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Bigger
battle ahead for other Tulasas in town
Once,
many years ago, when I was researching a story on prostitutes in
Mumbai’s red light district, I happened to be at a clinic for
sexually transmitted diseases in Kamathipura. One of the doctor’s
regular patients, a plump woman in her thirties with a prominent
gold tooth walked into the visiting room. I went up to her and after
explaining that I was a journalist asked if I could talk to her.
‘‘Why,’’ she said.
It
wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even an answer. It was more
like the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face. Why should a woman
agree to talk to a complete stranger about an unspecified range
of subjects which could include - given where we had met - her most
private and personal secrets? There could have been any number of
answers to that question, and as it happened, I did manage to convince
her to talk to me.
But
later, when I found myself thinking about her initial response,
I realised that I had never had any doubts that she would agree
to talk. Why? Because she was in a socially disreputable profession,
oppressed, needy and I was there professedly to help. It was the
height of presumption and I was duly chastened.
I found
myself thinking about this incident when I read recently about the
end of the Tulasa case. Readers may recall the story of Tulasa,
the minor Nepali girl who was brought to Mumbai’s red light
district to be later rescued and sent back home. Tulasa’s case
was not unique. Like her scores of Nepali women — many of them
young enough to tell their age in single digits — had been
abducted and forced to work in Mumbai’s brothels. According
to stories emanating from Nepal, abject poverty and the absence
of employment opportunities had persuaded many families to accept
this as a necessary evil and the involvement of a relative or a
family friend in the abduction was not rare.
Tulasa,
however, hit the front pages some time in the early eighties thanks
largely to press interest and the efforts of the media-savvy I S
Gilada, one of the doctors who treated her at the JJ Hospital and
who has built a substantial reputation on the basis of his ‘Save
Tulasa’ campaign. Pictures of the scrawny adolescent were accompanied
by horrifying accounts of her story. Her abduction, her being sold
from brothel to brothel, the clients she was forced to service,
the fact that she had tuberculosis and three venereal diseases.
Over the years, she has popped up periodically in the headlines
with stories such as her return home, her family’s reluctance
to accept her, her illness, her eventual death in a wheelchair a
year and a half ago. And now she is back in the news with the verdict
being delivered in the case against her persecutors. Only one of
the nine suspects faced trial, the rest having absconded; the lone
accused was released by the judge on grounds of inadequate evidence.
It is not so much the fact that the guilty haven’t been brought
to book - much time has passed and the evidence was apparently not
good enough - that struck me when I read the news.
What
struck me was the fact that for nearly two decades Tulasa has been
virtually a synonym for every possible indignity that could be heaped
on a human being. Gilada would probably argue, as he does in a document
brought out by his organisation, the People’s Health Organisation,
that ‘‘The positive fallout of her case was that a certain
consciousness was generated in Nepal against the trafficking of
girls.’’ And yet it seems to me that there must be better
ways to fight public campaigns than to lay every detail of someone’s
life threadbare in the press in horrifying and morbid language.
After
all, a 13-year-old girl who can hardly speak English or Hindi in
an alien city is hardly likely to be in a position to say ‘why’
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