(HOT SEASON : APRIL –JUNE 2000)
Lahore is a wonderful city with rich character and a worn charm. The Mughal Empire has bequeathed some glories to the modern city: the awe-inspiring Badshahi Masjid; the imposing Shahi Quila, or Royal Fort; the pretty Shalamar Gardens; and the now dilapidated tombs of Emperor Jahangir and his empress, Nur Jahan. Grand buildings inherited from the British raj sit in stately, shabby order on the broad, leafy Mall Road running through the center of town. New suburbs have grown—some affluent and some not. The streets and markets bustle and hum with life and the mosques and mausoleums are always busy. Best of all, though, is this ancient place—the Walled City—a quarter of a million people squeezed into a square mile of congested tenements and shops. It is the heart of Lahore and it carries the city’s soul.
Old Lahore can’t have changed much for centuries. The moat was filled in long ago and the defensive walls have gone, but the residents, constrained by ancient land boundaries and historical memory, continue to build their houses as if the walls still exist: an ageless and invisible presence. The thirteen gates into the city remain too, channeling pedestrians and traffic from the wide roads of contemporary Lahore into the narrow lanes and alleys of the Walled City. Rickshaws, horse-drawn carts called tangas, motorbikes, and small vans compete with pedestrians for space inside the walls. No vehicles of any kind enter the narrowest alleys. Neither does the sun. Only in the wider lanes and the bazaars does the sun shine directly on the ground. Most of the small passages running through the city lie in perpetual, dusty gloom.
Early morning is the best time to see the old city. During the hot season there are a couple of hours before the temperature soars and the lanes become too congested. The city wakes up and life unfolds in much the same way it must have done hundreds of years ago. The shopkeepers are busy: the butchers slice up chickens and goats, the tea shops open and the bakers prepare halva and fry puri for the first meal of the day. The fruit and vegetable sellers arrange their produce in a kaleidoscope of bright colors: plump aubergines, mooli, red carrots, sweet firm tomatoes, bundles of spinach, fresh okra, and leafy bunches of coriander and mint. Donkey carts rattle and creak down the galis, the narrow lanes, delivering goods: large round metal pots carrying milk from the villages; another piled high with sacks of flour and rice. A rickshaw whose only passengers are a dozen frantic hens stops and the goods are thrown, squawking, into the back room of a butcher’s shop. In the little workshops men and boys are already at work by seven o’clock, grinding bits of metal, heating syrupy liquids over open fires, sticking unidentified items together. It is gray, dirty, repetitive work and it lasts for most of their waking day.
Heera Mandi—the Diamond Market—is a crumbling ghetto of three- and four-storey buildings tucked into the northern corner of the Walled City, right next to one of the greatest forts of Mughal India and its biggest, most perfectly proportioned mosque. The old women living here say it has been the red-light district for as long as they can remember and it flourished long before the British arrived in the mid–nineteenth century. Heera Mandi, also known as Shahi Mohalla, was important then, and in its heyday it trained courtesans who won the hearts of emperors. The old ladies insist that things used to be different in those times: women like them were respected. They were artists, not gandi kanjri—not dirty prostitutes.
I have a room in the home of Shahi Mohalla’s most famous resident, Iqbal Hussain, a professor of fine art who paints portraits of the women of Heera Mandi. When I came to Lahore previously it was Iqbal who taught me most about prostitution in Pakistan and about life in the mohalla. He is an authority on the subject because he lives and breathes it: it’s in his blood. He is the son of a courtesan and has spent over half a century in Heera Mandi, growing up in this house that lies in the shadow of the mosque and in the longer shadow of social stigma. His friendship gives me some protection now that I’ve returned to stay in the mohalla and witness its life first-hand.
Iqbal’s house expands, month by month, as he scours the construction sites of the Walled City, collecting windows, doors, statues, and tiles from ancient, demolished havelis—the graceful traditional homes of the rich. He incorporates these fragments into his home, so it has become an eclectic fusion of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh design. My room, on the third floor of the house, overlooks the biggest courtyard in Heera Mandi. It’s the most beautiful room. It has three bay windows, each fitted with tiny panes of colored glass. The furniture and doors are of carved wood and the giant floor cushions, bolsters, and heavy curtains are made of golden and burgundy brocades. This room, like the whole house, has been assembled from pieces and images of old Lahore.
On the ground floor of the house Iqbal runs a restaurant where young couples meet for forbidden romantic liaisons during the afternoon. They sit in the back room and drink bottles of 7-Up in the summer and cups of coffee in the winter. The boys talk a lot and the girls giggle without reason or pause. In the evening most of the visitors are groups of well-heeled, arrogant men. At other times entire families come for an outing bringing Grandma, the babies, and assorted uncles and aunts. They dine at long tables and then traipse up to the roof to look at the Badshahi Masjid and the fort. As they pass my room I hear them puffing and complaining that the climb is steep and that there are a crippling number of steps.
There’s something exciting and illicit about coming here, something that makes respectable Pakistani pulses race. They park their air-conditioned cars right outside the restaurant, rush inside, and, after their meal, peep into the courtyard—into the dangerous scandal that is Heera Mandi.
From one side of Iqbal’s roof terrace you can see right into the heart of the marble-domed Badshahi mosque. All day and well into the night, straggly lines of barefoot men make their way to prayer across the vast quadrangle. At dusk, a couple of hundred boys and youths play cricket on the field by the mosque and men sit in circles deeply involved in a debate. A group of heroin addicts crouch at the edge of the grass where a copse of trees gives some shelter and privacy.
Lining the opposite horizon are the rooftops of the old city’s unplanned and ramshackle houses. Black Shia Muslim flags with red fringes are strung on rusty poles, and metal panja—the mystical hand that is the symbol of Shia Islam—rise high above the buildings. The roofs are a mess of steps, crumbling bricks, powdery cement, and terraces cluttered with all kinds of debris: piles of rugs, blankets, and bits of old furniture. The day’s washing is draped over walls and shutters, and here and there, almost lost in the chaos, are carved wooden doors, trellises, and ornate plasterwork—reminders of a more prosperous Heera Mandi when Lahore was still a multi-faith and multicultural city.
Forty years ago Heera Mandi was ornate: the old buildings lining the main roads had exquisitely worked jharoka—finely carved, wooden bay windows—and balconies. Today, very few remain. They have been torn down and replaced by ugly concrete blocks with simple wooden shutters or crude metal grills. The revamped buildings may be more practical to live in, but they have none of the allure of old Lahore.
Men rest on the roofs in the late sun. A few women sit with them, combing through their children’s hair in search of lice. Other children lean precariously out of windows and over walls, looking into the courtyard where a couple of fat, elderly women recline on charpoys, sagging, wood-framed rope beds, gossiping and chewing and spitting out their paan. A dozen little boys race around them playing games and fighting over a tricycle. These children live in the houses surrounding the courtyard. Half a century ago some of these buildings must have been grand residences, but today they have been divided and subdivided into one-, two-, or three-room apartments. Other houses that line the narrow alleys must always have been oppressive tenements with little light and no fresh air.
By dusk the rats run and jump in a fast-moving gray stream from one building to the next. The last of the light slips behind the domes of the masjid and the azan, the call to prayer, begins. A woman sings a ghazal in one of the houses opposite, her lovely voice reverberating around the courtyard until she too hears the azan and grows quiet. She sings every day in the shadows of her room, and we catch a glimpse of her beauty when she passes the window. Sometimes she is with her children and sometimes a man comes to visit. It’s always the same man, and when he beats her we pretend not to see.
I love this part of the day on Iqbal’s roof terrace, four storeys above the street. I sit in the twilight, jotting ideas and images into a big, untidy notebook. There is much to write about, so much to see and understand that I fear I’ll only be able to capture glimpses of this forbidden subculture. I’ve spent the last five years of my professional life as an academic researching prostitution and the trafficking of women in Asia. I’ve looked at human rights issues, debt bondage, and HIV/AIDS in locations as diverse as the clubs of Tokyo, the pedophile haunts of Phnom Penh, the girly bars of Bangkok and Manila, and the giant brothels of Mumbai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh, so large and heavily populated that they form whole subsectors of the city. Heera Mandi is like these places, and yet it is not. It still retains elements of India’s traditional pleasure quarters, but it is changing fast and I have come here to record these changes; a witness to the closing of an era. I’ll stay in the mohalla for a month or so, two or three times a year. Visiting for longer will be difficult because I have a job to do at home, teaching in a university, and I have three children: a boy and two pretty girls just the right age for the business. I can’t bring them to Heera Mandi to stay in the dubious safety of seclusion, so they’ll remain in England with my mother.
On the far side of the courtyard a couple of young women are folding dried bedsheets, laughing and moving playfully in opposite directions so that the sheets twist into a rough plait. I stop writing to watch them. Their younger brothers ignore them, too preoccupied with their kites and the rough skirmish to reach the highest point of the building. When the afternoon and evening weather is fine, dozens—sometimes hundreds—of kites flutter above the old city, tiny specks of color swooping and soaring in a dainty, pretty display. It looks such a gentle, well-mannered hobby, but in reality each kite flier is locked in deadly combat to send their rivals’ kites plummeting to earth.
On the roof of a neighboring house children somersault over a bulky roll of ancient bedding. An old lady—their grandmother perhaps—sits in a corner observing the game while patiently picking sticks and tiny stones out of the lentils she’s spread on a giant tray. The vision of Heera Mandi you see from the streets is only a partial view of the mohalla. There’s another world inside the buildings, the hidden world of the women, and there’s activity above the buildings too: the slower but ceaseless life of the inner city’s rooftops.
The courtyard wakes up at night and its lights remain on until dawn. Motorbikes roar in and out; the popcorn seller wheels in his musical cart; the pimps congregate on a couple of charpoys; a dog barks and triggers a dozen others. For women in this part of the city the world is largely nocturnal. They’re at home but they’re not asleep. They lie on mats or curled up on beds. They watch television, or listen to music while they eat and drink. They’re waiting. Every now and again a house closes its shutters. An hour or so later they will open again. Men walk around in small groups of two or three. They disappear into pitch-black alleys that are hard to negotiate even in the daytime. They must have been here before to be so sure of their step.
