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

going back, but with each visit, my once-uncontainable enthusiasm waned still. Even the smell I started to find harder to call endearing. My lungs now choked when I jogged through traffic. The perpetual drip of sewage became something I dodged instead of pretending it was innocent water, the way everyone else does.
    I had become accustomed to too many other, easier smells — the piney forests of the West Coast Trail meeting the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, apple-cinnamon cider as leaves turned from orange to red to brown to earth in New England.
    So it was that the once-longed-for Bombay Smell turned to a dreaded one. The magic of touching down at the city’s airport gave way to traveler’s trepidation. And every time I moved from one city to another, it felt as if that initial decision to leave Mumbai — the city I once insisted was the only place I would ever call my own — had condemned me to a life of un-belonging.
    By the time I finally decided to relocate to India for good, Brooklyn had become a home of sorts, too. I had to deal with a whole other wresting away from attachments I’d made, from cold-brewed coffee to artisanal ramen, to a city that promises eternal post-adolescence.
    This I did, I told myself and anyone who cared to listen, so that 23-year-old Shanoor could come to terms with 16-year-old Shanoor, who had believed she could “make a difference.” In its teenage ambition and naïveté, this meant single-handedly rescuing India from all its age-old societal ills.
    Growing up in Mumbai, where inequality is as obvious as the humidity, my privilege was apparent to me. My socially conscious parents raised me to be aware of it. But this happened within the confines of a relatively sheltered childhood and was most salient when my father or mother pointed out the indignity of disparity to jangle me from assuming life was guaranteed to be cushy, stable. Or when the gnarled, outstretched hand of a beggar simply couldn’t be ignored.
    When I first moved to Vancouver Island in my mid-teens, I had an acute realization of how little I knew about India, of exactly what it was I’d left behind. Mumbai’s injustices somehow became far more apparent from the other side of the globe.
    And I was incensed, hit squarely in the face by how unfair India could be.
    I had a new mission in life: to put my global, mind-stretching education and mounting outrage to use. I made a personal promise that I would go back to my home country to effect change.
    In the summer after college’s sophomore year — a miserable year for a variety of reasons, including that search for identity all young adults endure, compounded with feeling I lived in limbo between two worlds — I interned with Apne Aap Women’s Collective, an organization that supports sex workers and their children in Mumbai. It’s where I met Shabnam, the little girl with the braids and the gap between her teeth.
    The decision to learn more about this arrantly marginalized group came, in part, from watching Born Into Brothels on my pristine Ivy League campus. On a projection screen that descended noiselessly with the touch of a button in a glossy lecture room, India’s cruelty came to life. I was struck by the obvious pain, and also by an irrational, ever-precarious hope.
    But all that was quickly followed by a deep sense of personal failure when I learned the screening was organized by some Indian-American frat guy who ran my school’s anti-human trafficking initiative in between raging keggers. Did he even speak Hindi?
    I, who was originally from one of India’s biggest destinations for trafficked women, had never really done anything about it. I knew Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, was just as notorious and tragic as Kolkata’s Sonagachi, depicted in the film. Immediately, I needed to know more about it. And not by taking a course or checking out a book from the library. That’s what someone who isn’t from Mumbai does. I had greater