In one of the historical markets of Old Delhi is a road; often touted as the busiest and the most dangerous one in the city. It has a life of its own, its own alter egos black-and-white. Garstin Bastion Road they call it, named after some forgotten hero of the British Army. The government struggled to gloss over it by giving a saintlier nomenclature, the name ‘GB road’ stuck, like sins of the past.
In daylight, the place is a nerve centre of commercial activity. Vehicles crowd the area in the peak hours as it is the artery road that connects the Railway Station with the interiors. There is also a run of the consumers at the wholesale hardware shops on the ground floor of the market. Very few normal women come to this side of the market and those who show up are careful, very, very careful.
“Don’t stare up in the windows,” “Hold my hand,” “Stay still.”
The mothers would chide the minors, girls in particular, for their stupid innocence and clutch the soft arms, in something a mix of fear and anger, for they don’t want them to see those brazen women. As the earth swallows the sun, the shops close one by one but the stream of the customers, this time strictly males, doesn’t stop. The route is as busy as ever. The upper stories of the market lit up in the seductive shades of red and neon. And in the Mughal era Jharokhas, the overhanging balconies, middle-aged women and young girls in choli-cut clothing, bright lipstick and kohl eyes leer lecherously at the men and boys on the street.
Among these hues of woolly lights is a narrow staircase, to the rear of a hardware shop, which will take you to the dwellings of Campa Bai, the madam of the brothel.
At our first meeting, she had perplexed me. Not because she is a prostitute but because she didn’t appear like one. In a floral beige sari and neat braid, she resembled any other middle-class woman next door. Her uneven teeth with a slight protruding gave the effect as if she would erupt into laughter any moment. With just a hint of shadows under her eyes, she could be anywhere between forty and fifty. Slouched on a diwan lazily, she had closed her eyes in a bliss. A tuneless song of yesteryears resonated from the sealed lips. I watched her quietly.
“Yes, I don’t look like one.” She had read my mind like a slate.
I jumped in an embarrassed surprise.
“You are new here, aren’t you? A college student?”
Even though her smile wheeled me to lower my defenses, I tried to keep the conversation as minimal as possible.
“Yes, I am a trainee. ”
“Girls!! NGO didi is here!!” She announced my arrival.
In one command all the residents of the brothel came and sat down facing me on the floor, girls barely out of their diapers and women way past their youthful vigor. So disgusting! My heart brimmed with loathe for this deceptive looking woman and her thugs.
My colleague began a class on sanitation and common health issues and distributed the free condoms.
“Have some cold drink,” Campa Bai offered a frosty bottle of cooled drink, but I turned down.
“Arre it is so hot outside, don’t worry the bottle is sealed.” Have I become transparent to her?
Somewhat tempted and somewhat flustered, I accepted the bottle. I made a half-hearted attempt to make some conversation with the host.
“Don’t you ever long for the life you had before all this?” I gestured around with some hesitation.
She looked up with a start. The question had caught her off-guard. Then she murmured the words almost to herself….
I wish I could turn back the clock and bring the wheels of time to a stop.
A flood of emotions swept through her face as she stared at some imaginary dot over my head.
But then the smile evaporated, and she rubbed her mouth as if trying to scrub off some foul odor. Her previous calm composure soon replaced a little glimpse me had of her vulnerability.
“Isn’t it everywhere same didi, the story of my kind or yours? A woman is nothing but a slave everywhere. She continued her monologue with a bitter edge. “Day and night she slaves her body for others, bears them children, and bears their tantrums. At least here we are doing only one kind of slavery.”
Something in her stare disturbed me. I tried to change the subject.
“Campa! Is this your real name?”
She smiled and took a slow sip of the drink. Her eyes closed again. Is she trying to avoid me? Did she sense my antagonism towards her?
I met her many times thereafter. And more I met her more, my curiosity grew. She was always full of surprises. I often found her glued to the television either flickering through the news channels or caressing the slippery pages of travel books.
“Isn’t this a wondrous thing?” She gestured at the television with a grin.
I sat down in one corner and pretended to ignore her, but she was not ready to give up.
“Men don’t come here just for that thing, sometimes they need to unwind. And what can be more exciting than a wise listener—a cocktail of wife and mother.” She winked.
I was not expecting this kind of intelligence from her types of woman. She was a class apart.
“You can ask anyone on the street didi, Campa Bai’s Kotha has the richest clientele, from a councilor to a minister,” she winked.
I enjoyed spending time there, because the atmosphere was conducive to my story-writing hobby and second, it calmed my conscience as I spent some time with those poor little girls robbed of their childhood, and for whom I was just not able to do anything.