The front of Iqbal’s house is on Fort Road. The road runs along the perimeter of the mosque and the fort, and a hundred meters from his door is Roshnai Gate—the Gate of Splendor or the Gate of Light—so called because it used to be brilliantly illuminated. This is where the people of the old city—what the local people call the andron shaher, or inner city—enter the Hazoori Gardens. From the gardens they can turn into the entrance to the Badshahi Masjid or through the Alamgiri Gate into the fort. Once, this was the focus of power, not just of the city but of an entire empire too.
Lahore is the cultural center of the Punjab, one of South Asia’s most important and wealthy regions. The Punjab derives its name from the five rivers, or panch ab, which draw together to create an agricultural plain and a power base from which rulers have controlled large parts of the subcontinent. During the Mughal era, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Delhi, Agra, and Lahore were all, at different times, the imperial capital and the emperors constructed fabulous buildings in the cities to celebrate their religion, their power, and their women: the Taj Mahal in Agra; the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid in Delhi; and the Royal Fort and the Badshahi Masjid in Lahore. Mughal emperors paraded on their elephants through the Alamgiri Gate of Lahore’s fort, and their courtesans, their dancing girls, and their courtiers came this way too, along with merchants, jewelers, tailors, and scribes, after passing first through the sparkling Roshnai Gate: the great doorway linking the people with their ruler and their place of worship.
Roshnai Gate is not so glorious today, although I doubt whether life for those dancing girls slipping through the gate could ever have been quite as romantic as it is in legend. The most attractive might have won a place in a harem as one of an aristocrat’s many concubines, but for the others, life must have been much the same as it is now: a short life of flattery and a much longer life in retirement.
Elephants no longer wait outside the Alamgiri Gate: only cars and vans transporting tourists. But our side of Roshnai Gate—the inside—must have looked little different a century ago. It’s a lot more polluted now, and there are more motorized rickshaws than carriages, but the snack wallas are still there with their carts, still alternating their treats according to the season: syrupy sugar cane and mangoes cooled in ice-filled buckets in summer and hot, charred, sweet potatoes to warm us in the winter chill. The corner stalls sell Coke and Sprite today rather than delicious sherbet, the old-fashioned sweetened, diluted fruit juices, but the Al Faisal Hotel, just next door, serves up good traditional fare cooked in big pots over a fire. The favorite dishes are dal, vegetables, lamb or goat in a tasty curry gravy, or salan, and wonderful thin unleavened breads called rotiya. The baker mixes flour and water in metal buckets, rolling and slapping soft balls of dough into rounds that are pressed against the sides of a kiln-shaped oven only to be flipped out a few moments later, puffed and scorched at the edges, and so hot you can’t hold them. Most of the customers eat on the premises, sitting at trestle tables inside the open-fronted restaurant. Almost all the diners are men, but there’s a little corner for women too with a flowered curtain that can be pulled around so they can eat in the comfort of purdah, seclusion. It looks like a shower cubicle.
It’s very rare for the flowery curtain to be used because there are hardly any young women about. The few who are in the streets are veiled and walking fast. Girls and women between the ages of 12 and 50 stay inside their homes for their protection and to preserve their honor. Most of their lives are spent in a handful of rooms. They don’t even go out to do the daily shopping: it’s the boys and men who run errands.
Heera Mandi is an excellent place to buy food and the tea shops and restaurants are invariably packed with men buying cups of sweet milky tea, lamb kebabs, irresistible barbequed chicken, freshly baked breads, and crisply fried snacks that are mouth-wateringly tasty. Such delectable snacks also have an insidious and profound effect on the contours of the body. The poor of all ages are thin and pinched, but the more affluent young men who live in Heera Mandi, or who visit it for fun, are strikingly handsome: dark, with strong features and a confident manner. By the time they are 30, they are stout. They’ve had too many of those fried snacks. By 40, many have round, puffy faces and waddle like heavily pregnant women.
Fort Road turns by Roshnai Gate and runs along the wall of the fort. Workshops and garages cluster here: small colorless places where they fix rickshaws, motorbikes, and cycles. A dozen barbers squat on the pavement giving haircuts and shaves with lethally sharp razors. A few specialize in ear treatments and use miniature spoons on long thin handles to furrow around and extract clods of orange earwax from clients who seem to enjoy the dig.
The character of the road changes farther along: the shops are bigger and more prosperous. In the afternoons, one of the bakeries sells the most perfect samosas and a delicious, aromatic bean soup thick with finely chopped coriander. Customers form an untidy queue and then dash home with their just-fried samosas, the oil from the pastry soaking through the paper wrapping and the hot soup slopping in knotted plastic bags. Heera Mandi Chowk—chowk meaning intersection—lies at the top of the road, and from here, you can move quickly to more respectable areas through a road lined with shops that make and sell traditional musical instruments and dental surgeries that advertise their services with large, macabre, hand-painted illustrations of dissected mouths and heads.
These days, Heera Mandi’s main street is full of tea shops, restaurants, and small rooms with pool tables or pinball machines with multicolored flashing lights. By Tarranum Chowk a cinema promotes its films with pictures of plump, pretty girls on a big colorful billboard. It’s the busiest, most congested part of the mohalla; in front of the cinema, speeding rickshaws, carts, motorbikes, and pedestrians are all pulled into a frightening vortex of spinning bodies, donkeys, and metal, only to be spat out again, usually unscathed, to continue their journey through Heera Mandi.
These streets are never quiet and the galis and alleyways that criss-cross them are rarely empty, even at night. Especially at night. During the day Shahi Mohalla’s rundown streets look like any other part of the Walled City, but at dusk, this part of old Lahore transforms itself. The restaurants are packed. The revelers—all men—saunter hand in hand. It is noisy, lively, and exciting. Men jostle in the alleyways and the bazaar is jammed with traffic. Popcorn and ice cream wallas push musical carts through the crowds, maneuvering around potholes and mounds of rank garbage. The walls of an office at the corner of the main street are plastered with photographs of actresses. It’s not clear what services the office is providing, but it’s doing a brisk trade. There is a sign in the window in Urdu, and an attempt at an English translation, which reads, “Best Music Gorup—Eny Fungton.”
By nightfall a handful of middle-aged women sit by open doorways discreetly looking for clients. Up above street level and above the still-closed performance rooms, younger women move on dimly lit balconies. This is where the real business of Heera Mandi is done. A single young woman walks in the street—a tall, striking figure swinging through the crowd with an exaggerated sexy walk. She’s not veiled and she’s wearing a red shalwaar and a red-and-white flowered kameez. Tossing her hair and holding her head high, she is bold and confident. I look at her again and understand why: she’s not a woman, she’s a khusra—half man, half woman.
In the day you would never guess that Heera Mandi is a red-light district in which hundreds of women live and work. Prostitution is illegal in Pakistan and so is all sex outside marriage. Zina—extramarital sex—is punishable under Islamic law by stoning to death or by a prison sentence and a brutal whipping. Women who sell sex are the lowest, most vilified women on earth. But every day, for an hour on either side of midnight, Heera Mandi makes a concession to lewdness. A couple of dozen shops open their shutters and the women inside aren’t veiled. They wear elaborate, brightly colored dresses, great quantities of makeup, and sit on sofas and chairs that are draped in shiny satin covers. Their smiles are strangely stiff, but that’s because they can’t see into the darkness of the streets. Expensive cars pull up. Sometimes the men come in to buy a dancing show. The shutters are closed with a loud clatter, the sofas are pushed against a wall, cold drinks are brought for the men, white sheets are spread on the floor, and the musicians sitting in the corner of the room begin to play their harmoniums, tablas, and dholaks. These are the kothas, or performance rooms, of Heera Mandi, and they are where the best courtesans of the mohalla have traditionally made their name.
Maha
Maha lives with her five children in an apartment on the second floor of a house lining the big, open courtyard. I’ve caught fleeting glimpses of her many times from my windows. Today, she’s called me in to visit and is curled up on a surprisingly expensive-looking sofa. The scene could be respectably middle-class but for the stench from the drains and the rubbish strewn on the grim spiral staircase leading to her rooms. She’s lovely, with a natural poise, and her long thick hair is hennaed to a dark, glossy red. She’s plump but still graceful, and her dancing is superb. Ten years ago, before the pounds piled on, she must have been astonishingly beautiful. Now she’s in her midthirties and the mother of too many babies. Her children are delightful but they’ve been a disaster for Maha’s career: they’ve not done her figure or her finances any favors.
Her mother and sister live downstairs. Neither woman is blessed with Maha’s beauty. The older woman sits at the window for most of the day, grinning and chewing paan; she’s not always friendly. Maha says they nag her because she’s no longer bringing in money. Her mother insists that it’s such a waste for Maha to stay in her rooms when she retains enough beauty to enchant the customers in the bazaar.
Maha refuses to dance in the kothas of Heera Mandi because she says that Adnan, her husband, will disapprove. Maha is Adnan’s second wife and more like a mistress than a wife. Muslim men can have up to four wives at any one time and these can easily be replaced through talaq—a quick divorce. Adnan has withdrawn most of his financial support from Maha and she thinks the divorce will follow shortly.
Maha is lucky to have a legal marriage: most women in Heera Mandi never experience such a thing. They still, though, call their clients shohar, husband, because otherwise it would mean confessing to a criminal act. Indeed, a very large proportion of the women incarcerated in Pakistani jails are there because they’ve been convicted of having sex with someone who is not their husband. Not surprisingly, there is not an equivalent number of men imprisoned for having sex with a woman who is not their wife.
Adnan disapproves of many things. Five years ago things were different. He was a successful businessman who installed Maha in a nice house outside the walls of the old city. She has two children by him: Mutazar, who is 4 and the only boy in the family, and Sofiya who is 18 months old. Now, though, her happy life is changing. Adnan is growing tired of Maha and tired of supporting her and the children. Maha weeps and her nose turns pink. “Adnan loved me but after I had so many babies he told me to get out and go back to Heera Mandi. He doesn’t love me anymore because I’m fat. I’m old and finished.” She’s probably right. Maha’s story is a common one: pretty women from Heera Mandi win a temporary reprieve from the brothel in their twenties only to return in their thirties. Maha has come back to the place where she was born and has always belonged.
