. Her son would be a teenager then. A childhood lost, and a youth spent,” she said. “Is MCOCA justified in her case when others are walking free?”
Sonu never told me her story. I waited for a year.
Delhi MCOCA cases
5 people in 2002
2003 nil
2004 nil
2005 11 people
2006 – 5
2007 – 9
2008- 21
2009 – 28
2010- 11
2011 – 12 until August
The fallen
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 2012
She was spent. Moments ago she was standing in front of the judge in a crowded courtroom, almost pleading.
The accused had been tagged as a dangerous woman. An exploiter. A fallen woman.
Supporting herself against the wall, she tried to avoid the gaze of those who sat in the air-conditioned courtroom - lawyers, witnesses, victims, perpetrators, and spectators. But her face had been flashed on television screens many times over, and in newspapers. In a pink jumper, and jeans, surrounded by cops.
Her hands were limp in the policewoman's grip. The judge sat diagonally across from her on a high platform. In her exalted state, the judge didn't have the time to look at the woman. She, the custodian of justice, and the madam, who broke the rules. She had no apparent guilt.
The bail plea was rejected. Parole was out of question. In the courts, all she got were dates. In the hearing, the judge hardly heard her, dismissed the pleas and moved on to the other cases.
In the bus that shielded its occupants from the prying eyes with barbed wire that covered its windows, she veered towards the back, and then sat by the window.
A few men and women lingered on. In the minute-long window where the inmates climbed on to the bus to take them back to the Tihar Prisons in West Delhi, they could wave goodbyes, or shout out messages.
That afternoon, she looked like the most beautiful criminal I'd seen outside of an imaginary world of sensational stories about prostitutes I had read.
“She is pretty. Looks like she comes from a good family. Who is she?” a woman asked.
"She is a pimp.”
"Oh, how unfortunate,” she said. “Yeh sab kane ki kya zaroorat thi.”
Through the barbed wire, she stared into the parking lot. I called out her name.
“Sonu.”
The bus started moving.
“Put my name on the list of visitors that are allowed to meet you inside the prison.”
“What's your name?”
I repeated thrice.
For days after that hot afternoon in July in 2011 when I first saw her, I kept checking with the prison if I could meet her.
“She has six people on her list. You are not one of them.”
When Geeta Arora alias Sonu Punjaban, the notorious Delhi pimp who is alleged to have been involved in running an organized sex racket worth hundreds of crores, walked inside the courtroom escorted by the police officials, she chose a quiet corner by the window with a view of the mall.
Her lawyer took a seat beside her. At odd intervals, the woman cop who held her hand, would release the fingers and wipe off the sweat on her kurta.
She leaned towards her lawyer. He flipped through some papers and whispered in her ear. Her face looked tense. She was up against many odds.
At the end of the row of seats, her young lover Arun Thakral and her mother sat.
Thakral, a wiry man with a bony face, was watching her. He used to work for her, driving her car and ferrying the girls to their clients, and he was intimidated by Sonu. He had been arrested along with her but was later released on bail.
A few others, their hands in policemen's grips, were scattered through the three rows of chairs. A young man with his injured hand, and a tense face. Yet another man sat with a grim face waiting for the judge to arrive. They were petty criminals and looked their part. Greasy, dirty pants, and torn shirts, and hollow eyes.
Sonu wore black sweat pants that fell slightly below her knees leaving her calves exposed. In another time, she was high-maintainence, lining her eyebrows, pumping her lashes with mascara, and painting her lips a deep shade of red, her golden hair framing her face.
Here, in the courtroom, her lips looked chapped, her eyes looked sunken, and she hadn't shaved her legs in months. The rigors of prison life were evident.
She had been undergoing drug rehabilitation routine inside the prison and spent most afternoons sleeping in her cell because of medication.
“Cocaine. She was an addict. It is a lonely life out there. Substance abuse is common,” a police official said on conditions of anonymity.
Sonu wanted to be home for her son's birthday. The eight-year-old son, whose school fee receipts were used as evidence in the charge sheet filed against her by the Delhi police.
She was a victim of perceptions. She was seen as an oppressor, an outlaw and an immoral woman, a pimp, and a former prostitute by most.
In Custody
"What I do doesn't make me who I am," she had told the police official when she narrated her story. "I can't be defined by my trade."
The night was long and lay before her as a dangerous, tricky proposition. She must keep her wits about herself. The alertness and the anxiety the numerous cigarettes and cups of tea induced were her weapons against the confession she was about to make as a peddler of sex, a confession she would be forced to make.
But no matter what she said, or how she said it, the police would use it against her in the court. Under the MCOCA provisions, the confessions made in police custody are admissible in the court as evidence.
Sonu's hands trembled as she reached out for yet another cigarette the police official held in his hands through the grated iron door.
On the other side of the iron grill, Kailash Chand, the sub-inspector with Delhi Police who was used as a decoy along with another cop Narpat Singh in the sting operation that night in April in Mehrauli, sat.
On April 2, an informer told the Mehrauli police station staff that he had seen men, who worked for Sonu Punjaban, pimping women. He told the SHO the men would scratch their right ears as indication. The decoys would need to approach the two men and negotiate.
Kailash Chand and Narpat Singh, the other decoy, rushed out.
When they approached the men, they were offered two women for Rs. 5000 each. For rooms, it would be an extra Rs. 2000 per room. The two women - Khushi and Rashmi - were seated inside a black Scorpio.
But they said they wanted to see more women. They were taken to an apartment in Anupam Enclave where the men met with other women. The madam walked in, imposing and charming in her jeans and shirt.
Kailash Chand slipped out, signaled to the officials waiting nearby and the four women and four men who worked as pimps were arrested along with Sonu.
He had stocked up on packets of cigarettes and a constant supply of tea. He would have liked to provide alcohol, too. But he was a new recruit and he was unsure.
