Adventure Divas (20 page)

I’ve noticed a number of women and young girls scampering around the halls, preparing for something. “Two of our members died this week, of AIDS, and the group is having a memorial celebration in honor of them,” Ruchira says, explaining the energy.

“Most of the women in our organization are HIV-positive. One of the problems of course is, what are we going to do to help them? But the bigger issue is, what’s going to happen to their children? These children could literally be growing up on the streets when the mothers die. The boys will become part of gangs, and the girls will end up becoming prostitutes,” Ruchira says, answering her own question. “We want to get the girls placed in boarding schools and the boys given some vocational training classes.”

Ruchira tells me that they are also trying to educate men in the community.

“The customers or the partners?” I ask.

“Some are boyfriends, some are pimps, some are sons, and some are customers. We try to reach sailors, the police, taxi men’s unions. We explain to them what sex with a minor means, what it means to that little child. Her childhood is lost, her body gets destroyed, she has no chance of building a life for herself ever again. Many of these men think sex and violence are the same thing, they haven’t really understood what it means to have an equal relationship with women. We try to redefine masculinity because sometimes men come to the brothels thinking that they have this sexual urge, and the macho thing is to go and look for a really young girl and find an outlet for this sexual urge, but they don’t realize that it is so exploitative. They think that masturbation is wrong, it will make them blind. They think that sex with a virgin will cure them of AIDS.” These myths are not uncommon in communities around the world.

Outside, the memorial has begun. Fifty people, mostly women and girls, are gathered to honor the lives of the two women who died. Ruchira stands up and gives a talk, and a few others also speak to the group. Then six girls who look to be about thirteen or fourteen begin a Kashmiri dance, to Bollywood pop music that comes over a tinny loudspeaker.

“We try to build self-esteem through music and dance—and that goes a long way—but we come to a dead end at one point when the girls turn thirteen or fourteen, just at puberty. We know that the brothel madams are going to put them into prostitution,” Ruchira tells me as we watch the dance.

“See that little girl in the green dress?” She points to a girl of about thirteen, with thick black bracelets and a green
dupatta
scarf. “Her name is Lari and she hasn’t been in the business yet. She was somehow protected because the brothel madam liked her a lot and she thought she could get more out of her when she grew older, she was kind of skinny, and I was . . .”

Ruchira continues on, but my heart stalls.

She was kind of skinny.

Somehow this small phrase, which Ruchira includes almost parenthetically, horrifies me most of all. A little meat on her bones would change her price, and her destiny.

“. . . I was telling the madam,” Ruchira continues, “that Lari wants to be a doctor—let her stay in school and study for another year or two. I was literally trying to buy time, so I had to sit and negotiate and negotiate and negotiate and finally the madam has agreed to give us one more year.”

With the time she buys, Ruchira tries to find sponsors to support the children and get them in boarding schools out of harm’s way. Sometimes the brothel madams agree to this, and sometimes not.

In the last seven years, Ruchira’s work has taken her through the global network of sex trafficking, from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos to Kosovo, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, as well as to several countries in Africa and most major American cities. While awareness of trafficking is growing, so is the industry’s institutional strength via the Internet, telecommunications, and the well-oiled machine of organized crime.

“What we want to do is actually eradicate sex trafficking and prostitution as a work choice for women. Prostitution is inherently exploitative and women have the right to other nonexploitative options,” says Ruchira.

“What’s the good news?” I ask, not really expecting any.

“The good news is the women are willing to fight. Six years ago they were so timid and they were so scared, they were not willing to even talk to each other,” she says without even having to think about it. “They did not let outsiders in, and today, you can see the laughter and the joy that they have. They were willing to talk to you, they were asking you straight-out questions. They’re no longer timid, disempowered women. If you work with people and tell them about their rights, they’re willing to stand up and fight, and I think that is a challenge to the human spirit, and its response is the biggest and the best news,” Ruchira says.

“Has
your
spirit changed since you moved from journalist to activist?” I ask, loving her clarity, her warm but no-nonsense style, her respect for the people with whom she works and serves.

