4 - Places

Summary

The story of the blind men and the elephant is only too well known: each blind man imagines that single part of the elephant that he touches as the form of the entirety of the beast. While visualising the spaces and streets of Bangalore city, we have people who are surely not blind, but whose perspectives, on aggregate, end up delivering an outcome similar to the fable. Some, never having seen the hundreds of peepul groves dotting the main city or never having walked through labyrinthine markets of Chickpete, imagine Bangalore as entirely an ‘IT city’ since they draw their breaths from only the eastern and southern extremities where villages transformed overnight into apartment jungles and hypermarkets. Some would like to picture Bangalore as a wholesale loss of a pensioners’ paradise since all they melancholily see are the bygones, be it the commodious and composed bungalows or bare streets in balmy neighbourhoods (not having realised that their high-privilege limb of the elephant was mainly around the Cantonment area or neighbourhoods such as Basavanagudi or Jayanagar). But there are also others who touch and feel the elephant, such as street-based sex workers. Our chief intention with this book is to bring out the narratives of street-based sex workers, as one of the millions of people who also feel the elephant, and to render a visualisation of what their city looks like. That is, and as we have argued in Chapter 2, we do not simply stand at a vantage position and silently observe them and their spaces. We do not trace pug marks around the city to draw out a locus using our sophisticated occidental research instruments. Instead, we tether ourselves to their feet rather than putting on our indigence-proof shoes to walk around the city; we see with their eyes what their tangibles are and listen with their ears to the harmonies and disharmonies in their ambience, attempting all the while to not succumb to affluent visions from our own privileged faculties. We attempt to build metaphorical maps of a sex workers’ city with coordinates drawn from their histories which indicate worksites, watering holes, hideouts and danger zones.