In those hours that made up the night, she said many things that were recorded and then annexed to the charge sheet the Delhi police filed against her invoking the MCOCA Act, which Delhi adopted in 2002. In fact, as per reports, the crime branch decided to book repeat offenders under MCOCA, which prescribes a minimum sentence of three years, in order to curb organized crime in the city.
Originally used by the Maharashtra government to rein in the organized crime racket in the city, the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) is a stringent act that makes getting bail very difficult.
The police was determined to put her behind bars. The three pimps booked under MCOCA in Delhi include Sonu Punjaban, Ichadhari Baba, her biggest rival, and Kamaljit, a high class pimp, who was arrested in 2005 and is now out of the prison.
MCOCA requires proof of running a criminal syndicate and at least two charges “in the nature of organized crime” before the charges under the stringent act designed for underworld in Mumbai can be invoked.
When Sonu Punjaban told the police that after her father's death in 2003, all her earnings came from the flesh trade, where she first entered as a sex worker and later operated as a pimp, it was duly recorded and attached to the lengthy chargesheet running into hundreds of pages, and filed in a thick binder.
“We will see to it that she doesn't get out so easily,” a police official said. “We have done our homework.”
Sonu's hands were fidgety, her eyes restless.
Kailash Chand, who is now the Information Officer in the case, thought he saw no remorse in her. Only defiance. That's what made him sit outside the cell through the five nights the pimp spent in police custody listening to her story, and her arguments against the moral high ground of her detractors who often saw her as a criminal, a woman who used sex to fund her lavish lifestyle.
That's what the police press release stated - "lavish lifestyle". Then they listed the various sections of the ITP Act under which she had been booked. There was also a murder case against her but she was released later. Enough to press MCOCA charges.
He wanted to understand the criminal mindset.
"Prostitution is public service," she declared. "We provide an escape route, a release to men. We also help women realize their dreams. If you have nothing else to sell but your body, you must do it. All the time, people are selling something."
Sonu, who gave up prostituting herself a few years ago, had a business model where most girls were contractual workers who charged as per the number of clients they serviced.
Some of these were university students. They needed extra pocket cash to keep a flamboyant lifestyle.
All of this was in a diary that the police recovered from Sonu's apartment. She also a slew of women who worked for her on monthly wages like Rashmi whose husband beat her up, forced her to have sex with him, and didn't give her any money. She has a child and she wanted him to get a good education, Sonu told the police officer.
"And why shouldn't she?," she said. “She had no degrees, no capital. Only her body to sell.”
Prostitution, like any other industry, needs to be run efficiently. Unlike many other industries, it had a conscience. It offered a refuge to battered women, she reasoned.
A part of him, he said, was surprised to see that she had justified her “sins” to herself. Both were operating in parallel universes. She, who believed that in doing what she did, she was serving a larger purpose, empowering women who were either in abusive relationships, or were too poor to realize their ambitions. She was a facilitator. And he, who thought that it was an amoral act, an unlawful activity.
Sonu had done away with the questions of morality long ago. In her world where opulence and indulgence dictated everything, masking the real world under the veneer of desire, sex and love were distinct functions. Sex was an opportunity and must be used to get to where one wanted.
He also thought she was beautiful. Well-defined brows, black sparkling eyes, and fair complexion. A straight nose.
"She is beautiful," he said. "You give them what they want, fuel their addictions, and they are ready to talk. But you have to wait it out, and watch for the moment when they reach that point where the weaknesses start to overpower them and they would be glad if you offered them a cigarette. In return, they would tell you everything.”
Sonu, born as Geeta Arora in Delhi's underbelly, smoked incessantly as she bared her life to a stranger, her captor.
On his cell phone, he had saved pictures of the raid. A red-colored bed, women with head scarves wrapped around their faces to protect their identity among the others.
When he caught her from Mehrauli, he was taken aback by her beauty. At 30, she was already an old hand in the business. This was the only profession perhaps where a new apprentice got paid more wages. She did her time as a sex worker and networked enough to secure a client base that she would later use to expand her own business.
Vijay, her first husband who was a small time gangster and a carjacker, died in a police encounter in 2003.
She was madly in love with Vijay. In her old albums, there's a picture of him against the backdrop of mountains.
“If he hadn't died, Sonu wouldn't have become what has. She wouldn't have destroyed herself,” her mother Veena said. “I found her crying once and she told me how she had become a sex worker. There were all these blue pills she used to take. Paras' birth was a difficult one. She was a drug addict by then. I have brought up the child. She didn't even breastfeed him. She wasn't able to. But she used to come regularly to meet her son, brought him toys, sweets and took him out for movies.”
Geeta Arora was born in 1981 in Delhi's Geeta Colony. Her grandfather, a refugee from Pakistan, settled in Rohtak in Haryana. Her father Om Prakash moved to Delhi and started driving an auto rickshaw. The family then lived on rent in Geeta Colony, an unauthorized colony in East Delhi.
Sonu's elder sister Bala got married to Satish alias Bobby, who was also the son of her aunt.
Satish and his younger brother Vijay, who Geeta liked, murdered the man their sister Nisha was having an affair with and were arrested in an honor killing case.
When Vijay got out on parole in 1996, Geeta married him. He jumped the parole and seven years later, he was killed by the UP police in an encounter, as per Sonu's confessions.
At the time of Vijay's encounter, Geeta was pregnant. She gave birth to a son who lives with her mother in the small tenement on the second floor in Geeta Colony.
A dark flight of steps lead to the second floor home.
"If she was making so much money, we would have been living in a better place," her mother said.
On the days when Arun would go to meet Sonu in the prison, she would pack her daughter's favorite curry - cottage cheese and vegetables - so he could take it to her.
Veena came to the court on most hearings, and would complain about the police being lenient towards Nagma Khan alias Ariba, who used to work for Sonu when she started out, and then established her own network of escorts, and was much more flamboyant than Sonu driving an Audi.
After Vijay died, Geeta became friendly with Vijay's friend Deepak, a vehicle thief, who also got killed in an encounter in Guwahati. The police refer to her as a dangerous women, who allegedly tipped off the cops about her lovers, and got them killed.
