All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [167]
Why didn’t you then, why don’t you now, just go to the police and explain what happened? Why don’t you tell them about your life now?
“They would be the first to rape me,” she said with a sad smile. “Then they would simply hand me back over, and there would be more trouble when I was returned.”
Why don’t you secretly, however long it takes, stash away a little bit of money and just sneak away, go somewhere else in India, start over? (Yes, I asked a lot of embarrassingly dumb questions from a Western perspective … but I think we all would have.)
“Wherever I go, I will always be this.” She sighed. “I will see a former client who will reveal my past, and I will never be accepted anywhere as anything but this.”
This was so troubling. In a country of nearly 1.2 billion, she had sufficiently internalized her victimization and her boss’s fear tactics to believe that wherever she might go on the subcontinent, a former client would identify her and she’d be put back into forced sex. And it might be worse than her current situation. Even though her client’s large fees are immediately taken away from her, she holds back a little to send to her home village to support eleven members of her extended family, the same remorseless family that shunned her. Because they “depended” on her, she said she had to continue earning such high fees. She was trapped by her own mind and didn’t even know it.
Do your clients use condoms?
“Yes, the boss makes sure they understand they must. I am tested for HIV every alternate month.”
Ah, yes, it’s not called organized crime for nothing. A healthy prostitute is a better earner.
Has anyone among you tested positive?
“Yes.”
What happened? Did she receive treatment?
“I don’t know. She disappeared.”
Where do you think you will end up? Is it your fear that when you begin earning less you’ll be dumped at a brothel in Kamathipura?
“I can’t think about that,” she said, her face flashing blind panic. The question so terrified her, I instantly regretted asking it.
When I asked her questions about her daily life, her answers were even more chilling. Natasha said she lived in a three-bedroom apartment with ten others, all of whom shared her predicament. She is on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She never knows when the call will come; she lives knowing at any second she will be sent to have sex with a strange man, and she must do whatever, however grotesque, painful, and degrading, he wants. Her owner is someone she has never seen. In a perverse twist on Charlie’s Angels, she hears his voice on the phone as he bosses and threatens her. The pimp is the day-to-day manager of her life, checking on her, spying, supervising, and collecting money. Her clients include Indians and foreigners. I asked her if she had been to the Taj, my hotel, and she smiled. “Oh yes, many, many times.” I felt sick.
Sensing the destroyed condition of her soul, I flailed for something, anything, positive to talk about. “Your English is so impressive, Natasha. You speak wonderfully. I bet you read very well.” She said indeed, she did read some. When I asked what she might envision herself doing as a career, she told me she had long ago dreamed of becoming an Ayurvedic doctor, but insisted that this was now impossible. She did, however, try to surreptitiously teach the others, the little ones, at the apartment to read so that maybe someday they could do something different.
“The little ones?” I asked, a new sickness rising in me.
“I am the oldest,” she said. “The youngest is about fourteen.”
What? How long has she been there?
“She was eleven when I arrived three years ago. The others are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, around there.”
What does one say to that? How does one react? My time with Natasha was coming to a close. She couldn’t be late without arousing suspicion. The next part for me was incredibly emotional. To know she was walking out of that room and back into her life was a pain the likes of which I have felt only a few times in my life, pain like walking away from