Sex workers count losses after GB Road fire
NEW DELHI: The red of a wedding dress that shines through the ashen grey, a mangled fan and a misshapen box holding cash saved over the years… their belongings lie in heaps, charred beyond repair in a fire that destroyed the cramped spaces in Delhi’s red light area they called home and also their dreams for the future.
On Sunday, three days after flames tore through ‘kotha number 58’ in central Delhi’s G B Road that housed about 45 sex workers, the women gazed blankly at the detritus of their lives, wondering how they will manage. Covid-19 had pushed them deeper into the fringes of mainstream society, snatching their livelihood and the fire has robbed them of their homes and the little savings they had. “Everything is shattered,” said Maya*, stunned by what had happened. On Thursday evening, as the block went up in flames, the women and their families managed to escape with just the clothes on their backs and have been given temporary shelter in a municipal school nearby.
There were no casualties. “I have been living here alone for the last 10 years. My children stay with their ‘nani’ in Jaunpur and I was to visit them to fix my daughter’s wedding in January. I had bought her wedding dress, some jewellery and new clothes for all my children for Diwali. It’s all gone,” Maya* told PTI. For now, police officials have arranged their stay in the school and they are surviving on whatever help they have been receiving from police, some NGOs and generous citizens. Their brothel block is gutted, the beams twisted by the searing heat of the fire, the walls singed and their belongings, painstaking gathered over the year, lying in scattered heaps, some reduced to ashes and dust.