"She had many lovers," Kailash Chand said. "She lives life to the fullest. She spent a lot of money on her lovers."
After Deepak was killed, she moved in with Deepak's brother Hemant alias Sonu, a criminal who killed a man in Bahadurgarh suspecting him to be behind his brother's death. Geeta also got arrested in the case but was later released. In 2006 Hemant was killed in an encounter.
"She had a criminal mind. She liked adventures," Kailash Chand said. "Her lovers were dangerous men."
After Hemant's death, Geeta found herself without support. Her father had passed away. Bala's husband was in the prison and there was nobody to provide for the family. Her two younger brothers didn't have jobs.
Geeta had joined a beauty parlour to provide for her family. She had only studied up to Class 7 and couldn't get other jobs that demanded more educational qualifications or some vocational training or experience. She was also pregnant with her son from Vijay at the time.
While working as a beautician in Preet Vihar she met a colleague named Neetu, who introduced her to flesh trade, telling her how she could use her beauty to get ahead and make money. Later, she worked for a woman called Kiran in Rohini as a prostitute. That's when she came across pimps in various localities of Delhi - Lajpat Nagar, Vasant Kunj, Safdarjang.
She adopted Hemant's name when she entered the flesh trade as a pimp and suffixed it with "Punjaban”. It conjured the image of a full-bodied woman from the plains, dangerous and coy at the same time. A perfect combination for her new avatar.
Feminists often claim that prostitutes are powerful beings. They aren't the victims of men but rather their conquerors, withholding so much and only giving what the money can purchase.
As her mother said, Sonu Punjaban had a no holds bar policy for those that she took a liking too. Perhaps the men she was with were only means of engaging herself, a break from the monotony and melancholy of her life besides the drugs that she took.
Sonu Punjaban took many lovers.
Love and Life - the shrewd operator
Thakral, her lover, is seven years younger than her. A pimp, who also got arrested along with Sonu Punjaban and her girls, lived at her mother's house in Geeta Colony.
"She is pretty. I like her. The day I saw her, I fell for her," he said. "I am a pimp. We are from the same world. I am not going to get a good girl anyways. I get bored without her," he said.
In her confessions, it is not clear whether she was already running a prostitution racket while she was with Hemant. But by 2005, a year before he died, she had set up brothels in various parts of the city.
She recounted the names of the pimps who were in charge of these areas - Bobby Chakka, Pooja, Pradeep, Azad, Govind, Nagma alias Ariba, who came from Saudi Arabia and later became her rival.
"I knew them all and met them personally but in this business, we don't give out too much information to each other. It is strictly professional," Sonu's confession with the police reads. "Once I got a hang of the business and had made my own clients, I set up my own brothels around 2005."
With the money she earned from prostituting herself, she bought a Wagon R and a Maruti Alto but did the transactions in her mother Veena's name. Later, she bought a Santro. She went on to buy more cars in her family members' names and hired a few for business.
She set up her first brothel in Paryavaran Complex in B block and then rented out apartments in Freedom Fighter Colony, Malviya Nagar and Shivalik for her work. Four years ago, she bought an apartment in Anupam Enclave in Saidullajab in Delhi in the name of one Sanjay Makhija, an old friend. Throughout her career, first as a prostitute and later as a high class pimp, Raju Sharma alias Ajay was her accomplice. He was first her cook and later became her driver. He also worked as a pimp and was arrested twice with Sonu Punjaban.
It was a well run enterprise. She hired cooks and cleaners to service the clients and paid them monthly wages of around Rs. 25,000.
She paid the women on a weekly basis - Rs. 50,000.
She was the new age woman pimp who was sharp and calculative. She understood the market and she knew who to target in Delhi, a city with many villages, an urban pind with aspirations and quick money, a city that promised adventure and sexual liberation to its inhabitants.
She pitched her girls to the middle classes, an expanding demographic with disposable incomes.
Managing elite escorts was not her modus operandi. She couldn't use the internet. With her limited education, she knew she would not be able to procure very elite clients who look for the "girlfriend" experience where they could use the girls to show them off at parties, whisk them to the farmhouses where the girls would pour out drinks and indulge in “conversations.”
Yet she would provide for more than just sex. Her girls often were university students and well-groomed. They did it as a part time job to earn good pocket money.
Only sex, devoid of any romance, didn't sell in the market she was targeting. That was reserved for the very poor who usually went up the dark, narrow staircases leading up to hovels with trafficked women from poor states and neighboring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh on GB Road near the New Delhi Railway Station. Sex here cost much less - Rs. 100 if the girls were young.
As the business expanded, Raju Sharma, her accomplice, took charge of the outstation clients and the duo operated through agents in other cities.
But what became the chink in her armour were her two arests under ITP Act twice. On August 31, 2007, she was first arrested under Sections 4,5 and 8 of the ITP Act. She got bail but got booked under the same provisions in November 2008.
When she was arrested in April 2011 under the ITP Act, she had already been booked for the same offense twice, which is one of the preconditions for invoking MCOCA.
While the other eight, who were arrested along with Sonu, were released, she remains in judicial custody.
Her mother is still fighting to get her out of the prison. While the trial continues, Sonu has approached the high court for a bail, Veena said.
Meanwhile, her lover has left. He was tired of waiting for her.
“When she returns, she will return to an empty house. Her lover is gone. Her son would be a teenager then. A childhood lost, and a youth spent,” she said. “Is MCOCA justified in her case when others are walking free?”
Sonu never told me her story. I waited for a year.
