‘We need to be free to live and tell our stories’
Istarted calling the little eatery outside the Kamathipura brothel Hotel California because for months I would sit there trying to win the trust of the women there and they would ask why I wanted to tell their stories. I would tell them I was a feminist. They would ask me what’s a feminist and I would say I was fighting patriarchy. They would become even more curious and ask me if it was because I had no man in my life. Or did it mean that I didn’t need men, they would ask. I would tell them that neither was the case. I wanted men on my terms. I was not against sex. I was opposed to sexual power. Finally, two brothel managers—Maya and Mylie—took pity on me and let me enter the brothels. It had taken me 18 months to reach this point. That’s when I met Janki, a prostitute from Bengal, who bought me a soft drink with her own earnings and asked me to tell her story to the world and maybe that would help her daughter escape this drudgery. This simple desire reminded me of the 1929 Virginia Woolf essay, A Room of One’s Own. It transcended cultures and class.
And then, as I went deeper into their lives, I realised there are no binaries. It wasn’t man vs woman. The boyfriends who would pimp them would cook for them when they were ill. The binaries are between the consumer and the consumed. I began to see who were the consumed.
Feminism is a social justice movement. Men also become the consumed in trying to be the consumer. The masculine values assigned to them by society don’t make them gentle beings. In the battle of the sexes, women also force men to be breadwinners. A role reversal would be good.
The female half of the population is second class and yet young women say they don’t want to be called feminists. They say we won’t get married and this I find amusing. I tell them if they are feminists, they are likely to find more sex as they won’t fear it and they won’t fear their sexuality. Even when people talk about consensual sex. I want to talk about welcome sex because consent is a grey area. I want women to be visible.
I can’t cook even now. I dial or I go hungry. But I have learned to tell stories as a commitment to Janki. Her daughter is an animation artist. Janki died of AIDS a few years ago. I had met her in 1995. Feminism helped me cross class barriers. I learned storytelling in the brothels. I went to the spot. I heard them. They said they wanted education, jobs, justice, and a room of their own. These four things have become the core of everything I do.
Now you won’t hear the term spinster. That’s the big success of the feminist movement because we kept fighting. That’s how it is to be feminist—to be free to live and tell stories.