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 Story Of A Prostitute At Heera Mandi
In society, prostitutes probably occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. Dancing Girls of Lahore is a look at the lives of prostitutes in a Muslim society…
Louise Brown's book is an examination of the lives of the women in Heera Mandi, the red-light district of Lahore. Brown spent many months, over a period of four years living and researching the culture of "dancing girls" and prostitutes in Lahore, and the result is this incredibly compelling book. I read it in two sittings yesterday. The book is not without it's problems. Brown, who should probably know better, substitutes "Islam" for "Pakistani" almost indiscriminately, resulting in some inaccuracies. Whether this stems from bias or not isn't crystal clear, although it seems so. However, her affection for the people she meets in Heera Mandi is clear. The problem is that, as certain situations arise, Brown puts herself ever closer to a position of responsibility for her subjects, and may in fact jettison her respectability as a researcher. Brown spent most of her time hanging around, and eventually living with, a woman named Maha and her family, made up of three almost-teenaged girls and two younger children, a boy and girl. It was difficult for me, as a woman, mother, and Muslim, to like Maha. To be honest, I find her fairly despicable. She's a manipulative, shrill, and self-pitying prostitute and drug addict. It's not that she chose this life, really. Like many others in Heera Mandi, she was born into it, trained as a dancer as a girl, and her virginity sold to the highest bidder when she was about 12 or 13. Her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, all of them were prostitutes and dancing girls. As Kanjars, the courtesan tribe, they come from a sub-culture of prostitution. The men get involved as pimps for their mothers, sisters, nieces, cousins. In Pakistan's class-conscious society, there is precious little room for these women to move up and out, and so, like many of the poor in Pakistan, they are kept in their virtuale caste, never to be accepted by a respectable man, never to be educated. That didn't keep me from being disgusted by Maha. She has three daughters coming of age, and intends to sell them all off as soon as she possibly can. Nishta, the oldest, tries to escape her fate by deliberately neglecting to take her TB and juvenile arthritis meds and becoming disfigured. Nena, the middle of the three, is the peace maker and goes along with what her mother wants (and what is inevitable), even as she dreams of love with a nice young man her own age. Ariba, the youngest of the three, is the most pathetic of Maha's children. She's dark skinned, and treated so brutally and horribly by Maha that Brown initially thought Ariba was a servant child, not a member of the family. Maha castigates her daughter for being out in the streets rather than being the virtual slave of the home, saying that she's "shameless," when she herself has led a life of selling her sex to men and is about to sell her own daughters. Shameless, indeed. As Maha grows older and gains weight (a common problem for the men and women in Heera Mandi, who eat just about everything fried), she's less able to earn a living on her own. It's shameful for a woman past the age of 30 to sell herself, and there is such an abundance of young flesh available that older women end up in Tibi Galli, selling themselves for cents. So Maha looks to her daughters to provide her with money for rent, electricity, food, and drugs. Lord knows she can't depend on Adnan, her "husband." Adnan has a "real" family that hates Maha. Maha is, in turn, obsessed with Adnan's wife, Mumtaz, and often makes dua's against her or goes to "magicians" to have black magic spells cast against her. The people of Heera Mandi are obsessed with spells and magic in a way that seems awfully shirkish. Over the years, Adnan descends into drug addiction, and spends more time at Maha's — not because he values her company as his second wife, but because she doesn't harangue him about drugs like his first wife does. How can she? Maha is addicted to cough syrups and sleeping pills, and will smoke hashish if she gets the chance. She's often passed out or unable to speak for days at a time, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Maha is a woman who is aware of the despair of her situation, which is why she does drugs. Although a lot of it is bound up in her own self-absorbtion and obsession with Adnan, she isn't completely without a motherly heart, weeping as it is time for her Nena to go "out there." Still, she is so brutally abusive towards Ariba — almost selling her as a slave at one point — that I find it hard to excuse her behavior by virtue of her birth. With the exception of Tariq the street-sweeper and Iqbal Hussain, a well known painter, the men we meet in Heera Mandi are like Adnan - or worse. They're johns who slobber over twelve year old girls, wife beaters, pimps, addicts, drug dealers, and cross-dressing prostitutes. In one passage, Brown writes about a visit to a nearby Bengali family, nothing that while she sits in the living room, male clients walk in, go to the back room with the women of the house, and come out five minutes later. Meanwhile, the husband sits there chewing his paan and dreaming of procuring more young girls for his stable. I may have disliked Maha intensely, but it is the men of Heera Mandi, of Lahore, of the Gulf States where the virgins are sold who have created Maha and the others like her. She writes about how the men of Heera Mandi consider the physical scars they carry from latam (they do it with knives and blades) a mark of honor, and I wondered if this is because they have no honor left in anything else. Many of the residents of Heera Mandi are Shi'a and influenced by a folk version of Sufism, and Brown devotes a portion of the book on their religious devotion. These are a people devoted to a folk Islam. They feel religion, they just don't follow it very well. Culture and business trump whatever the Qur'an says. Brown writes of visits to tombs, of altars, flags, and shrines. She writes about kissing tombs, beating ones chest, and sacred horse sweat. Maha and the women of Heera Mandi are engrossed by fantastical tales of Sufi pirs who fly, who grant miracles, and by extremely graphic representations of Karbala. But as for daily prayers, or reading the Qur'an we read nothing. What one comes away with, ultimately, is hopelessness. Brown, caught between her position as an academic and researcher and Maha's "sister" stands by as Nena is sold to a Gulf sheikh for a few thousand dollars and illegally transported out of the country to fulfill her "contract." If Brown, a woman of conscience who has written forcefully against the sexual trafficking of women, can't stop a child from being sold into sex, how can any of us? Brown documents the oppositon of the Heera Mandi women and their johns to condoms, and contrasts it with the rise of IV drug use in Lahore. Coupled with the fact that these girls are being flown into the Gulf to service the rich princes and migrant workers, as well as the fact that many of the johns are married, one feels like one has just read a recipe for a massive HIV outbreak in Pakistan. And no one is doing anything to stop it. Prostitution is called the world's oldest profession. As you read Brown's book, as she details the changing nature of the sex trade in Heera Mandi and elsewhere, you know that it's not going to go away anytime soon. To stop the girls and boys of Heera Mandi from being forced into the sex trade, to keep Nisha, Nena, and Ariba's daughters from following the same path, there would have to be a massive societal change in Pakistan, the Gulf, Thailand, England, and beyond. We all know that it's not going to happen anytime soon. So Brown's book stands as an engrossing portrait of a particular place and time in the world history of the commodification of women.
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What would you people say ???
I got this on my email address
Thanks Bewaqoof Bahi
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