Delhi MCOCA cases
5 people in 2002
2003 nil
2004 nil
2005 11 people
2006 – 5
2007 – 9
2008- 21
2009 – 28
2010- 11
2011 – 12 until August
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Memory
"In an instant, I was back in the former cities
familiar cities, cities of memories, built on imagination and some facts
and houses, or homes
of me, myself, and the expats, or the refugees
and I knock on houses of memories, trying to salvage what is left
For memory works in strange ways. It replaces, and disfigures
and I am booked for ages
in the vaporised world
I float, run and sprint
away from nostalgia
but like a strange star
it catches up with me
Didn't I want this? Away from the facts of present, an unguided tour into the repository of the memory
Run, run, and then stop
feel my head, and it gets light, and it gets heavy
Nausea, and ecstasy
They alternate, fight for my attention
and i smile, and I brood
and then i walk through it all
but i can't think. Rather I can't see.
Your face is distorted. It is not configuring.
Is your nose that way? And your eyes like pools of glass. Cold, and icy, too.
I try to remember. Not too hard. Memory is fragile. It can run away.
You look sinister
Not so pretty as I would like you to be.
It is photoshopped. Your image. My image of you.
Memory is strange. It borrows from tears, hurt, and anger.
It preys on the heart. Plays tricks on the mind.
And there you are in the corner.
Standing against the wall of veins.
I want to redeem you, and make you look nice.
But as I said, memory is not my pet.
Among others, there's one in the yellow shirt.
Sipping his drink. Cropped hair, and a smile.
Blurred. But nice.
So, finally memory did you a favour.
In the streets, in a cafe, I stop.
And let memory entertain me.
Like a puppet show.
Here I am the master. I control some things.
I dare fate. I dare memory.
They dare me.
I feel the stab. Betrayal of memory.
But what is mine is always with me.
I can't disown it.
So, I keep playing games with memory.
Trust it to tell me the truths of life.
Of redemption and of salvation.
Like a slideshow."
familiar cities, cities of memories, built on imagination and some facts
and houses, or homes
of me, myself, and the expats, or the refugees
and I knock on houses of memories, trying to salvage what is left
For memory works in strange ways. It replaces, and disfigures
and I am booked for ages
in the vaporised world
I float, run and sprint
away from nostalgia
but like a strange star
it catches up with me
Didn't I want this? Away from the facts of present, an unguided tour into the repository of the memory
Run, run, and then stop
feel my head, and it gets light, and it gets heavy
Nausea, and ecstasy
They alternate, fight for my attention
and i smile, and I brood
and then i walk through it all
but i can't think. Rather I can't see.
Your face is distorted. It is not configuring.
Is your nose that way? And your eyes like pools of glass. Cold, and icy, too.
I try to remember. Not too hard. Memory is fragile. It can run away.
You look sinister
Not so pretty as I would like you to be.
It is photoshopped. Your image. My image of you.
Memory is strange. It borrows from tears, hurt, and anger.
It preys on the heart. Plays tricks on the mind.
And there you are in the corner.
Standing against the wall of veins.
I want to redeem you, and make you look nice.
But as I said, memory is not my pet.
Among others, there's one in the yellow shirt.
Sipping his drink. Cropped hair, and a smile.
Blurred. But nice.
So, finally memory did you a favour.
In the streets, in a cafe, I stop.
And let memory entertain me.
Like a puppet show.
Here I am the master. I control some things.
I dare fate. I dare memory.
They dare me.
I feel the stab. Betrayal of memory.
But what is mine is always with me.
I can't disown it.
So, I keep playing games with memory.
Trust it to tell me the truths of life.
Of redemption and of salvation.
Like a slideshow."
Saturday, December 03, 2011
"I am a survivor."
The identity and gender questions have always intrigued me. Whether gender is a matter of soul or of externalities, it needs to be examined with a more accepting mind. I met Abhina and Simran, two transgender women, and wrote their stories.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 25, 2011
"I came to life among the 16,000 sperms. I am a survivor. Let me survive."
She was 20 years and struggling with her identity. Underneath her male
garb, she wore women's underclothes. It was liberating to assert her
identity. Gender is what the soul defines, not the genitals.
That's what she told herself then.
"This is one life. This is my life. I shall survive," she recalled.
Abhina Aher, 35, a transgender working in Delhi, survived the snares
of the society, and five years ago, found a Guru, who helped her
through her transition. While taking the oath in front of the leaders
of the seven gharanas of Mumbai in a community home in Byculla, she
discarded all her male stir, vowed never to wear them again and began
to learn the ways of the hijra.
As a project manager for Pehchan, a new five-year project that will
provide HIV prevention services for men who have sex with men and a
part of the HIV/AIDS Alliance, Abhina moved to Delhi a year ago from
Mumbai where she was working for the community previously.
Chandelier earrings dangling from her ears, and her eyes perfectly
lined with kohl, her hair lustrous and her clothes impeccable, she is
yet to get rid of her male organs but her soul has survived the
onslaughts of making it in a society where recognition of the third
sex still has a long way to go.
When the newspapers used the term "eunuch" to define the community
that recently lost 20 of its members to a mishap in Delhi during a
congregation, she felt angry.
"We are fighting against the usage of the term. It is demeaning," she said.
There are too many stereotypes to fight against.
"When they interact with me, they look at me with astonishment," she said.
At the airports, the discrimination is there. Everywhere else, too.
"I have to go with my male name. Sometimes, others don't want to sit
with me. They change their seats," she said. "It is unfortunate."
As the Delhi government tries to establish the issue of "kin" of the
hijras that perished in the fire, Abhina said the issue of identity
lies at the core of their community. At a community congregation in
Nandnagari in East Delhi, hijra community members were trapped inside
the community hall, and many died, and others are still recuperating
from burn injuries in the hospital.
"We have become more alert. We close doors because we don't want
homophobic people to attack us and it has happened in the past. But
that's unsafe," she said.
The government announced a compensation package of Rs. two laks for
the next of each kin of each of the victims after the mishap but they
are yet to ascertain the "closest relative" as the community members
live in communes called gharanas led by the Guru after they leave home
and their families to be reborn as a hijra. As per the UNDP, there are
16 lakh hijras in the country. The community members live in a world
of hierarchies, of bonds that are forged because at some point, they
have all felt trapped within their male bodies, and have felt the need
to free themselves of the burden of their male genitals.
