By Krittivas Mukherjee
CALCUTTA, India (Reuters) – Every time her mother brings aman home, little Pinky picks up her infant sister and goes outto play in the grimy lanes of Calcutta’s rundown red lightdistrict.
That is, if it is daytime.
At night, the scrawny girls sleep under a cot lifted bylayers of bricks because their mother might need the bed toentertain late night customers.
Seven-year-old Pinky’s sordid life echoes the existence ofthousands of children in Sonagachi, one of India’s biggest redlight centers where childhood is about battling life’s murkyside and often losing it.
A documentary on these children of the bordello won anOscar this year, but recognition worldwide has meant little forSonagachi’s estimated 12,000 children, life for whom remains acycle of poverty and prostitution that is difficult to break.
Many of these unschooled children of prostitutes areemployed in small factories, shops and cheap eateries wherethey scrub dishes and mop floors for as little as 20 rupees (46U.S. cents) a day.
Girls usually take up jobs as domestic help and then end upin prostitution once they are old enough.
The very young ones like Pinky spend their day babysittingtheir infant siblings in the narrow lanes of Sonagachi –exposed to drunken men, street brawls and heroin-shooting pimpsin one of Asia’s biggest red light districts with 6,000prostitutes.
But the streets are the only escape for the children fromthe grim atmosphere of their one-room homes which are beingused by their mothers for business.
“We tell our mothers from outside the door when we arehungry. We play on the streets until we are called in,” saysPinky, rocking her little sister in her arms.
“The men who come are not good people. They swear anddrink. But they give my mother money.”
GLOBAL RECOGNITION
The world saw the children’s struggle, humiliation,exploitation and also their craving for freedom from theirsqualid existence in this year’s Oscar-winning documentary’Born Into Brothels’.
The children themselves helped make the movie, written anddirected by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. The children weregiven cameras so they could learn photography and possiblyimprove their lives.
Much of their work including some telling shots of theirsurroundings were used in the film.
But the global recognition that the Oscar brought forSonagachi hasn’t translated into benefits for its unfortunatechildren.
“We have heard that some film has been made on ourchildren. But I don’t know much about it,” says Minati Das,Pinky’s young mother. “Anyway, it doesn’t make a difference tous.”
“Life remains exactly the same ugly way it was forSonagachi’s children before the Oscar award,” said MrinalDutta, secretary of a group set up to represent the prostitutesof Sonaghachi.
But British-born Briski said she planned to set up a schoolfor the children.
“Proceeds from the film will be used to build a schoolspecifically for the children of sex workers, who are otherwiseso stigmatized that no school will accept them.”
A few schools are already functioning in Sonagachi whichteach the children rudimentary English, vocational crafts andthe local Bengali language. But barely 700 children attend theclasses.
Driven by poverty, many of the young girls end up followingtheir mothers’ footsteps.
“It’s all about the kids. They have gone from not beinglistened to, to getting so much attention. But still a lotneeds to be done to remove the stigma and if anybody can changethis, it’s the kids themselves,” Briski said.
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