Word: manju
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...policy debates of do-gooders are a world away from Bombay's Falkland Road district, where 8,000 prostitutes are packed into rabbit-warren brothels. There, on a hot, listless afternoon, Manju flashes an inviting smile, beckoning passersby with lewd remarks and suggestive body movements. With the fair skin and lovely slanted eyes of the Nepalese, so exotic to Indian men, she attracts an average of seven customers a day. Her fee: $1 each -- of which the brothel owner, a squat, brutal woman, takes more than half. Despite her sexy put-on, her shiny blue dress cut above the knee...
...story is typical. Daughter of a poor farmer in a hamlet three days' walk from Katmandu, Manju was 12 when her mother died. Unable to cope with three children, her father handed her over a few months later to two strangers: she thought she was going to Bombay to work as a housemaid. When the two men sold her to a pimp for $1,000, "there was nothing I could do," she says. "I was trapped." She is never allowed to set foot outside the brothel. Moreover, she is expected to repay her full purchase price. Rent, food and clothing...
Helpless, Manju, like many in her profession, is resigned to her fate. Returning home would not be an improvement. "Even if you work 24 hours a day in Nepal, you do not get enough to eat," she explains. "One can endure anything except hunger. If I were a man, maybe I would have committed murder to fill my stomach. But as a woman, I became a prostitute." It is a choice being forced upon too many. Along the highway of cheap love that now circles the globe, the cost in destroyed lives has become a blight to rival...