Abhina was born in Mumbai in a middle class family. Her father and
mother were government employees. In the world that she was born and
named as Abhijit Aher, the dreams ended at getting a secure government
job and starting a family. It was a limited world.
At seven, Aher first crossed over. At that age, she didn't know the
world regarded gender as sacred, and something that couldn't flow into
the other.
Her mother Mangala, a folk and Kathak dancer, was like a diva to her.
She donned the ghungroos first.
Her body, she said, felt rhythmic.
"I had a natural tendency to pick up rhythm. My mother was a dancer
and my father played the instruments," she said.
For many years after that day, Abhina struggled with gender and
identity issues.
"I continued being a feminine boy," she said.
At the Marathi medium school in Dadar, she first realized she was only
interested in men. She wanted men to love her as a woman. But her
first sexual encounters were with gay men.
While in school, her mother found out about her relationship with a
neighborhood boy, her best friend, and since then her "reformation"
began.
"I was policed. I wasn't allowed to play with dolls, and my clothes
were monitored," she recalled. "I kept the appearances. I excelled in
outdoor sports. I even did horse-riding."
In college, she was still exploring her sexuality through chance
encounters with men. When she stumbled upon Bombay Dost, a queer
magazine, she knew she wasn't the only one struggling with gender and
identity questions. That's when she started working for the Humsafar
Trust. Those days, she recalled, they had a one-room office and she
operated out the office, and met more transponders.
"I continued with my sexual encounters," she said. "What nobody
understands is we want to be with a man or a bisexual person. I want a
man to love me like a woman. This isn't just about sex but beyond it.
The only men I was coming across were gay men. I appeared as a man,
too."
In Class 12, she came out to her parents. But she continued living at home.
"They had no options. I was the only child," she said.
After years of crossdressing, Abhina decided to find a Guru. At the
different NGOs she worked with, she had spent time working with the
hijra community of Malvani, where she met Shehnaz Nani. She had
already started taking hormonal pills in secret and was helped by the
community members by then.
She joined the Bulakwala Gharana and identified Shehnaz Nani as her mother.
"It was a difficult decision but I did it. If I lived in fear of my
own identity, I wouldn't be able to redeem myself," she said.
She kept going to the Guru.
"Guru, I see you as my mother but if you tell me to beg and borrow and
do sex work, I won't be able to do it," she would tell Shehnaz Nani.
"I needed a mother who would transform me from male to female," she
said."That's out tradition. A culture."
But she continued living with her mother, taking care of her.
In time, her mother reconciled to her son being different.
"She tells me you have given me the love of a son and a daughter,"
Abhina said. "I am providing for her. She is proud of me."
The biological mother and the daughter talk through the nights,
giggling as little girls would do. She inherited her mother's saris
and the ghungroos. Abhina herself is a trained Lavni and Kathak
dancer.
She went to the elders of the community, the leaders of the seven
gharanas and took her oath.
"You have to say we want to be in the mother-daughter or Guru-Chela
relationship and they ask you questions to ascertain whether you
really want to be a hijra," she said. "The Guru needs to have faith in
you. We were bonded. I had to look after the Guru. Shehnaz Nani had
200 chelas at the time. This is our method of taking care of the old
and the infirm. She can't walk now but she is looked after."
Now, Abhina has become a Guru as she is influential in the community
and has a few chelas.
"Once you have a Guru, you do tag and you are reborn. I changed my
name and started wearing three clothes like a female," she said."I was
dying to do it. But I haven't got rid of my male organs. We aren't
forced to. We do it when we are ready."
She faced issues regarding renting a house in Delhi when she first moved here.
"We have to pay extra rent. Much more than what you would pay. So, we
live together to split the high rents. We live by throwing money to
navigate a system that is so much giants us, that doesn't recognize
our sexuality like for instance, the government has announced that
Aadhaar or UIDAI cards will have transgender column. But what do we do
about the base documents like the Pan card. Mine is still in the name
of Abhijit. Passport has "others" and it makes you feel as if you are
an animal. Besides, all government departments need to recognize the
transgender as a separate entity. Without it, we have issues regarding
property rights, and everything else. With Pehchan, we are trying to
address those issues and sensitize the public. One example is the
recent mishap where the government doesn't know about the guru-chela
tradition. There are no castration facilities available. It costs so
much more to do it privately."
Next to her, Simran, another transgender co-worker, nodded.
"We are trying to build a support system. Pehchan has a huge grant and
we are trying to work in 17 states to promote the rights of the
transgender community," she said.
Her day begins early. She lives in Kalyanpuri where she has bought a house now.
"I am from the Poonawala gharana," she said. "I was born and raised in Mumbai."
When she was in Class 10, she told her father she thought she was gay.
He said I was not fit to be in his house so I left home and lived at
the Bombay Central Station for three days. A hijra community member
took fancy to me, and just when we were about to begin our first
sexual encounter, I told her I felt like her.
She took me to her house and took care of me for eight months.
"I learned dancing, worked at a dance bar in Khar, and even did some
sex work but it was painful. I detested it," she said. "My dancing
days were the best time in my life. I had many admirers. I felt wanted
and I made a lot of money, too."
But it was tough living as a hijra.
I was told to wear women's clothes and I was like "why can't I wear
men's clothes and go and work in office to avoid begging and
prostituting myself."
But then, it would have meant cheating myself, she said.
"There was a phase recently in my life where I had to do sex work to
sustain myself and then I got this job," she said. "I have adopted a
daughter. I used to be in Kamathipura and she is the child of a sex
worker who passed away. Three former sex workers take care of her. I
want her to be independent and not form a close attachment as I
wouldn't want to her to feel I did charity for her. It is difficult
adopting children but many hijras adopt children and bring them up. If
it were easier, we would have saved so many children from living on
streets."
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet. On the weekends, she spends most of
her time and money on beauty parlors.
