Moonlight On The Cesspool

She walks with a swing. It is a gait that has been achieved with much imitation and practice. It is meant to be provocative but somehow makes her look like a school girl doing a mock ramp show.

The tinseled sticker she wears for a bindi catches light whenever she turns her head. And the long chains dangling from her ears sway whenever she gestures, whenever she looks around – which is like, all the time. She is just like a little sparrow.

Her mouth is a small cupid’s bow, with an almost imperceptible downward tilt at the corners, an indication of some untold tragedy deep inside her.

But, wait! The tragedy is not untold. It is visible to every man who walks past her on the street corner. It is visible to everyone who has seen the girl grow up. Yes, they remember! She once dressed in robes made of jute packaging bags and sooty rags. She now dresses in slinky jersey kurtas or shiny, slippery, bright-coloured sarees.

Her hair on a good day looked like the straw that she slept on in the night. And her eyes were red rimmed most of the time, because of all that crying. Now, she wears her hair in a fancy do and her eyes are shielded under a heavy coat of kajal.

There was a time when she slept behind the bus stop, on a running parapet that adjoined a wall, painted everyday with stinking urine. She never noticed the stench. After all, she used to be so exhausted by the time she reached her night shelter. And she shared the parapet with some of her friends. Friends that she made while begging.

She still shares her bed. This time with a new man every night. Sometimes, more than one.

She is Chitra. Age: 23. Height: Five feet. Occupation: Sex work. Address: Bus Stand in one of the world’s holiest pilgrim towns. Family: One daughter, father unknown.

Chitra has dark eyes, lanky hair. And a voice like a child’s. The girl grew up but her voice never did. It is still the childish tenor that one vague day in the past called out to her mother across a courtyard somewhere in a village. It is still the same trill that reverberated around the mango orchard when she whooshed in the air on a swing.

The voice is the same. And the girl is still a child. A poster child for Tragedy.

The days when she wandered around the village streets, bought biscuits at the village store, went late to school and got spanked are hazy memories. The day she flung a slate at a teacher and injured her, the day she ran away and got into a train to an unknown destination is the only link to the past she has.

I was a baby once, she says. Once? Isn't she still?

Chitra is a fighter today. She fights for the handful of rupees that she has to somehow earn everyday. She fights for the space on the barely curtained corner at the rear of the bus terminus. She fights for her baby to have a less raw deal than she had. And she fights for dignity. Just like other people.

I met Chitra. I met a child who lost her childhood. I met eyes that are pools of sadness, sentinels for her safety, camouflage for what she does not want the world to see - all at the same time. I met innocence, brutally violated yet somehow intact. I met the ugly side of life. I met my Guardian angel who saved me from being Chitra.

And I met my image in mirror that refuses to acknowledge the existence of Chitras in my cosy little world.