Indian sex worker takes to the streets to battle AIDS

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Indian sex worker takes to the streets to battle AIDS

By Anand Giridharadas International Herald Tribune

Published: June 6, 2006

MUMBAI, India With the strut of a baby-kissing politician, Shah

strolled down the byways of the red light district the other day,

pausing every few steps to offer a hug and a stern lecture to the

prostitutes.

Shah - tall and serene at 35, wearing a turquoise sari - began each

conversation gently, with a joke or a compliment. A woman's makeup,

she might say, was looking nice.

Then she would lean in closer, glance around for onlookers, and pull

out a pamphlet from the AIDS organization for which she works part-

time. Pointing at explicit photographs, she fired out her lessons:

This is how to use a condom; this is what a vaginal infection looks

like.

When her shift ends, Shah, who is being identified only by her

common last name to protect her identity, resumes her night job.

By midnight, if luck is kind, she will be in a cheap hotel somewhere

in the byways of Grant Road, earning a few dollars from a strange

man for what she calls the only work she knows. And because she must

survive, Shah will fail to tell him - even as she insists on a

condom - that she is a prostitute with HIV.

The United Nations reported recently that India had become the

HIV/AIDS capital of the world, its 5.7 million infections surpassing

South Africa's 5.5 million. Some Indian officials have disputed that

number, but the government has acknowledged that the spread of the

virus shows no signs of slowing.

Social Activities Integration, the nongovernmental organization that

Shah works for, runs the peer-education program in Mumbai. It

estimates that there are 37,000 sex workers in this city alone; the

real figure is probably much higher.

The organization employs 35 peer educators, with each responsible

for a group of 50 sex workers.

Although it has no official statistics, the group says condom usage

and the frequency of HIV testing have risen dramatically among the

women coached by their peers.

AIDS is often cast as an epidemic of bad choices. But it is also, in

the life of Shah, an epidemic of the choiceless. Since childhood,

she has walked on a path leading, with ever greater inevitability,

to AIDS.

She grew up in southern India, dividing her time between school and

her job in a firecracker factory.

When she was 13, her grandmother demanded that she marry her first

cousin. But he had a fist-sized lump growing out of his back, and

Shah's mother was angered by the thought of her lone daughter

wedding an invalid.

Her mother summoned her back to Bombay, and forced upon Shah a

marriage more to the parents' liking. They had been taking care of a

35-year-old migrant worker who had no parents in the city, and Shah

was beaten by her mother until she agreed to marry him.

By age 14, Shah had given him a daughter. He had begun to stray from

the marriage, and one day she caught him with another woman. When

she complained, he kicked her out of the house. It was Shah's own

house, and she had been ejected with her mother's approval.

Days later, a woman found her on the platform of a Bombay train

station and offered to find her a job as a maid. She got up and

followed her. By evening, she had been sold to a brothel for 10,000

rupees, about $220 today.

She told the owner to contact her mother, who would gladly pay the

money to buy her back. But when the brothel sent a messenger to

Shah's home, her mother denied having a daughter.

For years, Shah lived in the brothel on a single meal a day: rice

and watery lentil soup. She lived through years of forced embraces,

loving no one but believing that they all loved her.

" We don't love, " she said. " We take money, do our work, and they

leave. We don't love because our hearts have become too hard. But

the men love us. "

One of her customers became a lover. He bought her back from the

brothel and married her. When he needed money, though, she was back

on the street. She protested, and he stabbed her in the cheek and

back, burned her with kerosene on the belly and legs and shaved her

hip-length black hair down to the scalp.

Shah felt a rare flash of power when she went to the police,

dragging her two children in tow, to display her wounds.

The police followed her home. They dragged her husband out of the

house and beat him senseless on the roadside.

" I was very happy, " she said, " because he had tortured me a lot. "

Two years ago, a test revealed she was HIV-positive.

" I went crazy, " she said. She drank and took pills, trying to kill

herself. Then social workers approached her, looking for prostitutes

to educate their colleagues about AIDS.

She agreed, and because she knows their craft, she has a knack for

communicating with her colleagues. They stop her everywhere she goes

for a bit of gossip or advice.

She loves the work, for it has given her the first feelings of

respect. Today, suicide has fallen away from her thoughts.

" I have forgotten everything, " she said. She is happily remarried

and has discovered meaning through her teaching.

" I had an idea, " she said over a cup of tea, " that what happened to

me, I would not let happen to other girls. "

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/06/news/aids.php