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