“Somebody else will buy them if I don’t didi,” Campa Bai said in a sad voice to me as I combed five-year-old Malati’s messy hair. “At least here, until her body matures, she won’t join the trade.”
I watched her aghast. What a casual response to this brutality?
“I alone cannot change the system,” she retorted. “Can you do anything didi? Do you think the police are unaware? Or the Government does not understand? They talk of the latest gadgets to sniff the untaxed money but they are clueless about the millions of children who disappear every year?”
“But don’t you ever perceive any moral responsibility Bai? You are also a woman.” I searched in her eyes fixed on me.
After a long pause, she uttered, “I am doing all I can,” and closed her eyes for a very long time.
Was that the hint of a moistness I had caught in her eye? I was about to get up and leave when she spoke again.
“She had a different name back then…..”
And just like that, Campa Bai started unravelling her past.
It was odd to hear her address herself in the second person as if that was some previous birth. Despite my apathy for Campa Bai I soon found myself sucked into the wormhole of her memories.
*
It was a tiny village, somewhere deep in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh. There were no roads to offer one an escape to the cities, no electrical connection, no pucca makaan and no fancy items in the one and only shop out there. May be on the map (these words she learned later) her village didn’t exist at all. Belonging to a time with no television no picture books, what was happening beyond those fields of sugarcane and mustard simply didn’t exist for her, except the wondrous tales which Pramod, her cousin, brought with him from the city.
Her house was the largest one in the village, with huge wooden carved doors. The outer courtyard was for men where they smoked hookah. The inner courtyard where the womenfolk lived had cattle shed, a fodder shack and two windowless rooms next to the open kitchen. They used only the rooms to store daily commodities and at the time of the feasts to lock the sweets from children. She lived in that house with her grandmother, mother, uncle, aunt and three cousin brothers. In that house teeming with people, Amma, her mother had turned herself almost invisible behind that long veil, which had consumed her physical-self. Perhaps that was her way of penance for being a widow.
Rajni. She hated the name. It reminded her of the dark sorrow that had filled this house after the untimely death of her father on the very day when she entered this world. They slapped the truth onto her on her every mistake.
Give your glass of milk to Pramod. Let your cousin eat your share of ladoo. Massage your uncle’s feet with mustard oil. Amma would teach her the rules of the game now and then. She hated them, all of them. Most of all, she hated her coward mother who was punishing herself and her daughter for some non-existing crime of theirs. And they all derived fun out of her misery – Pramod, Lalit and Satish, her cousins. They would bully her around when her mother was not looking. use her as a target for their catapult practice. And even if Amma was there, she would prefer to ignore her suffering.
“Why Amma, why you say nothing to them, even when you do all the work around here and still don’t get the proper meal?” She was sobbing hard to draw her mother’s attention, who was packing lunch to take to the fields where her uncle was tending to the crop. In frustration, she pushed her bleeding knee under her mother’s veil. “See what that swine Lalit did.”
“Hush girl, he is your brother”
“He is not. He is a monster and so are others,” she wailed louder.
“Why you didn’t die instead of your father,” Amma slapped her across the face. “My life is full of misfortunes from the day you were born.”
To see Amma break into sobs made Rajni forget her own pain. As a comforting gesture, she pressed her little body to her mother and tried to sense those tiny shivers Amma was trying to hide as she muffled her sobs.
“We need to earn our keep, you and I,” she listened to the distant voice of her mother which was reverberating somewhere deep inside her body and now seeping through her back to which her ear was pressed.
“The day your father died, we lost all our Rights over this house. With a son, I could have asserted some claim but with a daughter, I had not even that. We have nowhere to go. And so we need to work hard, work very hard, never complain so that for them we become invisible and an object of pity, not hate. I see everything daughter, but this tiny scrape on your knee is nothing compared to the hardship we will face if they throw us out of this house. So bear it for me, for our survival.”
From that day onwards she took it to hide in the fodder shack when her cousins were around because she knew that her tears were worthless here. With time she too became invisible like her mother. But this was more because Pramod had left for the city in search of a job and the younger two were busy discovering the pleasures of smoking beedi or eating gutkha, away from the prying eyes of the elders.
“Rajni” The hoarse whisper pulled her out of the comforting siesta.
“Rajni get up. Will you take lunch to your uncle today? I am a bit dizzy,” Amma shook her.
“Why don’t you tell aunty instead?”
‘Her arthritis is acting up again. You know she can’t walk this far.’
Rajni curled up her nose but she knew there was no option. She picked up the copper casserole of chapatti and steel tumbler of buttermilk. She hated going all alone in the fields. She may run into those monstrous cousins or some wild animal. Her uncle’s fields were to the other side of the village territory. During the harvest season, her uncle, armed with a country-made firearm katta, slept in the fields itself to guard the crop against robbers. Occasionally, his sons joined him in this night-vigil but mostly he slept alone. And women of the house, mainly her mother, would bring the hot meal twice a day.
