A haven for those ‘with no voice’
Mumbai clinic aids women trapped by force and fear
MUMBAI— Hita’s worn brown shift droops off her bird-boned frame as she pulls her bare feet up onto the seat of the plastic chair, taking hold, then, of her knees. She appears to be folding in upon herself, disappearing, as she weeps. Hita is HIV-positive and Malik, the brothel owner, does not want her anymore.
Hita had stepped into the clinic gingerly, as if being borne by old bones, her face riven with sorrow, her tiny frame cast against a hot, bright sun. I judged her age to be plus-40 and learned that she had been sold into the sex trade, where she spent the substance of her life, commodified. I was struck by how childlike her voice was, as if she had never experienced adulthood, never quite got there.
She looks as though she could be blown away by a puff of wind.
The clinic is run by Bombay Teen Challenge, a name that suggests a certain resourceful cheeriness, like a 4-H club. But BTC has worked for more than 20 years at drawing the girls of this maximum city out of forced sex slavery, a hard cause with a Christian bearing that has drawn the active support of Blue Jays pitcher R.A. Dickey.
In January, Dickey attended the clinic’s opening and gave interviews from there.
“If the organization rescues one human life from that hell, then it has done its job in some way,” the Star’s Brendan Kennedy quoted Dickey as saying at that time.
So here we are, in an area of Mumbai known as Turbhe, on a deadend street pocked with hole-in-thewall brothels where women in second-skin jersey dresses pull potential clients toward their spare pallets. There is a Hindi expression: zindagi itna hai. This is your life. This is it. This is your lot. There is nothing more to your life now.
Through the glass front of the clinic, a heavy-set man can be seen seated in the back of an auto-rickshaw. His face is visible in partial profile. He is smoking and has a moustache and as he takes a pull on his cigarette, what hypnotizes is his goldcoloured watch. His shirt and pants are both bright white, a startling effect against the dust and grime of the streetscape. A young woman with a bare midriff and hardlooking belly rises from the brothel stoop and picks at the purple skirt that has become stuck in her crotch. I don’t know how that story ends.
Bombay Teen Challenge is led by K. K. Deveraj, who focused first on aiding street kids, boys especially, strung out on drugs and alcohol. Touring Mumbai’s infamous Kamathipura red-light district many years ago, he faced a different reality: young women trafficked into the sex trade, trapped by force, then by economics, and ultimately by fear.
“Always targeting the poorest of the poor,” Deveraj says of the traffickers. “Those with no voice.”
And so what Deveraj calls his “24-7 ministry” expanded its endeavours to rescue entrapped workers and aid them in their physical, emotional and economic recovery.
Kamathipura is a raw sight still: on a recent evening, the scissor gates were pulled back from the whorehouse entranceways, and the women, heavy with indifference, leaned into the doorways, waiting. The evening breeze disturbed the thin pieces of curtain that separate brothel beds from communal sitting rooms, or what the girls call the “showing room.”
BTC runs a night shelter for children of the sex workers in the area and has expanded its outreach by opening the day clinic in Turbhe, an area of Mumbai that has fallen open to the sex trade as redevelopment has forced at least a partial migration from Kamathipura.
Deveraj says the organization has to work hard to build trust in the new community. It hasn’t been won yet. The looks in the neighbourhood are flinty and suspicious. Little surprise. As Deveraj phrases it, BTC has “stuck its nose right in the middle of it” — there are brothels on either side of the clinic, and across the way.
BTC’s biggest initiative can be found two hours from the city centre at its Ashagram, or City of Hope. It is here, away from the persistent horn-honking clamour of Mumbai, that women such as Jyoti can take the time to tell their story.
Jyoti is not her real name, just as Hita is not her real name. Both women are Nepali, conventionally prized for their fragile beauty and fair skin, though Jyoti’s face is broad and strong. She is uncomfortable, initially, recounting her history, fiddling with the long plait of her hair, picking at her nails. But the tale does eventually come tumbling out as she revisits her childhood in a Nepali village and her adolescent days moulding clay bricks. It was the promise of clean work in a New Delhi cosmetics factory that spurred her to leave her village, following a husband and wife who pledged to be the conduit to a new beginning. Arriving in the capital, she was handed off to a woman at India Gate who took her to a brothel and said, “Now let me tell you, you’re in a whorehouse.” And added: “If you resist, you will make life harder for yourself. You have been sold.” She was 17. At first Jyoti thought she could earn her way out. She was told that in three years she would be “scotfree.” But she was shipped to another owner, and then to what she calls her “pigeon home” — a brothel in a city north of Mumbai, where she grew to fear the outside world. Jyoti did flee, eventually, an escape that turns into a horrific re- counting of misplaced trust, rape by a police officer, and the utter despair that left her naked in a bathroom, bleeding.
She covers her wet eyes with her black dupatta, recalling her last entrapment before meeting a caseworker at BTC.
That was four years ago. Jyoti lives at Ashagram now. She has learned to read and to write and has been trained as a seamstress. Sewing and jewelry making are economic endeavours here. Vocational training is central to the BTC enterprise, which runs an annual operating budget of close to $1 million, and draws the preponderance of its funding from U.S. churches and non-profits. On the day of my visit, the team has just filled a reorder of stone bracelets for the Hard Rock Café in the U.S., part of the restaurant chain’s Shop for Good philanthropic initiative.
Ena Costello oversees BTC’s sewing enterprise, from the early training of the Ashagram girls and women in straight-stitch quilts made from fabric remnants to exquisite bedding and table runners and the lovely “tie-up tunic” that Costello is wearing, which she would happily ship to Canada, she says brightly.
Costello has been serving as translator through our conversation, and Jyoti’s tale has brought her near tears. “Every story is heartbreak,” Costello says.
Jyoti may never reintegrate into the community outside Ashagram, into a society that demands to know who you are, and where you are from, and where your husband is. But she has a 14-year-old son, who lives in Ashagram’s boys’ dormitory and is being educated. He is doing especially well in math. She is exceptionally proud, beaming. Her son, she says, is her hope.
In Turbhe, BTC outreach workers are cooking and caring for Hita. She needs to go to the hospital, but she will not. She does not trust the hospital. The outreach workers hope that with time Hita will place her trust in them.