"I like pampering myself," she said.
She faced a lot of discrimination. When she used to take the metro
from Badarpur, where she first lived in a rented accommodation, women
would vacate the seat next to her.
"I felt sad," she said. "I stopped taking the metro which only took 10
minutes to get here and started taking autos that cost me Rs. 120 one
way."
On the flights, most men ask the crew to change their seats as they
feel "uncomfortable" sitting next to a hijra, she said.
"I have been working here for the last one year and 24 days and each
time I walk in the compound, men stare at me and make vulgar comments.
I am tired of 24/7 attention," she said.
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet.
"I am waiting for the legalization of SRS," she said. "I converted to
Islam because that's how the gharanas are geared. We have Hindus too
but I can go to a mosque and pray. Islam doesn't allow for sexual
relations between two men."
For now, she is trying to give back to the community in her own way
and she is happy being what she is.
"We live like the woman that is in us. We spend a lot of money on
jewelry because that is passed on to the chelas and our adopted
children and that's how we live. With no care, with no misgivings,"
she said.
Gender, as we get it from the womb, isn't sacred. What is holy is how
you feel, she said.
"I feel like a nurturer, and I feel like a woman," Simran said.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 25, 2011
"I came to life among the 16,000 sperms. I am a survivor. Let me survive."
She was 20 years and struggling with her identity. Underneath her male
garb, she wore women's underclothes. It was liberating to assert her
identity. Gender is what the soul defines, not the genitals.
That's what she told herself then.
"This is one life. This is my life. I shall survive," she recalled.
Abhina Aher, 35, a transgender working in Delhi, survived the snares
of the society, and five years ago, found a Guru, who helped her
through her transition. While taking the oath in front of the leaders
of the seven gharanas of Mumbai in a community home in Byculla, she
discarded all her male stir, vowed never to wear them again and began
to learn the ways of the hijra.
As a project manager for Pehchan, a new five-year project that will
provide HIV prevention services for men who have sex with men and a
part of the HIV/AIDS Alliance, Abhina moved to Delhi a year ago from
Mumbai where she was working for the community previously.
Chandelier earrings dangling from her ears, and her eyes perfectly
lined with kohl, her hair lustrous and her clothes impeccable, she is
yet to get rid of her male organs but her soul has survived the
onslaughts of making it in a society where recognition of the third
sex still has a long way to go.
When the newspapers used the term "eunuch" to define the community
that recently lost 20 of its members to a mishap in Delhi during a
congregation, she felt angry.
"We are fighting against the usage of the term. It is demeaning," she said.
There are too many stereotypes to fight against.
"When they interact with me, they look at me with astonishment," she said.
At the airports, the discrimination is there. Everywhere else, too.
"I have to go with my male name. Sometimes, others don't want to sit
with me. They change their seats," she said. "It is unfortunate."
As the Delhi government tries to establish the issue of "kin" of the
hijras that perished in the fire, Abhina said the issue of identity
lies at the core of their community. At a community congregation in
Nandnagari in East Delhi, hijra community members were trapped inside
the community hall, and many died, and others are still recuperating
from burn injuries in the hospital.
"We have become more alert. We close doors because we don't want
homophobic people to attack us and it has happened in the past. But
that's unsafe," she said.
The government announced a compensation package of Rs. two laks for
the next of each kin of each of the victims after the mishap but they
are yet to ascertain the "closest relative" as the community members
live in communes called gharanas led by the Guru after they leave home
and their families to be reborn as a hijra. As per the UNDP, there are
16 lakh hijras in the country. The community members live in a world
of hierarchies, of bonds that are forged because at some point, they
have all felt trapped within their male bodies, and have felt the need
to free themselves of the burden of their male genitals.
Abhina was born in Mumbai in a middle class family. Her father and
mother were government employees. In the world that she was born and
named as Abhijit Aher, the dreams ended at getting a secure government
job and starting a family. It was a limited world.
At seven, Aher first crossed over. At that age, she didn't know the
world regarded gender as sacred, and something that couldn't flow into
the other.
Her mother Mangala, a folk and Kathak dancer, was like a diva to her.
She donned the ghungroos first.
Her body, she said, felt rhythmic.
"I had a natural tendency to pick up rhythm. My mother was a dancer
and my father played the instruments," she said.
For many years after that day, Abhina struggled with gender and
identity issues.
"I continued being a feminine boy," she said.
At the Marathi medium school in Dadar, she first realized she was only
interested in men. She wanted men to love her as a woman. But her
first sexual encounters were with gay men.
While in school, her mother found out about her relationship with a
neighborhood boy, her best friend, and since then her "reformation"
began.
"I was policed. I wasn't allowed to play with dolls, and my clothes
were monitored," she recalled. "I kept the appearances. I excelled in
outdoor sports. I even did horse-riding."
In college, she was still exploring her sexuality through chance
encounters with men. When she stumbled upon Bombay Dost, a queer
magazine, she knew she wasn't the only one struggling with gender and
identity questions. That's when she started working for the Humsafar
Trust. Those days, she recalled, they had a one-room office and she
operated out the office, and met more transponders.
"I continued with my sexual encounters," she said. "What nobody
understands is we want to be with a man or a bisexual person. I want a
man to love me like a woman. This isn't just about sex but beyond it.
The only men I was coming across were gay men. I appeared as a man,
too."
In Class 12, she came out to her parents. But she continued living at home.
"They had no options. I was the only child," she said.
After years of crossdressing, Abhina decided to find a Guru. At the
different NGOs she worked with, she had spent time working with the
hijra community of Malvani, where she met Shehnaz Nani. She had
already started taking hormonal pills in secret and was helped by the
community members by then.
She joined the Bulakwala Gharana and identified Shehnaz Nani as her mother.
"It was a difficult decision but I did it. If I lived in fear of my
own identity, I wouldn't be able to redeem myself," she said.
She kept going to the Guru.
