Karma Sutra- Adventure Of A Street Bum

151 Pages·2012·1.1 MB·English

by  Rajendra Menen

KARMA SUTRA
ADVENTURES OF A STREET BUM
Rajendar Menen
For Dom, who told me to write.
For ‘Wanda Woman’, who liberated me from bondage.
For Anna and the angels, who followed me everywhere and kept me in one piece.
For Ruby, who is a gem.
For Maree Agland, who made Karma Sutra happen.
For The Daily, for pioneering street reportage.
For all those who lived and died along the way. My dharma buddies. So many of you.
Finally, for the sex workers of the world. Without them, this planet would be such a small place!
Table of Content
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
INTRODUCTION: Untold Chronicles
CHAPTER 1: Kamathipuar
CHAPTER 2: Ladies Bars
CHAPTER 3: Colaba and Kala Ghoda
CHAPTER 4: Aasha Dan
CHAPTER 5: Juhu
CHAPTER 6: Saundatti
CHAPTER 7: Goa and Kathmandu
CHAPTER 8: Escapades
CHAPTER 9: Street Voices
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
Perhaps the only thing more difficult than to be indifferent to India would be to describe or
understand India completely.
—’A Rough Guide to India’
I
have been on the street most of my life. I am still on the street.
It’s been a deliberate decision. A choice I have made in my saner moments.
It’s the only way to understand the magical mosaic of the Indian street.
I love the excitement of disorder that the street exhibits with such vivid
imagination. The colours, sounds, smells and dangers send the adrenaline
pounding. There is never a dull moment. You live with the unexpected. You
court it without fear. You wander with the flow and go where it takes you. It
never lets you down. It is startling, irreverent, exciting, agonizing, desperate,
raw, even tragic.
The book is not backed by ideology or dogma. It is not political. It is without
prejudice or bias. No insult is intended. No individual, social group, community,
caste or religion is targeted. All names have been changed where necessary and
all identities protected. It is not about activism or intended reform. No state
secrets have been compromised. It is not a definitive document on the street. If
anything, it is about empirical evidence and gut-level reaction. There are several
colours on the street. I have tried to absorb some of them.
The book doesn’t wear any moral garb. It is not judgemental. It doesn’t tell
you how to live, or how not to live. It just tells you how it is. If I have made
statements, they are a reaction to how the street has impacted me. It is my
opinion, straight from the heart. Not sponsored or designed by an outside
agency.
I have deliberately avoided statistics. I have also gone out of my way to not
quote anyone in the government. Figures can be doctored and interpreted either
way convincingly, and we all know the answers of those in power. This book is
mainly about my experiences on the streets of Mumbai, one of the greatest cities
of the world. It is about the darkness on the streets. It’s about the lives of the
marginalized, and their heroic battle against the enormous odds stacked against
them every single day of their lives. It is about how they surmount it all without
complaint: the true heroes of a karma that has shackled them.
It is about sex workers, drug addicts, hijras, Devadasis, the homeless and the
dying, and the hundreds of thousands of people who wander into India’s most
glamorous city to seek the crumbs. It is about the other side of midnight in a city
that is also equally gross about its display of power and pelf.
I have crossed the boulevard, lived with those who inhabit it, and broken
bread with them. I have had the option of returning to my life of comfort when I
wanted to. So it has been easy. But those on the streets were condemned to their
fate. For them, there was no escape. It takes great skill, wit and cunning on their
part to get out of it unscathed. This book documents their sutra; the sutra that
extracts every inch of guile to help them battle their karma.
The street is a living entity, its code well outside the pale of normally accepted
behaviour. When you are in the trenches every day of your life, and survival is
etched on your mind as your primary goal, you make your own rules. It is often
not in consonance with what those who make the laws have in mind.
Circumstances give birth to protest, revolt and rebellion. Anarchy has its seeds in
misfortune, whether real or perceived. It is difficult to understand this pain or its
expression if you are not of the street. It is also easy to exploit it and use it to
advantage.
The police are let out on the mean streets to look after them. They have it
rough. They are poorly paid, desperately outnumbered, manipulated by their
political masters, and low on morale. But they are in constant touch with the
marginalized. They are human, too, and get to see all sides of the dice. It works
on them. They see the corruption and the loopholes in the law, and exploit it.
They can become a terrifying presence.
The research for the book took several years, from the 1980s to the late 1990s.
During the period, the city also changed its name from Bombay to Mumbai.
There have been cosmetic changes to other locations too. This book is not a
chronology of events. There are no specific dates. Situations may have changed
but the flavour of the street will remain for a long time.
Most of the interviews were in Hindi. I have cut out the profanity from the
street dialect to give it to you in as acceptable a form as possible. I have also
tried to look at things with a sense of humour to soften the blow.
I have been fortunate to have been on this ride. Join me.
Rajendar Menen
1 December 2011
INTRODUCTION
UNTOLD CHRONICLES
There is a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there.
—Rumi
I
have been interviewing commercial sex workers and others who live on – and
off – the street for over two decades. I shall begin with the sex worker before
moving on to the others.
In the good old days the sex worker was simply known as a prostitute. A word
short and straight, like a powerful upper cut. No frills, no ornamentation. It takes
you to the count in a swift jab.
Then the world got politically correct. You couldn’t call someone short or fat
or dark or thin anymore. It wasn’t polite. They were all suitably and substantially
‘challenged’. The compassion extended to the prostitute too. Wise minds sat
together and decided that even if nothing could be done about the job portfolio,
the practitioner could be rewarded with a title that looked good on a visiting