“Yes, because as a journalist you go so far and then you back off, you know, you just want to tell the story—you don’t want the responsibility of changing the world. But as an activist you go, you push, and you push and you push and you push until you feel that you actually get a paradigm shift. I feel I’m doing something beyond muckraking. Journalists make a very valuable contribution. They expose the problem, and activists add on by trying to change the way people look at the problem and changing the situation altogether,” she says.

Her embodiment of both activism and journalism resonates with the Adventure Divas approach to storytelling. And her on-the-road life, dictated by the international nature of the trafficking issue, inspires me. I figure her kind of commitment must have a particular source.

“A lot of the women I’ve met may be artists, singers, professionals, whatever—but they’re also committed to a grassroots activism,” I say.

“I think that comes from the freedom struggle,” Ruchira responds, referring to India’s struggle for independence, “and it continues in all kinds of ways—social work and commitment to changing things. Life is not just about living for yourself; we have to contribute something back to society. It’s almost as if the thread of the freedom struggle is going through us. The women’s movement in India actually was born during the freedom struggle in a way. Politics are very much a part of women’s aspirations on one level in India; on the other hand, you’ll find a seven-year-old girl sold into sexual slavery and she can do nothing about it. So the contrast is great in India, and some people have the luxury to be activists, and other people don’t. So the people who have the luxury to be activists, it’s almost like an additional responsibility that you do it.”

“Is there anything you fear?” I ask Ruchira, thinking back to Kiran Bedi and Alice Garg—and to Kali, the protectress.

“Fear is not, um . . . well, there are moments of fear, but nothing long-term. For example, when I was making a film and was inside a brothel, I had refused to take help from anybody to make the film—no power structures, no cops, no NGOs—and a man pulled out a knife at me and said, ‘How dare you make this film here?’ There was that momentary sense of fear that, oh my god, I am going to lose my life here. On the other hand, the women with whom I had been making the film for eighteen months came forward and surrounded me and said, ‘We have let her in and she is making the film to get our voices out, so you can’t stop her.’ So their strength gave me strength and it was inspiring, you know. It’s almost like a commitment that this is the bond we’ve created. They trust me, but my strength also comes from their trust; and so there is no fear because of that.”

Ruchira goes to speak with a woman in a purple sari about an upcoming workshop designed to educate men about condom use. Cheryl and I sit silently and watch the final dance. These girls’ lives give new meaning to the term
at-risk youth:
fourteen, living in a brothel, and their mothers are all dead or dying of AIDS. The village girls sold into sex slavery are appallingly abused victims, but with support and voice, they aren’t powerless. I think about the prostitutes who gave bracelets to local politicians for protection. Apne Aap has created a new system of protection, a system through which women support and protect one another. Ruchira would never call herself a warrior, but she is one. I look at this building, which is a refuge amid a war zone. Strange how the brightest light comes from the darkest places.

Lari, the skinny girl who’s been granted a brief reprieve from the sex trade, is twirling, slightly awkwardly, the tassles of her long green scarf following her. She passes her hand across her face as the music stops.

My torso hangs
out the open side of the train and my dry, wide-open eyes watch India scroll by, vivid and blurry at the same time; an old life passing by in fast-forward. We are riding the rails again, back to Delhi for a day before making a final journey up into the Himalayas. I fixate on the waterways we chug over and alongside. All the rivers tweak my devotion to fly-fishing, a response that feels strange and indulgent after the brothel experience. A few hours outside Mumbai a particularly special emerald snake chases our tracks, like a playful child. I imagine a stolen afternoon of laying lines, and wily reflections. Fish do represent spirituality the world over, so my obsession is not completely without context here in India. The truth is, life never feels more holy to me than when I am thigh-deep, midstream, battling a lunker or simply watching arcing lines play out over water. Fishing is a meditation—my tabla
—
that keeps me on point, alive.

I walk back to our seats, and can’t resist raising the issue, once again.

“Julie,” I say tentatively, “what do you think?” I point at the green river that promises me sleek flashes from another world. She pulls her head out of Arundhati Roy’s
Power Politics
and looks.

