Hamsa

She stood anaemic, in a worn out floral nightie and a tea stained towel that was slung around to cover her bosom. With her dusky complexion and chiseled features, Hamsa would have been a beauty in another setting of life that was not to be.

Hamsa is a sex worker. She’s been one for a decade.

I tread through the narrow lanes of the slum, maneuvering my feet, careful not to stride upon the drain water that had breached its path. Chellam, the voluntary worker from an NGO, had graciously offered to take me along to the slum that was just a five minute ride from the college. Hamsa ignored the surreptitious glances cast at me and warmly welcomed us into her two roomed shack. And, as if to secure its rightful passage, a rat, that metaphor for peripheral living, scurried across my path into the drain.

Hamsa with her deep, vacant eyes, demolished the stereotyped imagery of a sex worker, festooned in gaudy attire and make-up, a constructed imagery that had been hammered into my consciousness by popular culture.

Hamsa sat down with utter, bodily discomfort of a pregnant woman.

Unlettered and abandoned by her husband, she was driven to flesh trade by deprivation. With two kids then, along with her parents and a deranged brother to support, she had resigned to this physically and mentally debilitating profession. Today, at 28, she remains a sex worker with four children and a protruding belly with a bastard child waiting to be delivered.

For long, her body has been a site of perverse violence. I let my eyes drift away, feebly tired of the reality displayed in front me. Nailed to the ridged and furrowed wall, with its peeling white wash was a laminated photograph of a little girl. Hamsa got up and removed the photograph from the nail. “I want to quit at the earliest because my children are growing up. I want my daughter to be safe and have a normal life”, She said, feeling the rim of the lamination. Hamsa has put her daughter in a hostel with the help of an NGO. As she spoke, she tucked the photograph close to her bosom. That image of her daughter was her sacred totem that sanitised Hamsa from the profane of her daily existence, a totem that promised a purpose to her life and its meanings.

Amidst the flashy facades of malls, multiplexes and its mannequins in designer suits, there is an underbelly and I saw a woman that dwelled in it. Couched in a starched world of crispy, colourful fabindia kurtas, pseudo intellect and fatuous banter, I saw Hamsa, a little older than I, living an experience that was so distant from mine that I believed was worth recording.

I re-traced my steps through those shady lanes, to the solace and security of my world, at once grateful for my sheltered existence and a promised feature. Somewhere within, there was an unnamed guilt that I refused to acknowledge, lest it stripped me of my fragile defenses.