We watch a video shot at the wedding of one of Adnan’s nieces, that is, a niece from his official, respectable family. Maha wasn’t invited to the wedding, but she has made up for her absence at the auspicious occasion by viewing the video so often that it’s almost worn out. She knows every frame. “There’s Adnan,” she shouts, pointing at the television. Adnan is twenty years older than her and seems a friendly kind of chap, stooping slightly and grinning hesitantly at the camera. Mumtaz, his wife, has a blank-eyed smile and a stunning collection of jewels.
Maha pauses the video so we can analyze the guests in greater detail. “Mumtaz doesn’t have a nice nose,” she states. “If a woman has a bad nose she’s no good. And her eyes are not as nice as mine, are they? She’s forty-three. She thinks she’s a sexy lady.” She begins to laugh but it tails off into more crying. I agree: Mumtaz is neither as beautiful nor as young as Maha.
Maha’s new, much inferior house has two rooms. One of these small rooms is dominated by an ancient air cooler that expels a blast of air so ferocious it almost rips the hair out of your scalp. It creates even more noise than it does breeze, and whenever guests arrive during the hot season we are forced to shout over the clattering and whirring. The other piece of furniture is a mattress on which I spend hours watching the life of the courtyard as Sofiya, Maha’s tiny daughter, who is all fat little thighs and snotencrusted nose, tramples over me, sharing my drinks, chewing the straws until they are useless, and then finding bits of old food on the mattress to put into my mouth.
The courtyard is a lively market and a constant flow of salespeople pass through. Sherbet sellers crush ice and mix it with artificial fruit syrups to drink on hot days, and a man with a pushcart sells every type of cheap clip, elastic band, and plastic accessory that has ever been designed for ladies’ hair. Fairground rides on squeaky metal wheels rattle into the courtyard: swings and miniature Ferris wheels, all trailed by a long line of excited children. A good trade is done in secondhand clothes imported from abroad and heaped on carts. Some of the other traders carry their wares around with them: two dozen plastic bomber jackets; an armful of enormous cream-colored cotton gloves that will fit no one; and a bamboo pole strung with garlands of flowers. The garlands are fragile and beautiful, but they last only a few hours before wilting and disintegrating into a handful of delicate, brown-edged petals. Some are made from gulab: pretty pink flowers that look like wild thornless roses. Others are made from motiya: white flowers, like a tiny bud, with an unforgettable, heady fragrance. Maha keeps the garlands in little dishes in her room to scent the air.
Some of the visitors to the courtyard are selling services. The malish karne wallas sell massages, advertising their skills by rattling bottles of oils on a metal tray. The clinking bottles sound like castanets. A barefoot man with a big gray beard sings religious songs praising Allah and asking the good householders for a few rupees. He has a strong, distinctive voice and he tours the courtyard every day or two singing the same tunes. The occasional rupee note flutters down to him from a window and he moves on, his voice becoming fainter and fainter as he sings his way down the gali.
Maha and her daughters are attentive hostesses, forever presenting me with a succession of snacks: namkeen, a spicy fried snack of wheat, nuts, and dal; potato chips; green mango with chili; biscuits; 7-Up and Coca-Cola. In Muslim societies it is customary to show kind and generous hospitality to guests, and visitors to Pakistan will never go hungry. The welcome is always warm, and the poorest household will give their best, even if this means that they themselves will go without. It’s a generosity I often find embarrassing, sometimes because I know my hosts cannot afford such kindness and sometimes because I visit lots of houses each day and am obliged to eat in every one. The food tastes wonderful but everything is fried. The meat swims in ghee and the fizzy drinks taste sweeter than at home. I put on seven pounds each month I stay here. No wonder the women of Heera Mandi look like they do: young women here are lithe and pretty, but fifteen years later most are obese. Lives bound to a few rooms, an unhealthy diet, and a complete absence of exercise results in atrophied muscles and generous layers of fat.
Maha and her relatives are interested in my size and surprised that I’m 36 years old and have three children. “Where is your belly?” they ask. “What happened to your hips? Your hips are very small.” Maha and her cousin look at me with compassion because it’s a well-known fact in Shahi Mohalla that men prefer women with ample hips.
Maha’s two older daughters, Nisha and Nena, are playing in the room. They are children from Maha’s first long-term relationship. When she was 15 she was taken as a mistress by a sayeed. A sayeed is a Muslim who can trace his lineage to the family of the prophet Mohammed. Maha thinks her relationship with a sayeed endowed her with honor and she repeats his full name over and over again so I can absorb its significance. Some of his social capital has rubbed off on her, and she’s immensely proud that her children have an important father. It endows her with status by association: these children haven’t been fathered by an unknown client.
Long before the sayeed, Maha was connected with other distinguished men, the kind of men that only the most beautiful and accomplished dancing girls can claim as patrons.
“My very first husband was very important and very old,” she gushes. “He was Sheikh Zayed. He married my sister, Fouzia, a few weeks before he married me, but he was angry because she didn’t bleed.”
Poor Fouzia was sent home in disgrace. The sheikh liked virgins, and young ones at that. As compensation, Maha was dispatched to Karachi to meet the great sheikh.
“He paid so much for me, two lakh”—200,000 rupees ($3,372)—“and I was only twelve.” Maha regards it as an honor, and maybe it was: Sheikh Zayed was the ruler of Abu Dhabi and the president of the United Arab Emirates.
She can’t remember much about the event because she was sedated, but she knows she wasn’t with him for long: perhaps only an hour. Then she was taken to another man—someone much younger and much more handsome. He liked her a lot and kept her in his bed for a month. She laughs whenever she repeats the young sheikh’s words. “He told me, ‘You are a very sexy girl.’ ”
Nisha and Nena don’t share Maha’s sensuality or her magnetic sexuality: they are eclipsed by her—pale and pretty, half-grown shadows of their mother. Nisha, the older girl, is tall, thin, and quietly angry—laughing and yet simmering with a resentment I can’t quite place. Her younger sister is softer, more compliant, her wide, long-lashed eyes frequently cast down with a childish shyness. She is very kind, very dutiful. One day, when I felt ill, Nena insisted on fanning me as I fell asleep on the mattress. When I woke, two hours later, she was still there, still smiling and wafting the fan.
I can’t imagine that these girls will make successful prostitutes. Their fate, though, has been sealed from birth. They are barely literate. They don’t go to school. In fact, they don’t go anywhere. They spend their lives in these two dark rooms in the corner of the courtyard, tripping down the spiral staircase, hovering around the entrance to the alleyway, and occasionally going in a rickshaw to the bazaar to buy food and clothes. That is the extent of their world.
In the life cycle of traditional Heera Mandi, Maha’s family would be poised to transform itself. The tawaifs, or courtesans, of old Lahore withdrew from selling sex in their early thirties because there was no longer any real and profitable demand for them. Only desperate common prostitutes continued selling services into middle age. Refined courtesans with honor to preserve went into graceful retirement and managed the careers of their daughters and nieces. A girl who gave birth to a daughter when she was 15 would have someone to replace her in the business when she was 30. Giving birth to a girl was like producing your own personal pension plan because a daughter’s youth and beauty sustained her family. This transition has not yet happened in Maha’s household, but for Nena and Nisha—now 12 and 14—there will be no escape from the bazaar. In Pakistan, marriage is still most women’s only option in life, and, unluckily for Nisha and Nena, no one will seriously consider marrying the daughter of a prostitute. As Maha so often reminds me, the daughter of a dancing girl always becomes a dancing girl. They pass the occupation and the stigma from one generation to the next like a segment of DNA.
Girls in Heera Mandi grow up in a completely different environment from ordinary Pakistani girls. In the mohalla, female beauty and sexuality are openly celebrated. From the time they are babies, girls witness a stream of men coming to the doors of their mothers and aunts and know that, when they grow a little older, these men will visit them too. Not all live easily with this, but most do: there is no alternative, and within the enclosed world of the mohalla, it is not considered wrong or bad. Indeed, those who perform the task well, expensively and with dignity, are lauded and envied.
Maha spreads herself out on the mattress in a lilac shalwaar kameez. Even when she is sitting down, she is loud and energetic. Adnan is about to visit and she’s preparing herself with concentrated enthusiasm. She has sprayed perfumed deodorant everywhere, drawn thick black lines around her eyes, brushed her hair, and colored her lips in vivid fuchsia. In between the preparations she shouts at the children, cuffs her son on the head, and complains that Adnan’s scheming wife—his official wife—is sabotaging her place in his heart.
She orders the children out of the room, takes my hand, and whispers, “Mumtaz, that bitch woman, said to Adnan, ‘Why do you like Maha when she has had so many children? She is big…big.’” Maha gestures to her groin, makes a wide stretching motion with her hands and performs some realistic grunts to mimic giving birth. She’s serious: in Heera Mandi having children is bad for business, at least in the short term. Babies prove your secondhand status and suggest that you have a slacker, and cheaper, pelvic floor. The most successful of the elite courtesans may never have children because of the impact on their figures, and in old age they will live off their savings and the earnings of their nieces.
Maha hisses at me that Mumtaz is keeping her husband at home by offering him an unlimited diet of oral and anal sex. Maha makes clear that doing it in the bund (anal intercourse) is something she neither likes nor is capable of performing.
I ask her how she can be so sure that Mumtaz is offering these sexual favors.
“She’s a Pathan,” Maha shouts. “They all do it.”
In Heera Mandi, Pathans—also known as Pashtuns or Pakhtuns—are treated like a joke, and they are reputed to have a fondness for anal sex. Pathans come from a tribal society spanning the borders of north Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those in Swat in north Pakistan practice strict seclusion of their women. A girl is said to enter her husband’s house in a bridal dress and to leave it in a coffin. No girls and young women are visible in the villages and towns of the area because they are all inside their homes. Outside, in the men’s world, young men and women have no contact, and in the absence of female sexual partners, frustrated men turn to teenage boys and sometimes to those who are even younger. Beardless boys with soft skin are highly prized. Until very recently it was a sign of status for a man to keep several bedagh (passive male partners) to cater to his sexual needs: it was considered entirely normal. Even today, most young men’s first sexual experiences will be with a bedagh or with a friend, and sex with boys continues to be considered less demanding and more pleasurable than sex with women.
