Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai's Brothels by Shanoor Seervai Page A

moments, I stood there, transfixed. I gazed up the stairs into the abyss and imagined the men jeering inside with red, unfocused eyes, the businesslike madams counting cash, and the sex workers putting on a grand show with pouty lips and hips suggestively cocked to one side. A seven-year-old girl, who often deliberately forgets her math textbook at school but loves to draw, goes home every evening to this, a place where abuse of women is routine, I thought.
    I was overcome by a sudden impulse to run up the spit-stained stairs and rescue Shabnam from the room on the second floor. But I turned around instead. In the taxi to the station, boarding the train and riding home in the pouring rain, I repeated, “No one will ever forgive me,” over and over. My father answered the door to the apartment. “I left a seven-year-old girl at a brothel today,” I blubbered.
    I cried through my hot shower and home-cooked dinner, my brother glancing warily in my direction, prompting my mother to cast stern looks at him.
    That memory of Shabnam and the abyss stays with me even today.
    *****
    For seven years, from high school in Vancouver, to college in Rhode Island, to a brief sojourn among Brooklyn’s hipster and yuppie tribes, landing meant one thing: the descent after 16 hours of in-flight entertainment into a boiling swirl of chaos.
    Yes, I flew into other cities during that time, and was duly impressed. How could I not marvel at Manhattan’s stately welcome as a carpet of sparkle was unfurled below me and towering spires saluted from just outside the airplane’s window?
    But nothing was more magical than hearing the jet engine change pitch at the edge of the Arabian Sea. The seatbelt would stretch against my waist as I craned past the understandably peeved passenger beside me, and I would watch in wonder as black nothingness gave way to the radiant metropolis of memory. This, I knew, was the beginning of a sorely missed cascade of sensations, culminating in that which I inexplicably craved: the Bombay Smell.
    Nobody will ever forget that first breath after the aircraft door opens in this city of 18 million on India’s west coast. On modern maps it is now called Mumbai, ever since a right-wing political party rechristened it two decades ago, but for many proud denizens the new name doesn’t always stick, and it remains, affectionately, Bombay.
    After being away for so long, the Bombay Smell — more aptly described as a stench, if love hadn’t prevented me from such derision — would trample upon my weary face and press against my unaccustomed nostrils, demanding my undivided attention. Jet lag be damned! By the time the air entered my lungs, it already had begun to percolate into my pores, refusing to let me be a stranger. The Smell announced that another North American winter had been temporarily suspended for Maharashtra’s perpetual, buggy heat.
    And so I came to ache for the moldering musk of home when I first left my city at 16 to attend school in Canada. Weeks before return visits I found myself dreaming about it, counting the days until I would no longer be thinking about Mumbai because I was simply there ,basking in splendid familiarity. No more would I struggle to explain Mumbai, because no one would ask. Everyone around me would have, as I had, found ways of making sense of the insanity, accepting that which cannot be rationalized as madness to embrace.
    But, as the years passed, as I breathed more of that sterile North American air, a creeping change took place. Going back to India started to elicit more explanation than less — to myself, that is.
    How could I, who’d imagined herself as a sort of ambassador for her beloved city when abroad, no longer get it, no longer be able to decipher this frenetically scribbled code? The paradoxes that I had justified and circumvented became blatantly irreconcilable, and rather than a homecoming, returning to Mumbai became an exercise in self-flagellation.
    I didn’t stop