1 - Libidinal City, Outcast Workers

Summary

India's Silicon Valley, a garden city, a modern metropolis, a global city, the future city, a pensioners’ paradise – but a sex workers’ city? While the list of sobriquets for Bangalore city is endless, the last one may seem the least likely and might even raise shudders of revulsion. In one of the earliest conversations that we had when gathering the material for this book, a retired street-based sex worker, the moment she heard what we were exploring, remarked with eyes tightly shut and arms stretched over her head:

Oh Bangalore? Just sex, sex, sex everywhere!

While this could have easily been passed off as just brash mockery from a woman whose body and spirit, like tens of thousands of others in her guild, has borne first-hand the grit and lechery of the streets of this metropolis for decades, little did we realise that she was quite accurate in her feisty statement. It slowly unfolded to us that her pronouncement applied to Bangalore's streets and public spaces so much more than it did to so many other cities in India, because while sex workers in cities such as Mumbai or Kolkata are associated mostly with ‘red-light areas’, the whole of Bangalore city is one.

Cities like Bangalore are reminiscent of a hackneyed Dickensian condition: the best of places, the worst of places, bringing hope, bringing despair, capable of liberating, capable of overwhelming, offering solace, offering turbulence, a heaven, a hell, where one can gain everything, and where one can be left with nothing. City spaces are the stage upon which street-based sex workers encounter these clashing conditions, perhaps all of them within the course of a single day. All of us claim our romance with the city spaces we regularly traverse, along with the bus stops we wait in, the traffic signals we cross, the benches we occasionally sit on, the eateries we enjoy and the businesses we engage in. When elbowing through the rabble of KR Market, or while stumbling upon countless faces in Majestic, or even while strolling by the shimmering emporia of MG Road, the ‘decent’ people who claim Bangalore as rightfully only theirs would not be able to (or would not choose to) see street-based sex workers.