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From the Editor's Desk
The Delhi Walla's Visions of a Possibly Vanishing India
A couple of years ago, the Indian blogger Mayank Austen Soofi took me, in an auto-rickshaw, to his favorite brothel. It was in Delhi's illegal and infamous red-light district, on Garstin Bastion Road, or G.B. Road, a crumbling commercial thoroughfare that I had encountered only in the lewd imaginings of school friends years before. Soofi had a firmer grasp of the place. He had spent two years regularly visiting the brothel, first as an English teacher for the proprietor's sons and, later, as a journalist. He published a sensitive, book-length account of the brothel's workers, in 2012, titled "Nobody Can Love You More," and he had stayed in touch with the people who live there.
After being accosted on the twilit G.B. Road by pimps in T-shirts who asked "Jana hai?" ("Want to go?"), we climbed a flight of steep, uneven, betel-stained stairs and entered a large pistachio-green waiting room with a low ceiling. A single light bulb cast a bleary gleam on framed pictures of the Hindu god Krishna, the Sikh saint Guru Nanak, and a Muslim Sufi shrine - a menu of sin absolvers to choose from. A tall woman in a sari shook our hands and led us into the next room, where we were greeted by a domestic scene: two men sprawled on the ground drinking tea in front of an industrial fan; a five-year-old boy in a skullcap, praying on a mat; two young men loafing before a PC; and two sacrificial goats, straining into the room from their tether on the balcony. This was the one-room living space of the proprietor's family. At night, the adults slept on the floor of the pistachio-green waiting room; when customers arrived, later in the evening, they would step over and around the adults' supine bodies.
Continued here
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