card. How could somebody be called a prostitute in the days of McDonalds and
Microsoft? And what was the point in meeting at exotic locales all over the
world at great cost and debating the merits of prostitution endlessly if nothing
could be done for the prostitute? So the poor woman (we are gender-specific
here) could now die of AIDS and tell the accusing world till her last breath that
she wasn’t a prostitute but a commercial sex worker. It was a grand title. She
could die in peace. Her epitaph would read well.
As a rookie in one of the biggest newspapers in the world, I had several beats
to choose from. It was always easy to sit in an opulent patisserie and take down
notes, return to the office and file a report. I did this for a while and got scared.
What if I got fattened by the food, drink and the junkets and died of cardiac
arrest in a supersonic jet across the Pacific en route to the inauguration of a new
fleet of airplanes? It wouldn’t be as exciting as a bullet grazing my nape in a
bunker. A confession: I am an excitement junkie. I like to waste my life, rather
than do nothing with it. I have lived recklessly – spending time and money on
the street – and given myself to what Osho called the care of ‘existence ’, which
simply meant surrender to a higher force. That was good advice. I am still in one
piece.
Each one of us is born to forces beyond our control. I was born into a middle-
class milieu, to a confluence of circumstances that ensured a fairly easy life for
me. I was born into a family that believed in quality education and to a code of
values that incorporated integrity and hard work. Opportunities would come
knocking and I would have the luxury of choice. This simple accident of birth
determines the course of one’s life in the ‘developing’ world. But somewhere
along the way, I decided to hew my own path and march to a different drumbeat.
I met Radha in my late teens. She was slightly older than me but I was told that
she could love a man with the force of a hurricane at level six. She even insisted
that I take the only gold chain that she had. She owned nothing of material
consequence but wanted the best for me. This gesture had me stumped. This
wasn’t middle class. She was a prostitute, had already slept with many men and
had plumbed the depths of loss and despair within years of sighting adulthood.
And here she was gifting me a valuable ornament that she had really worked
hard for. And who was I? Nothing more special than a clean-faced youth who
had befriended her. But she took her chance. She lived dangerously. I liked that.
We were kindred spirits. My first interview, I think, began with her.
Over the years, I went on to interview thousands of sex workers. I have
launched and edited journals on HIV/AIDS, written books and countless articles
on the subject and been part of several television teams from all over the world
keen on documenting on camera their strange zone of existence. The sex worker
is fascinating – her life so different from ours – but intimidating, too.
There is a huge moral streak running down the pants of society and she sends
a tremor through it. You mention the word ‘prostitute’ and there is excitement,
there is vicarious interest, many eager questions are asked in hushed tones, and a
lot will be said behind your back. The majority wants nothing to do with you.
Their world-view, built with ordinary self-righteousness, gets a knock on the
head. You are a bad man even for talking about her world with some enthusiasm.
But who visits the sex worker? Why she has been in existence for so long? Who
fuels her demand? Who else but the proselytising moral brigade walking
bowlegged between desire and duty and unable to fulfil either.
I have visited brothels in different parts of the world. I have sampled the street
and the bougainvillea that shadows it. I have known the high and mighty who
can’t live without the sex worker and also those kicked in the butt by life but still
glued to her eyelashes. Art, cinema and literature pay tribute to the courtesan.
She has an indisputable place in the history of nations, and is the heroine of
several mythologies that have helped structure the feathers of modern society.
Love and, possibly, its sexual expression, gives mortal existence a new lease of
hope. It gives life to deadend situations. It helps you dream, fantasize, fly. In the
everyday existence of salaries, bills, taxes, rearing families, ill-health, old age,
pensions, insurance claims, debt and finally, death, escape routes are vital for
sanity. The escape hatch depends on temperament, attitude, personality,
circumstances, religious beliefs, conscience, genetics, disposable income and
several other ingredients.
The sex worker is feared. She is condemned because she can break the
delicately woven fabric of society. Accept her as an integral part of life, and the
family can be ruined. She is a threat to middle-class institutions that make room
for progeny, the sharing of property and the continuity, in some order, of the
human race. Gender harmony is tenuous at the best of times. Why give it another
handle to usher a faster collapse? Man is anarchic deep within. Validating the
sex worker and her hold on you will result in social chaos. Sexually transmitted
diseases have added to her public ostracism.
It is the era of AIDS. Society has become permissive, there is sex for the
asking, birth control is easy, and yet the sex worker is in greater demand than
ever before. Surely, there has to be a good reason for this flagrant violation of
simple logic and the umbrella of morality that is foisted on society.
In the common perception, interviewing the sex worker may seem a very
attractive proposition. The tempting rustle of soft flesh ready to break into
orgasmic delight at the sight of a coin, in snug boudoirs sheltered from the sins
of the everyday world; copious hard-luck stories, dripping with syrup, flowing
like a torrential downpour, ready to be canned for Cannes or parcelled for a
Pulitzer nomination, stories of exploitation, revenge and the final emancipation
from a world gone wrong.
While all this may be true in parts, in its entirety nothing could be more off
the mark.
The sex worker is a tough nut to crack. Years of exploitation have calloused
her soul. She will enter her cocoon and tell you to get on with the job. It’s almost
impossible to get her to talk. You have to wine her, dine her, cater to her every
whim and become her friend before she lets you in on the dark secrets of her
bizarre world. She will tell you a pack of lies in the beginning. Even her real