Problem Attic. Insert witty tagline here.

Retro-blog: Day Five

12th Dec 03

Today John took me for a walk around the district. As maybe mentioned before, where I was staying is on the edge of one of the world’s largest, nastiest red light districts. Today, I wasn’t on the edge…

First, we walked up the main road, up to the river. Along the river banks was a small city of houses made of bamboo and black plastic. All on crazy angles—architecture is obviously not a priority when you’re building a shack in the mud on a riverbank.

Along the way we got accosted by a boy who must have been about 14 or 15, and who kept saying “you want a girl, mister? Mister, I got girls, you want a girl?� I was kinda expecting this, but it still hit like a ton of bricks. John told me later that it was probably his sisters he was trying to sell off on us.

So after that little interlude, we headed off the main road and into the middle of the district. At one point there was this delightful dialogue with a couple of locals:

Locals (in English): Where do you come from?

John (in Bengali, pointing behind him): Just up the road there.

Gotta love cross-lingual humour. Anyway, we carried on, and pretty shortly found ourselves in the idol-making district (I wonder if there’s any significance in the idol-making district and the red light district being in the same place?) There were streets and streets of men sitting, making and displaying their wares, idols of all shapes and sizes. Some of the idols are darn scary, like Kali, a goddess who is always shown standing on the corpse of one of the other gods. She’s the original “empoweredâ€? woman.

Then came the awful part of the day. We were walking through the center of the red-light district, and we came across the main street (it’s about 2 meters wide.) This street was literally lined with girls standing shoulder-to-shoulder. There would have been a couple of hundred girls in a 50m stretch in this street. The oldest would have been maybe 30; the youngest I saw probably 13. Ironically (or perhaps not) it was the first time I’d seen typical western dress over here.

John was telling me afterwards that there are around 10,000 women employed in the sex trade here. This isn’t the glamourous red light area that tourists head to either—this is the low-class, locals-only district.

It gutted me seeing all that, and got me asking some big questions about my place in it all—what could I do? What should I do? How do you let these people know that there is hope?