“Dead,” she says, nodding in the direction of a bloated sheep carcass floating mid-river.

“There might be some fingerlings,” I mumble hopefully.

“Dead,” she reiterates, and goes back to
Power Politics.
Roy, a Booker Prize–winning novelist and activist, was on our diva list. While we could not arrange to meet her, her insights reverberate among the crew members as we pass around her book, a challenge to the globalization of the world economy, the privatization of India’s power supply (usually by U.S. or multinational companies), and the dams that are displacing hundreds of thousands of citizens. Roy says, “Is globalization about ‘eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated? . . . The answers vary depending on whether they come from the villages and the fields of rural India, from the slums and shantytowns of urban India, from the living rooms of the burgeoning middle class, or from the boardrooms of the big business houses.” By the time Julie finishes the book, she will most certainly add “dammed” to her reasons why we will not find a suitable river to fish in.

The train makes
a stop and the crew stumbles out to attend to myriad bodily functions. We have been going down, one by one, with parasites. “This is the last one in the course,” Julie says, tossing a Cipro to John as he shuffles off to find a bathroom. Julie is like Scarlett O’Hara, tenaciously tending to moaning Civil War soldiers; she refuses to let a mess get in the way of the production at hand. Julie gets busy counting cash and pills and I run across the street to call Jeannie.

“I’m so glad you called. Where have you guys been?” she asks over a crackling international phone line.

“Ruchira Gupta—the sex trafficking story—just completely consumed us for a few days. It was amazing—scary and horrible, but amazing. The divas here are
huge.
Oh, and we lost some great footage to bad processing, which was heartbreaking.”

“That’s really a shame. But listen, listen, I’ve got excellent news. REI is in! They want to be an exclusive underwriter and will pay more for it.”

“Oh my ghaad.
Fantastic.
Exclusive?”

“Also,
USA Today
says that we are ‘Firing up souls!’ So I hope whatever you’re getting over there can deliver on that,” she adds with a laugh.

“I don’t know how we’re going to capture this country in fifty-two minutes. Jeannie, there are a
billion
people here.”

“Who’s next?”

“Well, the Bandit Queen, if—” The line cuts out as a diesel-belching Tata Steel truck rumbles by the yellow phone booth. I see Julie waving to me frantically, and I run back through a cloud of exhaust for the train, in time with the whistle toots, just like in the movies.

I am anxious to breathe the pure air of the Himalayas, but haven’t given up on Phoolan Devi, the elusive Bandit Queen. Devi, along with a New Zealand writer named Keri Hulme, has been on our list from the inception of Adventure Divas. But our window of time for meeting Devi is closing. We must leave for the Himalayas in twenty-four hours.

“Let’s just go to her house tonight,” I say, exasperated, when we arrive in Delhi and still are unable to reach her. “We’re out of time. What’s the worst that could happen? We get thrown out.”

At eight o’clock that night we are dropped off in front of the open tall wrought-iron gates that surround Devi’s residence on a main drag in Delhi, less than a mile from Parliament, where she works. A man stands in front of the residence, his orange cigarette cinders one of the few bits of light. Raghu stops to speak to him near the front gate. While they’re talking in Hindi, Julie and I slip by and head up the driveway and toward a back door, maybe a kitchen door, that seems to be ajar. “Could it be this easy?” Julie whispers.

“I’ve never shot in D.C. but I can’t quite imagine dropping in on Tom DeLay or Denny—”

“Tom DeLay? Why in the world—”

“Ao”
(“Enter”), we suddenly hear from inside.

Julie and I push open the wooden door and step into a small, windowless rectangular room with white walls full of twelve very serious-looking middle-aged men in pale pastel shirts, who sit in chairs that line three of the room’s four walls. The men stare at us: two American women clasping our hands in
namaste,
bowing slightly, more times than necessary, because we do not know what else to do and are buying time, hoping like hell Raghu shows up. At the front of the room, taking the fourth wall, holding court behind a large wooden desk, is a cute (no other word suffices), poised woman with a wide face and flat cheeks: Phoolan Devi.