The next day Maha’s eye is swollen and bruised. Adnan paid her a visit but the eyeliner and lilac shalwaar kameez were wasted on him. She hangs over a bowl bathing her face with iced water and cries, “I want to die. I want to cover myself in kerosene and light a match. Then I’ll die and be happy.” She scrambles around the room hunting for matches only to find that there’s barely a drop of kerosene left in the plastic bottle. She has no intention of carrying out the threat, but she wants some sympathy. For the whole afternoon she sits by the window holding a tissue to her eye and waiting for Adnan to drive into the courtyard.
When he doesn’t arrive we decide to search for him. Maha spends a long time disguising the bruises before we run to find a rickshaw, our veils flapping and our sandals slowing our progress. Adnan owns extensive property in Lahore. It’s not prime real estate, but there’s a lot of it: streets and streets of lower-middle-class housing and small businesses. Maha points out the house she lived in before she was packed off back to Heera Mandi. It’s a fairly ordinary-looking place but it’s a palace in comparison with her home in the courtyard. We spot Adnan ambling along the street, and Maha tells the rickshaw walla to stop. Maha keeps glancing at herself in a mirror fixed inside the rickshaw, adjusting her hair and the drape of her dupatta on her head and shoulders. She pleads with Adnan and then argues with him because he’s wearing a heavy gold chain that his wife has bought for him. Adnan smiles and laughs as if it’s a big joke. “Tell him I love him,” she says to me in strangled sobs. “Tell him his wife is old and I am more beautiful. Tell him sex with me is better than with Mumtaz.”
Children of the Mohalla
I haven’t seen Maha and the children for three weeks. They’ve moved into a new house. It’s a modern place, but the bedroom has no windows, and although there’s a bathroom with indoor plumbing, the room has no ventilation and there are frequent floods because the plumbing disconnects itself and water from the sink and the bath gushes out onto the floor. Going to the toilet is like going paddling. The new residence does have one advantage: Maha runs her fingers lovingly over a couple of plastic cupboards and sighs, “It’s an American kitchen.” This means you have somewhere to put your pans and bits of food rather than simply piling them on the floor.
There’s been a marked change in Nisha, the oldest girl. She’s much thinner and is lying curled up on the bed shivering and looking hot. She rolls off and staggers into the other room giving me a wan smile.
Maha is in such deep and angry despair that she doesn’t notice.
“Some days Adnan doesn’t visit and I’ve no money,” she complains. “He gives me three hundred rupees [$5] on the days he does come and sometimes there’s not enough money to feed the children. I can’t go on like this.” She stomps around the room shouting. “I keep praying for that bitch Mumtaz to die, but nothing happens. So I’m going to Bahrain with a group. I’ll earn lots of money. I’ll sing and men will look at me and give me jewelry. I can earn two or three hundred thousand rupees in three months. When I come back I can give my children plenty of food and have a happy family.” She thinks about this in silence for a while and adds, “But then Adnan won’t love me because other men will have looked at me and he’ll be jealous.”
She’s caught in a dilemma: she doesn’t know whether to keep the little security she has by staying with the erratic and unloving Adnan or strike out on her own and reenter the Heera Mandi bazaar. Both alternatives are doomed.
Adnan has arrived at Maha’s house and some of the family are getting a decent meal of roti, chicken, and salad. Adnan and Maha sit on the mattress eating with Sofiya and Mutazar. Maha’s children by other fathers wait in the other room, peeping around the door. There are eating hierarchies in many Pakistani families, and the poorer the family the more strictly these are enforced because there’s less food to go around. Senior males are given priority and those lowest in the pecking order eat last: they have what’s left when everyone else has finished. Females—especially children—are low in this hierarchy and a woman’s children from a previous liaison are as good as invisible.
Adnan leaves and Nisha sits next to me on the bed bowed over her meal and picking at bits. She shreds her roti, makes it into a little pile, and pushes the chicken around the plate. She has no appetite at all. She walks, sunken-chested, into the bathroom, and I turn to Maha.
“What’s the matter with her?”
Maha shakes her head. “TB, I think, for the past three or four months.”
“Has she been to the doctor?”
Nisha shuffles back in and Maha motions me to be quiet. She whispers, “One visit to the doctor costs two hundred rupees and then there are more visits and more. What do I do: give her medicine or food? Adnan won’t help.”
“Mutazar went to the hospital just a few weeks ago,” I comment. We all went with him when he had some stitches removed from a wound on his finger.
“Mutazar is Adnan’s son and Nisha is someone else’s child.”
Nisha’s pale blue polyester kameez is hanging off her shoulder blades. Her limbs are bent and she can’t straighten one of her arms. She pulls up her sleeve to show us a swollen, deformed elbow. I don’t understand how Adnan can refuse to pay for her treatment or how her mother could have ignored her condition for so long. But Maha is preoccupied with her husband; her concern for their relationship is her whole life and her main, sometimes only, topic of conversation. The children she had with Adnan are valued because they tie him to her. The children she had with other men do not enhance the marriage: they serve only to complicate it because the children’s food has to be bought with Adnan’s money.
Maha claims that Adnan doesn’t care much about his stepchildren. He says they are destined to be kanjri in the brothels of Heera Mandi. I think he’s being optimistic. The only place that Nisha seems destined for is the graveyard.
Maha has two children who no longer live with her. I discovered their existence when we were looking at some old family photos. I can’t tell whether Maha’s earlier silence on the matter is because she doesn’t care or cares too much. She had four children with her sayeed husband: two sons in addition to Nisha and Nena. When he abandoned her, Maha’s husband took the boys and left her with the girls. The sons had some value, whereas the daughters were going to be prohibitively expensive to marry off: they would have to be given an enormous dowry to compensate for the shame of their origins, and even then, no decent man would consider them.
Maha’s family has such complex dynamics. The two youngest children—Adnan’s children—have the lion’s share of love and attention. They are fed and washed and treated with far greater care than their half-sisters. Mutazar, the son, is especially spoilt and frequently indulged. The two older girls receive poorer treatment and their clothes are nowhere near as new or as clean.
There is yet another child: Ariba. She’s 11. When I first met the family I thought she was a servant or an impoverished friend of one of the girls because she looks very different from her two older sisters. Nisha and Nena are fair-skinned and fine-featured; Nena possesses the large, lustrous almond eyes of classical Indian beauties. Ariba, in contrast, has dark skin—considered ugly and very low class in this society—and her clothes are ragged and far too big. Her mother brushes her three other daughters’ hair but she rarely brushes Ariba’s.
At lunch today Ariba stood on the periphery looking as if she was in the wrong place. Perhaps she was: there was no plate for her. No one had told her to go away, but she was lingering, clearly excluded. She found a space on the corner of the mattress and ate bits of naan that Mutazar, her little brother, threw to her. There was virtually no meat left and no salad.
Ariba is learning how to be tough and streetwise. She spends a lot of time outside the house. This is unusual for a girl of 11 in Heera Mandi, but Maha doesn’t seem to care about the dangers she faces. Ariba annoys me but I am also desperately sorry for her. She tries to steal from me whenever she can, but she’s an inept pickpocket: I can feel her scratching around in my bag for money. Sometimes she throws a towel or a blanket on the floor between us so that she can scrabble underneath it to find my purse. When I turn to look at her in the midst of this furtive searching, she smiles fulsomely but nervously. She was successful once: she took seven hundred rupees ($12). I thought of telling her mother, but I knew she would get a brutal beating and her status as the pariah of the family would be confirmed. I was sad she did this, because if she had asked me, I would have gladly given her the money. But Ariba would never have asked. She would never have assumed that she could be given anything. She gets nothing without a fight.
After days of persuasion and negotiation Nisha is finally going to the doctor’s. The visit is being treated like a family outing, and everyone squeezes into a two-seater rickshaw for the journey. The clinic isn’t far from the house. It caters to the women of Heera Mandi, and to the poor of the inner city.
The consultation process is confusing. Dr. Qazi, a dour, high-speed medic, holds his surgery in the middle of an ailing throng. On the right-hand side of his desk are the women, most of whom are hidden behind a curtain. On the left-hand side are the men. Patients stand or sit in a queue that moves closer and closer to him so that, in the last stages, they sit next to his desk and can listen to, and participate in, the consultation offered to the patients immediately before them. It costs thirty rupees (about fifty-eight cents), but for this you get to hear about everyone else’s problems as well as being given advice about your own.
Many of the patients are in desperate need of a miracle. Most are malnourished. The doctor’s office is filled with limp, fat-bellied babies with oversized heads. The women patients over the age of 20 are divided into two groups: the shockingly thin and the seriously obese.
A frail girl is carried in and lies coughing blood onto the floor of an anteroom. She’s about 15 or 16. Her skin is like parchment pulled tight over slender bones. Her mother stands next to the bed holding the girl’s tiny baby. Dr. Qazi pays a fleeting visit and says that nothing can be done. The doctor’s office empties immediately and the patients reassemble as an impromptu and uninvited audience to watch the girl die.
Once the death has been observed to everyone’s morbid satisfaction the spectators vanish and rejoin the line waiting to see Dr. Qazi. Word goes around that it was tuberculosis. No one is surprised. Tuberculosis is one of the biggest killers in the developing world, and in places like Shahi Mohalla, it is approaching an epidemic. It’s highly contagious, and a large proportion of the Pakistani population is infected, but it only wreaks havoc on those whose bodies are already weakened. It is, overwhelmingly, a disease of poverty, poor nutrition, and unhealthy, cramped homes.
Nisha is petrified—she thinks she’s going to share the same fate as the coughing girl. Something else is upsetting her too. Perhaps the sight of the blood-stained floor has stirred memories of her childhood. She’s sitting in Dr. Qazi’s line, holding my hand and telling me about her father. “He hit my mother all the time. She was so frightened. He took her jewelery and gave it to another woman in Heera Mandi. My father punched her and kicked her in the stomach, and there was blood everywhere and the baby died.”
