A moment ago, she was smiling. Now, she is crying. “Why these tears, Aarti?” I ask. The eight-year-old girl shakes her head. Wiping off her face, she struggles to give a faint smile but starts crying again. “It’s her mother,” says Saajid Bhai, the owner of Kotha No. 50, one of the 96 establishments on GB Road, Delhi’s red light district. Dear readers, today I want you to forget about Taliban, Zardari, Obama, Osama, Kashmir and Manmohan Singh. Instead, let’s focus on the life of a child. I’m writing this on my laptop while sitting in this kotha.
Like other children, Aarti studies in a school, plays at home, and fights with fellow children at the kotha. Her nose is pierced; her frock has orange flowers. She likes pakodis; she hates bananas. She can recite the English alphabet; she can count from one to hundred. Her mother, a sex worker called Aneeta, has hopes from Aarti. “I’m waiting for her to grow up so that I can live from her earnings,” she had told me one evening.
The reason why Aarti is crying is that her mother has been told to move out from Saajid Bhai’s kotha. Aneeta is considered a risk. She is an alcoholic. She shares her living quarters – a tin shed on the kotha’s rooftop – with her daughter and a Nepali lover. The man is a drunkard. Sometimes, they have violent fights in which he slashes her arms with a shaving razor. But they always patch up. What made Saajid Bhai give an ultimatum to Aneeta was when she discreetly started robbing her customers at knifepoint. “If they complain to the police, we all will be in trouble,” says Saajid Bhai.
Aneeta has now decided to shift to a neighbouring kotha. Aarti is unwilling. They have lived there before. The establishment is very small, crowded and extremely filthy. “Here, Aneeta has the roof to herself,” says Saajid Bhai. “There, both mother and daughter will have to live in a small cabin that is fit for only a single bed.”
Most women in Saajid Bhai’s kotha don’t want to let Aarti go. “But who are we to snatch a child from her mother?” says Zeenat, a sex worker. After a pause she says, “Don’t get duped by the girl’s innocent looks. She is as shayani (cunning) as her mother.”
Searching for the mother, I go upstairs to the roof. Aneeta is peeling potatoes for the dinner. Her man is lying on a mat. It’s the twilight hour. In the distance, Connaught Place skyscrapers have started blinking their electric lights. “Soofiji, do something about Aarti,” Aneeta says to me. “Teach her good English.”
“Earlier, Aarti would sleep upstairs with her mother and that Nepali man,” Saajid Bhai says. “When Aneeta would go out at midnight to get customers, Aarti would be alone with her stepfather. Fearing that he might do something wrong with the girl, we asked Aneeta to let Aarti sleep in our floor with other children.”
In the political dynamics of the kotha’s children, Aarti doesn’t count. “She’s a bhikhari (beggar),” says Zia, a cheery child of another sex worker. The girl is usually ignored and is asked to join in a game when there are not enough players. But Aarti is also loved. While her mother sleeps during the day, Aarti is taken care of by the kotha’s other sex workers. They give her food.
Is Aarti crying because she fears that she might not receive the same treatment in the new place? Since she is shy around me, I call Anupama Ghosh, a research fellow in Delhi University. As part of her PhD thesis on human trafficking, she comes daily to the kotha to interact with the women. Sometimes, she helps their children with subjects such as Maths and drawing. “I remember the two sketches Aarti drew,” says Ghosh. “One had a doll looking out of a window. That was very insightful. In GB Road, most women solicit customers by waving their arms from their balcony windows.”
The other sketch was the curious combination of a fish and a man. The man was Aarti’s biological father. A labourer in Chawri Bazaar, he occasionally comes to the kotha to meet her. Once, he had taken Aarti for fishing to a lake outside Delhi. “Perhaps the memory stayed with Aarti,” says Ghosh.
According to Saajid Bhai, the labourer feels for his daughter. Then why can’t Aarti’s mother move into the hovel of this man? “She can’t. He lives on the pavement,” says Saajid Bhai. “Secondly, once a woman has got used to the freedom of a kotha, she is unable to live in the society.”
I look for Aarti. She is standing alone in the balcony. By now she has stopped crying. “What do you want to become when you grow up, Aarti?” I ask. Her cheeks turning red, she says, “Kuch nahin (nothing).”
Mayank Austen Soofi lives in a library. He has one website (The Delhi Walla) and four blogs. The website address: thedelhiwalla.com. The blogs: Pakistan Paindabad, Ruined By Reading, Reading Arundhati Roy and Mayank Austen Soofi Photos.