"Guru, I see you as my mother but if you tell me to beg and borrow and
do sex work, I won't be able to do it," she would tell Shehnaz Nani.
"I needed a mother who would transform me from male to female," she
said."That's out tradition. A culture."
But she continued living with her mother, taking care of her.
In time, her mother reconciled to her son being different.
"She tells me you have given me the love of a son and a daughter,"
Abhina said. "I am providing for her. She is proud of me."
The biological mother and the daughter talk through the nights,
giggling as little girls would do. She inherited her mother's saris
and the ghungroos. Abhina herself is a trained Lavni and Kathak
dancer.
She went to the elders of the community, the leaders of the seven
gharanas and took her oath.
"You have to say we want to be in the mother-daughter or Guru-Chela
relationship and they ask you questions to ascertain whether you
really want to be a hijra," she said. "The Guru needs to have faith in
you. We were bonded. I had to look after the Guru. Shehnaz Nani had
200 chelas at the time. This is our method of taking care of the old
and the infirm. She can't walk now but she is looked after."
Now, Abhina has become a Guru as she is influential in the community
and has a few chelas.
"Once you have a Guru, you do tag and you are reborn. I changed my
name and started wearing three clothes like a female," she said."I was
dying to do it. But I haven't got rid of my male organs. We aren't
forced to. We do it when we are ready."
She faced issues regarding renting a house in Delhi when she first moved here.
"We have to pay extra rent. Much more than what you would pay. So, we
live together to split the high rents. We live by throwing money to
navigate a system that is so much giants us, that doesn't recognize
our sexuality like for instance, the government has announced that
Aadhaar or UIDAI cards will have transgender column. But what do we do
about the base documents like the Pan card. Mine is still in the name
of Abhijit. Passport has "others" and it makes you feel as if you are
an animal. Besides, all government departments need to recognize the
transgender as a separate entity. Without it, we have issues regarding
property rights, and everything else. With Pehchan, we are trying to
address those issues and sensitize the public. One example is the
recent mishap where the government doesn't know about the guru-chela
tradition. There are no castration facilities available. It costs so
much more to do it privately."
Next to her, Simran, another transgender co-worker, nodded.
"We are trying to build a support system. Pehchan has a huge grant and
we are trying to work in 17 states to promote the rights of the
transgender community," she said.
Her day begins early. She lives in Kalyanpuri where she has bought a house now.
"I am from the Poonawala gharana," she said. "I was born and raised in Mumbai."
When she was in Class 10, she told her father she thought she was gay.
He said I was not fit to be in his house so I left home and lived at
the Bombay Central Station for three days. A hijra community member
took fancy to me, and just when we were about to begin our first
sexual encounter, I told her I felt like her.
She took me to her house and took care of me for eight months.
"I learned dancing, worked at a dance bar in Khar, and even did some
sex work but it was painful. I detested it," she said. "My dancing
days were the best time in my life. I had many admirers. I felt wanted
and I made a lot of money, too."
But it was tough living as a hijra.
I was told to wear women's clothes and I was like "why can't I wear
men's clothes and go and work in office to avoid begging and
prostituting myself."
But then, it would have meant cheating myself, she said.
"There was a phase recently in my life where I had to do sex work to
sustain myself and then I got this job," she said. "I have adopted a
daughter. I used to be in Kamathipura and she is the child of a sex
worker who passed away. Three former sex workers take care of her. I
want her to be independent and not form a close attachment as I
wouldn't want to her to feel I did charity for her. It is difficult
adopting children but many hijras adopt children and bring them up. If
it were easier, we would have saved so many children from living on
streets."
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet. On the weekends, she spends most of
her time and money on beauty parlors.
"I like pampering myself," she said.
She faced a lot of discrimination. When she used to take the metro
from Badarpur, where she first lived in a rented accommodation, women
would vacate the seat next to her.
"I felt sad," she said. "I stopped taking the metro which only took 10
minutes to get here and started taking autos that cost me Rs. 120 one
way."
On the flights, most men ask the crew to change their seats as they
feel "uncomfortable" sitting next to a hijra, she said.
"I have been working here for the last one year and 24 days and each
time I walk in the compound, men stare at me and make vulgar comments.
I am tired of 24/7 attention," she said.
Simran hasn't changed her sex yet.
"I am waiting for the legalization of SRS," she said. "I converted to
Islam because that's how the gharanas are geared. We have Hindus too
but I can go to a mosque and pray. Islam doesn't allow for sexual
relations between two men."
For now, she is trying to give back to the community in her own way
and she is happy being what she is.
"We live like the woman that is in us. We spend a lot of money on
jewelry because that is passed on to the chelas and our adopted
children and that's how we live. With no care, with no misgivings,"
she said.
Gender, as we get it from the womb, isn't sacred. What is holy is how
you feel, she said.
"I feel like a nurturer, and I feel like a woman," Simran said.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Women from Mewat and men from Punjab
On Day 8, I went to the Ramlila Grounds to see what they call the "revolution" and I found the energy infectious. An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on august 24, 2011.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 23, 2011
From the podium, a thin wiry woman thundered.
“Sailab se keh do, apni aukat mein rahe.”
Mumtaz Behan, who said she was a revolutionary from Mewat, was cheered on by the crowds at the Ramlila Ground. She was speaking on behalf of the Pasmanda Dalit Muslim community.
“Jo unpe haath rakhega, use benoor kar denge,” she hollered into the microphone. The crowds swayed, clapped, whistled.
In a blue salwar kurta, she went on, promising the support of all women in Mewat.
The women of Mewat in Haryana, hitherto known to be a backward region with low literacy levels and poor health indicators, had joined the movement. Hopes were running high. Corruption was the root cause of everything.
Mumtaz pledged the support of the poor women of Mewat in a hoarse voice.
The rain started to fall. As she descended the stairs, the two young men started to sing.
“Mera Rang de basanti chola ...”