Maha had been five months into the pregnancy when the kicking induced her miscarriage. Her husband had grown tired of her himself, and even though he’d decided to profit from pimping her out, he still became angry when the clients made her pregnant. After some practice, he developed such a talent for do-it-yourself abortion that perhaps Maha was relieved when he abandoned them and they had to find their own way home to the comparative safety of Heera Mandi.
Nisha is trembling as we take her for her x-ray, but she manages to forget her fears in the excitement. Maha and the children want to enjoy the entertainment. “It’s expensive,” Maha exclaims as all the family form a scrum around the X-ray machine to get maximum value for money.
“She has advanced tuberculosis of the joints.” Dr. Qazi’s diagnosis is swift and he doesn’t feel the need to explain anything about her condition or the danger of contagion. He hands Maha a list of medicines and tells her to come back at some unspecified date. “She will recover,” he tells me in English, “but she has to take the medicine and to eat well and rest. The most important thing,” he stresses, “is that the parents take time to care for her.” This last form of treatment is probably the most unrealistic prescription he could offer.
The Tawaif
Places like Heera Mandi are not new, and dancing and sex have been linked on the Indian subcontinent for millennia. For centuries, women like Maha have lived by selling their beauty, youth, and skills. Maha is from the Kanjar, one of the region’s prostitute groups. Her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother were all in the same profession: part of the generations of women who were born, raised, and trained to please men.
Pakistan’s culture is a hybrid, a fusion of two great civilizations that converged in northern India: the ancient civilization of the Hindus and the newer civilization of the Muslim invaders, who ruled over large parts of India from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. What we see today in Lahore are the remnants of Islamic and Hindu social practices that produced the tawaif—the courtesan.
Three thousand years ago religious prostitution flourished in Hindu temples throughout the subcontinent. Pubescent girls were married to gods and dedicated to temples where they performed ritual dances. The temples provided land grants to support the performers, but many women also had to supplement their income by selling sex. In time their daughters, too, were dedicated to the deity and so the cycle was perpetuated. This is not an archaic practice: its legacy continues even today in the devadasi tradition of India.
The Hindu caste system ranked people according to their occupation and ritual purity. Hundreds of subcastes—of traders, artisans, warriors, and priests—were arranged in an inflexible hierarchy. Social status was determined by birth: the son of a potter became a potter, the children of sweepers became sweepers, and the daughters of dancers and prostitutes inevitably followed their mothers into prostitution. Many of India’s entertainers—the singers, dancers, minstrels, and bards of the subcontinent—were from the lower castes and often associated with prostitution. Women who performed in public were the antithesis of respectable Indian women, idealized as secluded wives and daughters. But although they were born into these disreputable castes and destined to be entertainers from the moment of their birth, they didn’t prostitute themselves indiscriminately: their families were often retained by the aristocracy and sex was only part of the service they provided to their patrons.
Dedicating girls to temples is now very rare in northern India, where hundreds of years of Muslim rule destabilized the administration of Hindu temples and, in some cases, led to their destruction. But the system of Hindu prostitute castes has continued to flourish even in Muslim areas. Islam does not endorse a caste system—in fact, it promotes the equality of all men—but when Islam expanded into South Asia, it adapted to the Indian social environment and absorbed many of the basic principles of the caste system. Some of the Hindu prostitutes converted to the religion of the Muslim conquerors, but even so, they remained very near the bottom of a complex system of social stratification. Today, descendants of the Kanjar—a Muslim entertainer and prostitute group with obscure and vilified origins—live and work in Lahore’s Heera Mandi.
Maha dances slowly at first, concentrating on her footwork, her feet striking flat on the floor and her ankle bells chinking in a slow, rhythmic pattern. She smiles, lifts an eyebrow, and swings her hair so it falls in a silky curtain over her face. The music changes tempo, the pace of the tablas accelerating, and Maha motions her daughters to turn up the volume of the tape deck. She’s dancing energetically now, her feet moving faster, her arms held high. Even though it’s the middle of the night, it’s still oppressively hot in her cramped rooms and, as she dances, the fabric of her green shalwaar kameez adheres to her back. Her face and neck are beaded with sweat, tendrils of hair sticking to her skin. She is breathing fast and excitedly—transformed. Maha loves dancing: it has been her life, her passion, and part of her livelihood since she was a child.
Orthodox Islam forbids singing and dancing on the grounds that it may lead to a loss of self-control and then to debauchery and fornication. The Mughals, the Muslim rulers who controlled large parts of India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, did not see entertainment this way. Dancing and singing were considered to be forms of refined culture, and patronage of the arts was a symbol of Mughal status. The emperors employed thousands of artists and took kathak, a dance-theater form long associated with religious themes, out of the Hindu temples, changing its emphasis so that it became the favorite dance of the Muslim imperial courts. When Maha dances in her room in Heera Mandi, she performs a debased but still recognizable version of kathak.
Kathak is sublimely elegant, apparently effortless, and rigorously, punishingly difficult. The accomplished kathak dancer’s feet, hands, and eyes must be tightly coordinated. Her hands have to be trained to twist, first the right hand and then the left—palms up, palms down—as the dancer steps forward and backward, then side to side, her head and eye movements flawlessly synchronized. The turning of a circle must be deft and seamless with the correct number of steps and an exacting, faultless motion of the arms. Her fingers must be perfectly and delicately controlled. It is a highly developed skill that is won only with long and patient practice. No one in Heera Mandi is trained in kathak dancing today. It takes years to master; it is expensive to employ a dance teacher; and audiences no longer understand the complexities of a dance form that is supposed to tell a lengthy story. Maha had only a limited training in kathak, and her daughters have had none. The older Kanjar women say it is sad; they say you have to go to Delhi to learn kathak properly.
Some of the essence of kathak has been incorporated into the world of Indian films, mixing it with a less refined, more accessible form of dancing and a good measure of Bollywood glitz so that it appeals to a popular audience. It is the same in Heera Mandi. Maha’s dancing is elegant, but also lewd by Pakistani standards; her hand movements are sensuous, she kisses her fingers, lifting them into the air, stamping her feet, grinding her hips, and smiling suggestively. She doesn’t have the discipline of the classical performers but she is still a proud heir to a precious tradition.
Anarkali—Pomegranate Blossom
The Mughals originated in central Asia, drawing their customs from an Islamic world in which women were secluded chattels and rulers maintained enormous zenana (female quarters) in their courts and palaces. The emperor had absolute control over his wives and concubines. Singers and dancers performed exclusively for the royal household, and beautiful dancing girls became concubines of the emperor and lived for the rest of their lives in vast hareems. Emperor Akbar kept five thousand women in his hareem and Emperor Arungzeb is said to have kept even more.
The Punjab Civil Secretariat in Lahore is a strange building that has had many incarnations. It was originally a tomb built in the early seventeenth century, then it became a residence, and for a time it was a British church. Today it is an archive housing books, city records, a few old maps, and, tucked into a corner, a white marble sarcophagus engraved in intricate detail. A little notice declares it to be the tomb of Anarkali—Pomegranate Blossom—the nickname given to Nadira Begam, who was a favorite dancing girl in the hareem of Emperor Akbar. Legend says that Anarkali fell in love with the emperor’s son, Prince Salim, and that while the emperor glanced in a mirror he caught a glimpse of the lovers’ longing gaze. In a fit of jealous rage, Akbar ordered Anarkali to be buried alive. The heartbroken prince never forgot Anarkali, and when his father died and Salim became Emperor Jahangir, he had a marble sarcophagus made for her. On one side of the sarcophagus are engraved the words “The profoundly enamoured Salim, son of Akbar,” together with a Persian verse, which declares:
Ah! Could I behold the face of my beloved
Once more, I would give thanks unto
God until the day of resurrection.
The story has become a Lahori legend, but one that is in dispute. An eminent historian of Lahore claims it was a fabrication dreamed up by an English merchant who visited the city in the early seventeenth century. The sarcophagus, he maintains, belonged to one of Jahangir’s wives, not his murdered lover. But it was not uncommon for straying women to suffer a fate similar to Anarkali’s live entombment. When the British envoy Sir Thomas Roe met the great Mughal Jahangir in 1616, he mentioned in his diary that a woman of the hareem had been caught with a eunuch, one of the castrated males who were allowed access to the emperor’s women. The eunuch was cut to ribbons and the unfaithful woman was buried in earth up to her armpits and left in the sun, moaning about the pain in her head until, eventually, she died. Anarkali may be a myth, and the sarcophagus that is said to belong to her may lie forgotten in the dim and dusty secretariat, but her legend lives on in the name of Anarkali Bazaar, the busy main market of Lahore.
Less exalted aristocracy followed the example set by the Mughal emperors: they patronized the arts and kept mistresses both for pleasure and as a measure of social status. Only the richest men could afford the attentions of the most expensive courtesans. Tawaifs, though, offered far more to Indian men than a claim to status: they provided the romance and companionship that men could not find in their arranged marriages. The tawaif was the South Asian equivalent of the Japanese geisha. In the 1820s, Abbé J. A. Dubois, a French missionary, wrote that in a country where courtesans abound, they “are the only women in India who enjoy the privilege of learning to read, to dance and to sing. A well-bred and respectable woman would for this reason blush to acquire any of these accomplishments.” Sixty years later K. Raghunathji wrote a book about prostitutes in Bombay in which he claimed that the elite Muslim dancing girl “is generally ready of wit, is more cultivated than a married woman, and owes much of her fascination to the fact that in a country where wives are not fit for society, she is a most charming and pleasant companion.”
Chaklas—red-light areas—prospered in traditional and colonial India by providing two sought-after services: they supplied beautiful women for sex and witty company, and they were also the scene of mujra, traditional singing and dancing performed for the delight of a rich and cultured clientele. The salons of the best tawaifs were respectable establishments where the sons of the nobility, gentry, and intelligentsia were sent for an education in classical music, Urdu poetry, the language of love, and sophisticated etiquette. Some served as salons where composers, musicians, and writers sought their inspiration. To the outsider, seduced by the image of urbane glamor, it was a world of sensuous and exquisite delights. The tawaifs in these establishments were the elite of the subcontinent’s prostitutes, and they became the lovers of powerful men. They always formed a minority of prostituted women, however, and very few ever became wealthy and respected outside the chakla. Below them the hierarchy of prostitutes descended in steep steps marked by a woman’s beauty and upbringing. At the very bottom of the ladder were desperate women who sold sex in order to scrape together the meanest existence. Heera Mandi is what is left of a traditional red-light area and, like the chaklas of the past, it has its great tawaifs—its successful courtesans—but it is home to an even greater number of poor women who have no other way to survive.