Rajni halted in her steps at the sight of her uncle lying on a cot under the shade of Neem tree. She was unsure of her next move. From her cloak of invisibility, she was pulled onto the stage suddenly. The only conversation she had with the uncle was the occasional nods and snorts he gesticulated while smoking hookah in the courtyard. She doubted if he even knew of her existence in the house.
Between the mouthfuls, uncle enquired about the health of her mother and aunt. Her ear reddened. She nodded her head and hastened to draw drinking water from the Well next to the tree. Then she sat down on her haunches and waited as he finished the meal, drank buttermilk, picked the remaining food from his yellowing teeth and gargled.
She packed the empty utensils in the sarkanda, wild grass, basket. As she got up to leave, the uncle called out, “Care for some sugarcane?”
She nodded again, unsure of the question.
He signalled her to follow him as he headed towards the sugarcane field.
The nightfall was creeping up the sky when she reached home. The place was almost empty except for her grandmother whose aged eyes couldn’t see her swollen face and the dried blood on her legs and skirt which she had tried to clean at the well in haste. Ignoring the beckoning of the old woman to massage her head, she scurried to her refuge. For how long she moaned in the fodder shack, she didn’t remember. Somewhere around midnight, when the house was in deep slumber, Amma came with food. The grief crushed the words which were bubbling inside her. She hugged her mother and broke into an uncontrollable shiver.
“Shhh”, mother lifted her face towards her, “the hyena attacked you”
“Uncle, Uncle…,” she tried to tell her the truth
“Shhh child, shhh, not so loud. The hyena attacked you,” mother looked into her eyes.
Then she realized that it was not a question. She knew. Amma knew the truth.
They wept together for hours; their cries muffled in each other’s bodies, holding each other and collapsing together, grief passing from one body to another and back.
“Hyenas, there are hyenas all around us.” Mother let out another muffled cry.
And she learned another truth that day. She was not the only one attacked by a hyena.
She was barely ten, a girl who just had a swelling on the chest in the name of breasts. What rape meant and what were its social connotations was beyond her tender mind. It was just an act of torture, unspeakable torture for her. She had realized that no one would come to her rescue, not even her mother. She had to escape this hell, no matter what.
And soon she saw a ray of hope when Pramod, her cousin, arrived in the village with the magical tales of the city.
“Don’t tell anyone that I am helping you with it,” he said. “They are selfish people, cowards, don’t want others to enjoy a good life,” he winked. “You will live like a queen, money growing in your backyard like this crop of mustard,” he cajoled her, though she didn’t need any persuasion; she had decided.
The next morning, she met him at the assigned spot and together they boarded the tonga, which brought them to the town market from where they caught the bus to Delhi.
The five hours of the bumpy bus ride was nothing less than an adventure for her. But all her excitement turned into an unknown fear as they reached the city. She looked at her chapped skin, the faded long skirt and blouse which her mother had stitched out of her old sari. Her hair was dust matted and smelled a little funny in this city air. She felt so out of place, an animal out of the woods. “There are hyenas everywhere,” her mother’s warning echoed in her head. She looked for Pramod who was buying their lunch. He returned with a plate of patties and two bottles of some dark liquid.
“Here, take this.” He pushed one bottle in her hand. “This is Campa cola, one of the treats of the city.” He winked, “taste of winters in summers.”
She liked the feel of the bottle against her skin. The cool glass was soothing her fears. And when she took a sip out of it, the bubbles gurgled in her parched mouth and then moved up her head. It was altogether a different experience, a different world for her. And all her misgivings about the city vanished in an instant. She took the quick bite of greasy potato patties.
“Oh, how blissful,” she uttered aloud after gulping remaining chilled cola in one go. Her cousin watched her with an amusement, but she didn’t care because she had fallen in love with this alien city and its wondrous delicacies. And when Pramod left her with the madam next day she didn’t resist at all because they promised her as many as colas she wanted to have for good behaviour.
“Campa”, she told the brothel owner her new name.
“Why campa, what’s wrong with Rajni?” Madam asked in an incredulous tone.
“In all my life, full of miseries and pain, this bottle was the first thing which had comforted me, given me joy. Rajni has only given me darkness. Thus, call me Campa from now on.”
“You are full of surprises child,” the old woman laughed at her choice of the new name.
I was still holding the bottle in my hand when Campa Bai cut off. The mischievous twinkle was back in her eyes and she broke into a childish giggle.