More cheers. The speaker went on to list the wide spectrum of support Anna Hazare was enlisting. Farmers' unions, dalit organizations, muslim leaders, who invoked the holy month of Ramadan as they spoke about the movement's reach, its scope and its promise.
Shahid Bhagat Singh's nephew climbed on to the stage, which looked spartan with just a poster of Gandhi as the backdrop. The isolating symbols were done away with this time. No Bharat Mata this time.
On a little table, a miniature statue of Gandhi was placed.
With a group of Sikh men, the nephew Abhay Singh Sandhu sporting a yellow turban waved the flag. He said he was with Anna and so were the people of Punjab.
The tempo caught on. The music came on. Someone shouted into the mic “Inqualab Zindabad.”
And then, more speakers.
Being part of those who were throwing their weight behind Anna was considered the populist measure for some.
A leader was discussing the financial cost of it. Couple with that, there were logistical issues. But this was the right thing to do, he was overheard telling another man.
A Sikh man exhorted the crowds to dance. He was on the stage. Sandhu was on his side. The moment was right. In the rain, it would make for the pretty picture.
The cameras were arched.
Scribes were taking notes. The crowds were watching.
Intermission. The two singers have their moment. They start to croon.
Arvind Kejriwal climbs on to the stage. He has an announcement to make. The people craned their necks. The cameras panned.
“Salman Khurshid has called us. Should we go,” he said into the mic. “If he has called, we should go. But we won't do anything without consulting you.”
A round of applause. Then, the go-ahead.
In between, Ram Jethmalani is spotted. He met Anna.
"I told him he should live. He should carry on for the movement. If he dies, the movement will die so he needs to take care of himself," he said.
Then, Professor Yogendra Yadav, an Indian social scientist and a member of the NAC for the implementation of the RTÉ act, got on to the stage.
In 2009, when UP's chief minister Mayawati had addressed a rally from the same stage, the setting was different. The stage looked regal. Four airconditioners were blasting. There were the typical accompaniments – the elephants, the pink and the blue colors, the diamonds glittering in her ears.
The same stage, which looked so out of reach, and so made up, is now the focal point of the movement. On an elevated level, Anna sits.
Yadav began his speech.
“This is a festival of democracy,” he said.
He said it warmed his heart to see people speaking in Marathi in Delhi. It was integration.
He asked the crowd what it meant when they wore caps and t-shirts saying “I am Anna.”
He went on to explain.
“It means we are looking for Anna within us,” he said.
Outside, vendors selling Anna caps were doing brisk business. Everyone was looking for Anna within and without.
Anna was behind the stage. Sleeping.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 23, 2011
From the podium, a thin wiry woman thundered.
“Sailab se keh do, apni aukat mein rahe.”
Mumtaz Behan, who said she was a revolutionary from Mewat, was cheered on by the crowds at the Ramlila Ground. She was speaking on behalf of the Pasmanda Dalit Muslim community.
“Jo unpe haath rakhega, use benoor kar denge,” she hollered into the microphone. The crowds swayed, clapped, whistled.
In a blue salwar kurta, she went on, promising the support of all women in Mewat.
The women of Mewat in Haryana, hitherto known to be a backward region with low literacy levels and poor health indicators, had joined the movement. Hopes were running high. Corruption was the root cause of everything.
Mumtaz pledged the support of the poor women of Mewat in a hoarse voice.
The rain started to fall. As she descended the stairs, the two young men started to sing.
“Mera Rang de basanti chola ...”
More cheers. The speaker went on to list the wide spectrum of support Anna Hazare was enlisting. Farmers' unions, dalit organizations, muslim leaders, who invoked the holy month of Ramadan as they spoke about the movement's reach, its scope and its promise.
Shahid Bhagat Singh's nephew climbed on to the stage, which looked spartan with just a poster of Gandhi as the backdrop. The isolating symbols were done away with this time. No Bharat Mata this time.
On a little table, a miniature statue of Gandhi was placed.
With a group of Sikh men, the nephew Abhay Singh Sandhu sporting a yellow turban waved the flag. He said he was with Anna and so were the people of Punjab.
The tempo caught on. The music came on. Someone shouted into the mic “Inqualab Zindabad.”
And then, more speakers.
Being part of those who were throwing their weight behind Anna was considered the populist measure for some.
A leader was discussing the financial cost of it. Couple with that, there were logistical issues. But this was the right thing to do, he was overheard telling another man.
A Sikh man exhorted the crowds to dance. He was on the stage. Sandhu was on his side. The moment was right. In the rain, it would make for the pretty picture.
The cameras were arched.
Scribes were taking notes. The crowds were watching.
Intermission. The two singers have their moment. They start to croon.
Arvind Kejriwal climbs on to the stage. He has an announcement to make. The people craned their necks. The cameras panned.
“Salman Khurshid has called us. Should we go,” he said into the mic. “If he has called, we should go. But we won't do anything without consulting you.”
A round of applause. Then, the go-ahead.
In between, Ram Jethmalani is spotted. He met Anna.
"I told him he should live. He should carry on for the movement. If he dies, the movement will die so he needs to take care of himself," he said.
Then, Professor Yogendra Yadav, an Indian social scientist and a member of the NAC for the implementation of the RTÉ act, got on to the stage.
In 2009, when UP's chief minister Mayawati had addressed a rally from the same stage, the setting was different. The stage looked regal. Four airconditioners were blasting. There were the typical accompaniments – the elephants, the pink and the blue colors, the diamonds glittering in her ears.
The same stage, which looked so out of reach, and so made up, is now the focal point of the movement. On an elevated level, Anna sits.
Yadav began his speech.
“This is a festival of democracy,” he said.
He said it warmed his heart to see people speaking in Marathi in Delhi. It was integration.
He asked the crowd what it meant when they wore caps and t-shirts saying “I am Anna.”
He went on to explain.
“It means we are looking for Anna within us,” he said.
Outside, vendors selling Anna caps were doing brisk business. Everyone was looking for Anna within and without.
Anna was behind the stage. Sleeping.
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