The Village Family
It’s a momentous day for the family living next to Maha. Their first-floor home is crammed with excited visitors and the place is a shambles. Jumbled piles of clothes lie on broken charpoys; a precarious tower of boxes is packed with a dust-coated muddle of items; and the threadbare rugs are ingrained with bits of debris and polished to a shine by grime and wear. The large family—a mother, a father, seven children, and a few grandchildren—all live in two rooms. The older daughters have children of their own: one has a toddler and an emaciated baby whose sallow skin hangs in crepelike folds. Maha raised her eyebrows when I told her I was going to visit them. “What? They’re the village family,” she scoffed. Everyone in the courtyard repeats the same thing: the family came from a poor village last year and don’t know the ways of the city. The women can’t dance and they can’t sing. They can’t even speak properly. They’re nothing but low-class folk from the jungle.
The father of the village family is sitting in state among the anarchy. Two of the sisters bubble with anticipation and explain that they’re going to Dubai on an airplane. A promoter from Heera Mandi is arranging the trip. It’ll be the first time they have been out of the country—although one of the sisters interrupts and says that she’s been to Karachi twice. This Dubai trip is a major career break for them and they’re thrilled. They will go to Dubai as dancers, but the real money will come from selling extra services.
A large, tattered suitcase is dragged out and a fat man arrives in a rickshaw. He’s brought a brand-new case in tan-colored plastic that both sisters claim as their own. Fancy shalwaar kameez are pulled out of unlikely storage spaces under the mattresses and from behind the sofa and are folded untidily and stuffed into the cases. Moments later, one of the brothers pulls them all out again. The clothes are vivid: lilac, purple, pink, red, and green. They are made from clumsily stitched synthetic fabrics and some are finished with embroidery and sequins. The women are so proud of their finery. They ask me to inspect the ghungaroo, the bells that they will fasten to their ankles, and the jewelry they will wear. I tell them their things are lovely—and that they themselves are beautiful—and with their radiant smiles and their infectious excitement, they truly are.
At three o’clock the suitcases are heaved down the stairs and into a waiting taxi. The Dubai-bound women climb in with one of their brothers. They wave up to their mother who is leaning out of the window, weeping and blowing her nose on her dupatta. A large group of people assemble in the courtyard to watch the farewell. “See you in three months,” the women call.
Another of the courtyard’s families is monitoring their departure closely. The people in the household living directly opposite my landlord, Iqbal, are also new arrivals in the mohalla and, like the village family, they are not yet accepted by the long-term residents. The father is an old, bone-thin, reformed drug addict. He has a son and a couple of daughters, and at least one of the girls is in the business. The rooms in his house are big and very sparsely furnished. A hundred years ago it must have been a very imposing residence, but it has long since slid into decay.
I’ve been introduced to a confusing succession of people in this house. Some of them are relatives of the family and some are girls who have been brought in from villages to work as prostitutes. The father manages them and acts as their pimp, and everyone is presented as some kind of relative. One ugly young girl, who always wears the same red dress, has a suggestion of a beard and no breasts. She is a boy.
The father is usually very busy. He scouts for custom in the street or sits on a charpoy in the courtyard waiting for business. He chats and jokes with passing men, and they must like what he says because they accompany him to the house for more laughs.
When I visited on a hot afternoon in May he wanted to talk about his dead wife and to show me her photograph. He seemed genuinely upset. We drank tea and he took me to the window and pointed into the courtyard at the beginnings of a little shrine covered in what appeared to be bathroom tiles and decked with Shia Muslim flags and panje. “He’s a very religious man,” someone explained. “He’s building that shrine with his own money.”
A one-room building stands next to the emerging Shia shrine. It has a low, corrugated-iron door and no windows. Inside a couple of charpoys balance on stilts of uneven bricks to lift them out of the monsoon floods and thwart climbing rats. The room is the pimps’ den and the place from which they monitor the local women. The drug pushers congregate there too, waiting for customers who want to buy hashish, heroin, or pharmaceutical drugs. Mushtaq is one of the most important men: he’s big and dark and handsome and spends his time relaxing, loose-limbed, on a tatty charpoy or slowly patroling the courtyard and galis. Traditional families of prostitutes did not need men like Mushtaq and his friends to pimp for them: they had their own clientele that they had built up over years. The new women arriving in Heera Mandi do not have these networks and they cannot solicit for customers—most do not even go out of their rooms—so instead they rely on the pimps to bring in the clients. Some of these men aren’t just intermediaries: they operate their own businesses, importing women from the outside and putting them into the trade, whether they are willing to work or not. They’re a worrying-looking bunch: big strong men with black moustaches and thin ones with gray stubble and quick eyes.
Nautch Girls
Today the links between dance, art, sex, and power are loose, but these connections continue to draw on long South Asian traditions. The Mughal Empire waned at the beginning of the eighteenth century and official support for the performing arts declined. Throughout the nineteenth century, dance became ever more clearly associated with prostitution. Classical dancing was still the preserve of elite courtesans, and lower-status entertainer castes continued to perform folk dances for less sophisticated audiences, but the gulf that separated these women and the types of services they rendered narrowed dramatically.
Tawaifs and entertainer castes lost many of their traditional patrons when the British removed a large part of the native elite in northern India. By the time the Punjab was annexed by the British in 1849 the weakened Mughal rulers had already been usurped. About fifty years earlier, Lahore had been captured by the great Sikh leader, Ranjit Singh, who allegedly had a retinue of 150 dancing girls, and for a time the city became the center of a short-lived Sikh state. When the Sikhs were ousted by the British, the demand for tawaifs and the service industries that catered to the old rulers collapsed. The British deputy commissioner wrote in the 1868 district census report that there had been a relative decline in the population of Lahore’s Walled City. “Since annexation, a class, which at one time formed a considerable proportion of the population, has been gradually dying out and its ranks are but scantily recruited…the class of retainers, courtiers and hangers-on about the late Lahore darbar [court].”
In the early days of the British raj, the colonialists combined local practices with the privileges of conquest and took Indian women as concubines. They did not, though, become patrons of elite courtesans and sponsors of the arts. The old ways lived on in princely states that maintained a degree of independence from the British. In places like Lucknow, local Muslim rulers actively encouraged the maintenance and development of traditional culture. Things were different in areas under direct British control. The new rulers rarely understood the culture, the etiquette, or the refinements of highly polished, Persianized Urdu. Most did not even enjoy the dancing of the women whom they called “nautch girls”—a corruption of nachna, the Urdu verb “to dance.” Traditional kathak dancing is not an erotic spectacle, even by prudish Victorian standards. The Punjab Gazeteer of 1883 stated: “Dancing is generally performed by hired nach girls and need not be further mentioned here than to say that it is a very uninteresting and inanimate spectacle to European eyes.” The dances can take hours and incorporate much technicality and symbolism that is entirely lost on those who are not versed in the art.
This indifference to the “nautch” was not universal among the British, especially as the nineteenth century drew to a close. After the Indian mutiny of 1857 great efforts were made to underline the superiority of the British by encouraging social distance between the white rulers and the natives. Taking local women as concubines became a subject of disapproval and then of scandal. British women were imported into India as respectable wives to replace Indian mistresses. This distancing coincided with the Victorian social purity movement that spread from England to the colonies. English and Indian prostitutes suffered increasing stigma and, by the end of the century, a powerful “anti-nautch” movement drew support from both British colonialists and some sections of Indian society. Despite the decorum and modesty of their performances, even the most highly trained and sophisticated dancing girls were reviled as lewd because everyone knew their origins.
Courtesans and ordinary prostitutes had been tolerated, and sometimes encouraged, in precolonial India, but under the British, the distinctions between prostitutes were obliterated and they were all lumped together as criminals to be policed. They still did not constitute a single community, however, because they remained divided by religion into Hindu, Muslim, and Christian prostitutes and into gradations according to wealth and training. Among the prostitutes of the cities of north and central India it was the descendants of the courtesans, the singers and dancers of the old feudal courts, who formed the elite of the red-light areas.
Tourists at the Sufi Shrine
The anniversary of the death, or urs, of Data Ganj Bakhsh Hajveri is a festival in Heera Mandi. Data Ganj Bakhsh lived in the eleventh century and he is Pakistan’s most important Sufi. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam, first spread into South Asia by wandering Sufis. Data Dabar, Data Ganj Bakhsh’s mausoleum, is the spiritual center of the Pakistani Punjab; it lies just on the other side of Bhati Gate, a fifteen-minute walk from Heera Mandi. It’s always busy—especially on Thursdays, when it is packed with devotees—and, during the urs commemorations, our part of the city becomes crammed with pilgrims.
Devotees have flocked to the city throughout the day. Some arrive in specially hired coaches; others come by train or on public buses. A field by the side of the Badshahi Masjid has been transformed into a giant encampment. Enormous tents cover a third of the ground and food is being prepared in dozens of metal cauldrons called degs over charcoal fires. The tents, the musical entertainment, and much of the food is paid for by important feudal families from the rural areas: it is a form of paternalistic benevolence that they grant to their tenants and other poor folk. In Fort Road one of the local drug dealers has opened a water stall. An enormous vat sits underneath an awning and the water is offered to sweaty, dehydrated pilgrims in communal plastic mugs.
Groups of women circulate among the hundreds of men on the field, sauntering about and sitting on the grass to sing for a few rupees. Their real income comes from selling sex: the singing is just a form of advertising. These women aren’t from Heera Mandi: they are women from the villages, and they service their clients in the cheapest lodgings available. Despite all this competition from outsiders, the local prostitutes are still preparing themselves for some robust business. Most of the tourists are poor villagers, so the lower-priced women are likely to be in greatest demand.
