Restoring Life in the Red Light Districts of Kolkata, India
By Sarah Lance
It is estimated that there are more than sixty thousand
brothel-based women and girls in prostitution in Kolkata.Pinky stood at the entrance to the narrow, crowded main lane of Sonagacchi, the largest red light district in Kolkata, India. She was waiting among other young girls standing the line. (In India, working in the sex trade is often referred to as “standing the line,” because the women literally line up along the street waiting for customers.) Pinky’s hair was cropped close and her eyes glassy with unshed tears. The raw look of shame and fear spoke of her vulnerability and drew me to her. I asked her where she was from and how long she had been in Sonagacchi. She told me the story of losing her mother and how her father was now also very sick and she needed to support her younger brothers. With tears, she said she had only been on the line for ten days. Unlike many of the girls I had met previously, Pinky had not been trafficked; instead, she was offering her body as a solution to desperate poverty.
I walked away from Pinky carrying her desperation as my own. Crying out to God, I lamented Pinky’s situation and voiced my anger that no place existed for a girl like this to find a job and support her family without selling her 16-year-old body. I found myself feeling hopeless, paralyzed, wondering how in a place of such deep and profound bondage there could be freedom. I asked God for a vision, for radical hope with tangible actions that would give fair job choices to girls like Pinky and a safe place where life could be made new.
A short five-minute walk from our home, our small community continues to find ourselves walking down the main lane of Sonagacchi and sharing life with girls like Pinky. We walk through the doors of brothels as if we belong—up the dark, filthy stairs into very small but well-kept rooms of women we have come to call friends. As a community of believers, North American and Bengali, we have been seeking the incarnation of Jesus in the red light area of Songacchi for more than six years.
The women of Sonagacchi and Kalighat, a smaller red light area, are the daughters, sisters, mothers and wives of the poorest of the poor in the villages of West Bengal, India, Nepal and Bangladesh. They have found themselves at the doorsteps of these brothels because of poverty, trafficking and trickery. Some of them married the wrong boy and found themselves here when they could not bear children. Some heard the promise that appeals to the ears of every girl in desperate poverty: “You can have a good paying job as a nanny or housecleaner”—but then found themselves under the firm hand of a madam, working for years to pay a debt for their own lives. One mistake led them to the door of a brothel and into a life that many feel they can never leave.
Numbers Become Neighbors in Need of Redemption
According to Jose Vetticattil and Sunitha Krishnan, "Although exact numbers are not known, it is estimated that there are more than sixty thousand brothel-based women and girls in prostitution in Kolkata.”1 Seven thousand of those women are living their lives in the red light area called Sonagacchi.2 The lanes are also filled each day with an additional three thousand women who come in from the villages up to three hours away searching for an answer to the hunger in their children’s bellies.3 These women, called flyers, offer themselves out of circumstances of desperate poverty for rice and school fees. Humanity in the red light area is numbered by gender. The statistics do not tell the whole story because they only relate the women who live in this place; they forget the children and the men who find themselves partnered in bondage to the sex trade which is plied within its boundaries.
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Sarah Lance is the Word Made Flesh Kolkata field director and the director of Sari Bari. She lives and works among women trapped in prositution and shares the dream with her community that one day all the men, women and children of the redlight areas in Kolkata will find freedom. |
