All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [152]
I had spent the previous day absorbing the lay of the land in Kamathipura. The brothels were so much like those in Svay Pak, Antananarivo, Nairobi—except they were even more crowded and filthy. Some were no more than rickety rabbit warrens stacked on top of one another, attached by ladders and narrow corridors. Women lived and worked in bunks four or more to a room; their children running around or hiding under beds amid their scant possessions while their mothers serviced customers. It was hell. Each brothel building block had electricity and running water for only two hours a day. The women explained that they had to queue with their small pails at the one spigot in advance of the water’s flow, or else they might go without water for days. They said they try to help one another out: If one had a client—and oh, how precious those terrible rupees are—they would try to fill one another’s pails, although brothels, like prisons, can have personality conflicts and cliques, and sometimes arguments broke out over scarce resources.
The women we met were aware of the HIV/AIDS crisis but were often too poor and powerless to protect themselves. If a trick would pay extra not to use a condom, and the woman and her children were starving, who could fault her for conceding? It was clearer to me every time I visited prostituted women that the key to stopping the spread of HIV is changing the behavior of the men who exploited them for sex (also known as “demand abolition”), which, logically, would be accompanied by the ultimate goal: a reduction, and eventual eradication of sexual exploitation.
So here we were at the Royal Cinema, where a troupe of interpersonal communicators regularly interrupted the shows—there’s always a pause to change reels anyway—with lively skits and demonstrations of the importance of male condom use and other behavior change scenarios. Today’s was especially powerful, as women from the brothels boldly stood on a public stage, performing vignettes that showed hundreds of people what daily life was like for them. In one, a woman presented her ID card to the ration office for her measure of kerosene, but the bureaucrat, knowing she was a prostitute, discriminated against her, denying her rations. In another, a customer bullied a woman into unprotected sex. In yet another, a pimp took all of a woman’s earnings, then beat her to “teach her a lesson.” A troublingly common example of generational discrimination was shown, too, in a girl being sent home from school, scorned and denied access because her mother was a prostitute. Without school, the girl’s own future as a prostitute is almost a given; a life of penury is indeed certain. And no representation would be complete without depicting police extorting sex for free.
The Mumbai media had been invited to this Saturday afternoon event, which we expected to be followed by a fairly low-key Q&A with me about PSI’s mission. Nobody had anticipated the hundreds of reporters, photographers, camera crews, and assorted gawkers who crammed into the theater lobby. While Papa Jack and his security team tried to push back the shouting paparazzi, I huddled in a corner with a beautiful old woman with bad knees and no shoes. She stood creakily, the smells of her unwashed body pronounced, and raised her hands to bless me; I made myself lower than she. She placed her hands in prayer on my head. I reached down to touch her feet. She might have been Jesus Christ himself, but I never had the chance to find out because the mob grew more unruly and were starting to crush us against the wall. Suddenly I felt Papa Jack’s strong arm around my shoulders as he and Marshall pushed me through the crowd like a flying wedge of blockers hurtling toward a touchdown. The goal, in this case, was a van