Some of the devotees are giving me a really difficult time. They block my path in the street and force me to walk in piles of rubbish. They make unfriendly comments, like “Get out of Pakistan” and “Kanjri,” and a few throw stones. A couple of old men became angry because my veil slipped for a time and part of my hair was uncovered. A broken brick was lobbed at my back for no apparent reason. Rural Pakistanis’ attitudes to women are even more conservative than those of city dwellers. A foreign woman on the streets—even a veiled one—is an affront to many Pakistani men who come to Heera Mandi.
I sit by the side of the road under the shade of a tree, watching the tourists going to visit the fort and the Badshahi Masjid. Most are men, but a few women accompany their fathers and husbands, dressed in their best clothes, hobbling by in shiny, rarely worn shoes, proud of their finery and nervous of the outing. They give me puzzled sideways glances and very few smiles.
A middle-aged man stops in front of me and grins. He’s unusually unattractive with a filthy kameez and one closed eye. “I love you,” he says.
“No, you don’t. Not really,” I reply.
He speaks to me again in English. “Yes, I do. I very love you. I very, very love you.”
I gather my shopping and prepare to flee.
“Look.” He pulls out a wad of notes from his pocket. “I love you. I have much money. Come with me. I very love you. How much do you want?”
There’s no time to reply because I race back to the house, but even then he doesn’t give up. He hangs around outside for hours, patrolling up and down the road, keeping his one good eye on the building. Perhaps he thinks I’m playing hard to get.
The streets, especially near Roshnai Gate, are filled with attractions. A man performs a show with a wretched dog and a couple of old monkeys that he pokes with sticks. Another popular attraction is a ten-foot-long homemade cinema constructed from metal sheets held together with giant rivets. It’s a weird contraption, shaped like a rocket lying in a wheeled cradle. Customers peep at a small screen through tiny holes running along its side while a young man stands at the tip of the rocket turning a spool of film in front of a crude projector. Another man plays a soundtrack that has absolutely no connection with the pictures being shown inside. It’s a desperately amateurish affair, but it has lots of patrons. The owner of the mobile cinema invites me over to have a look. Among the visions on offer are knife fights, a man being impaled on a stake, another being decapitated. As a special treat, it is promised that sex scenes will be sandwiched between the next killings.
By ten o’clock at night no women are visible on the festival ground. Hundreds of men are sleeping on the grass around the darkened perimeter of the field. Some areas have been set aside for bathing: a hosepipe supplies the water, and part of the grass has been transformed into a big, muddy pond in which a dozen half-dressed men lie cooling themselves. Outside the tents masseurs are giving treatments and people congregate in little groups to talk and eat. Some of the tents are reserved for sleeping, but the very largest are being used for entertainment. A highly accomplished qawwalli singer performs songs in the largest tent. These are songs that are a form of worship in the Sufi tradition, a conversation with God building slowly, layer upon layer, to a melodic, stirring crescendo that creates such ecstasy in the listener that they are able to draw nearer to Allah. All of the mohalla is witness to this devotion: the sound of the singer’s voice carrying from the Hazoori Gardens right up into the heart of Heera Mandi bazaar.
The New Nawabs
Heera Mandi has been in decline for decades and elite prostitution has been leaving the mohalla for over fifty years. In his memoirs of colonial Lahore, Pran Neville wrote of the joys of courtesans and dancing girls, and of Heera Mandi, “which came to life at night with its reverberating sounds and glittering sights when fun-loving Lahoris would flock to it for entertainment.”
In those days, the most sought-after patrons were the Punjabi landed gentry and the urbanized, intellectual Lahori elites. This historical memory remains alive for some of the women who continue to work in Heera Mandi. When Maha speaks of one of her former clients, a rich landowner, she calls him a nawab and links him with what she believes to be a golden age when women like her were respected tawaifs.
Heera Mandi sparkled less and less as the rich began to leave their havelis in the inner city for the conveniences of new homes in spacious suburbs. Heera Mandi’s patrons also changed. After Independence in 1947 Pakistani entrepreneurs began to develop modern industries. Together with men from the expanding middle-class bureaucracy, these industrialists and businessmen provided Lahore’s prostitutes with a new type of patron. Some of the women left the kothas of Heera Mandi to entertain their clients in other parts of the city, and this process accelerated when the military government of Ayub Khan, pursing a policy of stricter Islamization, closed the red-light area in the 1960s. Deprived of their traditional places to live and work, many of the women of Heera Mandi moved into the world beyond the walls. A public outcry about the dissemination of vice led to the return of at least some of the women, but they were officially restricted to singing and dancing, and even that had to take place at carefully circumscribed times.
The traditional Pakistani elite stopped visiting the mohalla twenty or thirty years ago. The men who today are cabinet ministers, diplomats, bureaucrats, and senior army officers tell me that they and their friends came to Heera Mandi in their youth but ceased visiting long ago. They say it was not just because they became older and wiser but because the diversions of Heera Mandi became illegal and, most importantly, because the place became unfashionable for the rich and influential. The only really powerful men who visit today are the godfathers of criminal fraternities who hold meetings in the kothas of the mohalla in the quiet hours just before dawn.
Twenty years ago the bazaar was filled with function rooms. Many of these have closed now because customers demand much less dancing these days and rather more basic sexual servicing. Some of the old establishments that were on prime sites on the main road from Tarranum Chowk to Taxali Gate have been replaced by shoe shops. Only a few of the remaining ones keep professional musicians, who provide the dancers with live musical accompaniment. Instead of performing to the sound of a harmonium, a tabla, and a dholak, many women now play tapes and CDs on a “deck”—a tape and compact disc player. These “deck functions” are more popular among the clientele because they are so much cheaper.
Today’s rich have little desire to demonstrate their social status by supporting a beautiful courtesan who speaks flawless Persianized Urdu and sings impeccable ghazals. Instead, they wear Rolex watches and drive Land Cruisers. Poor men don’t want to see singing and dancing either—they can see plenty of it on the television or videotapes. Expensive prostitution rarely happens in the mohalla and houses in pleasant suburbs are just as likely to be brothels as the ghettos of Heera Mandi. Rich men might not come here anymore, but the girls of Shahi Mohalla continue to visit high-status clients in hotels or discreet brothels in select suburbs. The men who patronize Heera Mandi are lower- and middle-class men—those without the sophistication or the finances to afford the new elite prostitution scene in plush hotels with girls who speak English and have designer handbags. The world has moved on from the days of landed elites and cultured nachne walli. The mujra—the singing and dancing display executed with skill by the courtesans of the past—is almost dead. The market for entertainment has changed and Heera Mandi’s women are being dragged along—and down—with it.
“In Those Days It Was Different.”
Two types of sex workers live in modern Heera Mandi: the traditional Kanjar families and the new entrants to the profession. Most of the Kanjar say that they came from India during Partition. When the British left in 1947, the subcontinent was divided between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Many of those caught on the wrong side of the divide—the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and the Muslims in India—fled their homes. In the process Lahore was transformed from a multifaith city to the Muslim city of today. Punjab was the scene of horrendous bloodshed during Partition, and the older Kanjar women of Heera Mandi report that they escaped from the communal warfare of north Indian cities with nothing but their jewelery and the clothes they wore. Most claim an illustrious but unverifiable past as favorites of nawabs and maharajas, and for years after Partition they were known in Heera Mandi by the Indian city or region from which they had migrated.
Today only a handful of these extended families can be identified. They have been swamped by recent recruits to the trade, and the divide between the two types of prostitutes—the established families and the new arrivals—is increasingly vague. In Heera Mandi very few people are certain about exactly who is a “real” Kanjar because their origins in pre-Partition India are so vague. It is only the women of the traditional Kanjar families who cling fast to the old distinctions.
On a hot June morning I sit having breakfast with a group of elderly Kanjar ladies. Most are in their seventies or eighties and spend their days drinking tea and eating mild, sweet paan. They talk about the past and how much better it was before things were spoilt by cheap women in their low-class khoti khanas—the name given to the worst kind of brothel run by male pimps.
“When we were young we lived in India. That’s where we are from,” the oldest woman explains. “In India we sang for the aristocracy. We worked for the Maharaja of Patiala. We were his servants.
“In those days it was different. We had high status and were respected. We were trained as singers and dancers and we had to practice for hours every day. We began when we were about seven, and then we started performing when we were fourteen or fifteen. The classical singers had the highest status and the good musicians had high status too. Only the lowest kind of entertainers went to bed with the men. People looked down on them, but we were respected and other women would listen to us sing. It wasn’t just the men who came to see us.”
Maybe things weren’t really quite as rosy as this, but that is how the older women like to remember their youth. They were artists, they insist. Their skills had nothing to do with sex—except, perhaps, sometimes. Their singing careers lasted about fifteen years and they retired when they were 30.
“When we came to Lahore in 1947 there was no one here. Many of the houses were burnt and the people who lived here—the Hindus—had gone to India. We came here because this was the diamond market: we knew it was where the singers and dancers lived.
“Coming to Lahore was difficult because we had to leave everything behind in India. We carried our gold and jewelry and we lived for a while by selling what we had. When it ran out, my elder sister’s daughter began dancing. She danced in some movies and sang in the theater and in big stage programs, but it was hard because she was the only one supporting our entire family. In the end the other girls went into the business too.
“Until twenty-five years ago lots of people came to Heera Mandi to listen to the music—women as well as men. They would come to big functions and sit around the singer while she stood in the middle of the room and sang. It was good in those days, but all that has changed. Nobody bothers with singing and dancing anymore. We were trained for years, but today nobody does that.”
The old ladies are chewing and sucking paan, their mouths stained red because they eat it continuously. They have a specially worked silver paandan, a box filled with little pots of spices, pastes, betel nut, and tobaccos. A silver plate sits on the bed, its pile of betel leaves kept fresh under a wet cloth. It’s a simple and addictive pleasure and they pay careful attention to detail, adjusting the combination of spices to make the paan just the way they like it.
A younger woman—in her late forties or early fifties—adds her own memories to the story. She talks about how the standards of the area have gone down: how the area has been tarnished and their reputations have been spoiled by the nature of the business in today’s Heera Mandi.
As I’m about to leave she asks me angrily, “Why do the men come here and then leave us with babies and never come back? Why do they do that?”
I say it happens everywhere, not just in Heera Mandi, but she doesn’t agree. She thinks there’s something especially bad about this mohalla.
“Don’t they care about their children?”
I say that the men have come here for pleasure and that, after the pleasure, they will forget all about the place and the women they’ve loved. I add that they probably realize that their children will be cared for.
“It’s true,” the old ladies agree. They smile and nod and chew their paan while they watch the young women of the family playing with their babies. They’ve had very long lifetimes in which to get used to the idea.
I ask if they’ll ever leave Heera Mandi. “Why should we?” they say indignantly. The younger woman adds that she has been here, in this house, all her life. She doesn’t know anywhere else. “We have nothing to be ashamed of. This is our home and we’re respectable people. What other people think is their problem.”
Women like these old Kanjar ladies are the heads of their households: there are no real husbands in their families and men are short-term guests. In a complete reversal of most Pakistani families, women hold power among the Kanjar. Women earn the money and women manage the profession. They are known as naikas: they decide when a girl is ready for the business; they decide on her clients; they manage the courtship; and they decide how to spend the money that’s earned.
The Kanjar look down on the new entrants to the business because they say they are cheap women who have no artistic standards. Some of these women have migrated to Lahore from impoverished rural areas; some have been sold to brothels by their families; others are married to men who pimp them out; others flee abuse at home and have nowhere else to go and no other way to earn a living. Most find themselves in brothels run by men who pocket the profits from their labor. Some are locked into a system of sexual slavery. I am told that in the poorest parts of Heera Mandi some girls are held in chains after they tried to escape from their pimps. I’ve never seen these girls. No one ever does except the clients. Perhaps they don’t exist—but the very thought of them is sufficient to keep young brothel workers compliant and in thrall to their pimps. Unlike the Kanjar women, the new arrivals in Heera Mandi do not have family networks to help them or a rich heritage to give them psychological support.
The traditional, intensely patriarchal culture of the subcontinent exploited Kanjar women, but this older system of prostitution provided an element of protection that is missing in the newer, more vicious structures of the Lahori sex trade. Old women have a place in Kanjar society because they run the little family firms that make up a large part of the sex trade. But now there is a new breed of manager: a professional class of pimps, agents, and procurers who are rendering the managers of the established industry redundant. Some of these people are from Heera Mandi, some from outside, and they are increasingly wealthy and powerful. The future for elderly Kanjar women is ever more fragile: the modern-day executives want workers in their teens and twenties—women who will be discarded as unemployable shortly after they reach thirty.
“I Like Them to Be like Girls.”
Tarranum Chowk is permanently and frighteningly busy. In the middle of a hot June day I spot a young khusra dodging the rickshaws as she skips by the cinema. She’s throwing a flimsy dupatta around her shoulders. Her hair is plastered with henna and scraped on top of her head so that it looks like a little pile of dung. Her beard is just beginning to show, and her eye makeup has melted slightly in the heat.
She hesitates and stops to look at me. After a few moments she reaches out, adjusts my dupatta, and traces her fingers over my face. “Beautiful,” she laughs and kisses her fingertips.
She catches hold of my hand and tells me her name is Tasneem. We dance back down toward the Badshahi Masjid and turn into a narrow passage barely lit by the sun filtering through the space between the houses forty or fifty feet above us. The walls of the buildings are a dark, drab gray, and there are so many flies feasting on the rubbish that the mounds of rotting food seem to move.
Tasneem takes me into a house leading off the alley. Twelve or thirteen khusras are lying on cushions, all dressed in pretty suits. They’re friendly and seem pleased to see me: it gives them a new subject to discuss. They make me sit in the middle of the room so that they can look at my hair and nails.
Tasneem sits next to me busily arranging her kameez and hoisting up her bra to make it appear as if she has breasts. Her performance starts a competition over who has the most womanly figure. On the surface it’s good-natured banter, but there’s a constant undercurrent of competition amongst the khusras. They’re obsessed with who is the most beautiful and the most feminine.
One elderly khusra insists on showing me her breasts. They look very real. She says that she had also been born with a penis but that it had been removed. She begins to take off her shalwaar to prove the point, but I tell her that there’s no need: she’s clearly an authentic khusra.
Tasneem puts her hands on the floor next to mine. She has a man’s hands, far bigger than mine, with long fingernails that are varnished in maroon and knuckles that are heavily creased despite the fact that she’s in her early twenties.
“Wrinkles! Wrinkles!” the other khusras shriek. Tasneem flies out of the room in tears and hides behind the door with her face in her dupatta. She makes an elaborate display of being wounded and the others laugh even more.
Tasneem beckons me to follow her, and we climb up the spiral staircase right to the top of the building. She shares a room here with other khusras. Large, professionally produced photographs of them cover the walls. All the dancing girls—and boys—of Heera Mandi have these framed glamour portraits in a place of honor, often adorned with gold tinsel. In the photographs, heavily made up and wearing their finest clothes, they become stars who have escaped the dismal poverty of the mohalla. It’s a fantasy but they love it. I’m obliged to note the beauty of the subjects, their obvious star quality, and the magnificence of their outfits.
As a rule Pakistani men are handsome in a very masculine way, and the khusras are no exception. The pictures capture butch men plastered in makeup, jewelry, and flamboyant clothes. Tasneem and her friends hold their prized portraits before me. They’re so earnest that I can’t say anything other than, “Very lovely.”
Tasneem announces that I need beauty advice. I’m alarmed. She makes me sit on a little stool by the window so that she can see me in the light. She opens her makeup box, rummages through ancient, grubby cosmetics, and sorts out the most appropriate colors. She varnishes my nails in the same maroon color as her own, paints my lips the deepest burgundy, and makes my eyebrows two thick black lines. There’s unanimous agreement that I look like a stunning dancing girl, but I’m shuddering at the thought that I have to pass through throngs of men in Heera Mandi looking like one of Cinderella’s spectacularly ugly sisters. We walk home holding hands. Tasneem has left her dupatta at the khusra house and so, with stylized sauciness, she mimics what any self-respecting woman would do in public—she covers her imaginary breasts with the end of my own shawl.
Tasneem likes being sent to buy cold drinks at the shop by Roshnai Gate. Sometimes I meet her as I go to buy food at the Al Faisal Hotel. She enjoys the opportunity to camp it up as she walks down the road, flirting outrageously with the men who make roti and the customers drinking tea in the restaurant. They think she’s funny and they laugh, making comments to each other. She responds by pouting, flicking her hair over her shoulder, and making a convoluted performance of retrieving money from her bra. A real woman—even an experienced prostitute—would never dare to behave in such an overtly sexual manner.
Today, some new people are sitting in Tasneem’s room when we return with Cokes. They’re men who look like men. One is slim with fine features and the other is short and square with a luxuriant moustache. They tell me that they’re not like Tasneem and the others; they don’t live in Heera Mandi, but they visit every week or so. The slender one comes to dress up, dance, and sell his services. The other is a customer. Both men are married and they want to know if there are men like them in England.
I tell them that men who have sex with men in my own country don’t have to dress up as women unless they prefer to. The khusras think this is interesting, but they’re skeptical. The man with the lush moustache says that it’s not a nice idea. “I like them to be like girls,” he adds. Tasneem looks serious. “The customers want us to be pretty. No pretty dress, no pretty face—no money.”
The khusras take it in turns to dance. Tasneem is teaching me a combination of foot movements and the slender visitor performs an energetic routine of twists and flourishes. And then the dance group’s guru shows us how it really should be done. About 40, with a muscular build, heavy features, and long black hair, she’s the striking person I saw in the street on one of my first nights in the bazaar. Her name is White Flower and she owns the khusra house. The others whisper and nod to me knowingly. “She’s the best,” they explain, and they are right. She dances like a woman, with coquettish glances and swaying hips. The graceful movements are perfect even if her body shape is not. Her audience is enthralled and so am I.
“I Was Born This Way.”
The khusras of Heera Mandi are similar to the hijras of India. Both are often described as “half man, half woman.” Most of the khusras I know in Heera Mandi were born biologically male: they look like men and they have a penis and testicles. A few—very few—are genuine hermaphrodites. Some of the biological males undergo surgery, often paid for by their clients, to remove their sexual organs. In the process, they rise a notch above their still complete friends. Their superiority is based on their lack of a penis and on the more feminized appearance that they begin to develop once their bodies are deprived of the testosterone produced by their testicles.
Ambiguous sexuality has an acknowledged tradition in Hinduism: deities in Hindu mythology have male and female essences, some transforming from one gender to another. The idealized hijra is an ascetic linked with a goddess, and with fertility, and has a recognized power to bless or to damn. It is customary for hijras to dance at houses where a baby boy has been born or where a marriage is taking place. If the hijras are paid well, they leave placing a blessing, but if they are poorly rewarded, they vent their anger and curse the newborn child or the marriage bed. These spiritual powers inspire a mixture of dread and ridicule even in modern India. It’s the same in Pakistan: in Lahore, the khusras dance, unsolicited, at weddings, births, and circumcisions, and they rarely leave without a respectable profit.
Islam considers homosexuality to be an abomination, but the Muslim world has a history of third genders and eunuchs playing important roles in society and in the courts of Muslim rulers. A few eunuchs were born with ambiguous genitals, but the vast majority were castrated either as children or as young men. They were valuable as loyal guards, teachers, and administrators, or as slaves who could be used for sexual recreation by adult men. Male prostitution has long flourished in the cities of the subcontinent, and today about 10 percent of the dancing girls of Heera Mandi are khusras.
Many men have sex with men in Pakistan; they also have sex with boys. Homosexuality is derided in public, but it is accepted, providing it remains a secret. The men involved in homosexual acts don’t perceive themselves to be homosexual, and the men’s families won’t perceive them to be homosexual either. Most Pakistani men marry and produce children: their extramarital sexual preferences are irrelevant as long as they can maintain a respectable public face. Having sex with other men or boys is not associated with stigma providing a man takes a dominant role in sexual encounters. It may even reinforce a man’s masculinity and status because he is sexually dominating others. It is the receptive partner who is despised and ridiculed. He is labeled as submissive and passive—like a woman—and khusras and boys fall on the feminine side of the gender divide. Most of the same-sex relationships that are found in Heera Mandi are profoundly unequal: encounters between men and boys, or between men and khusras, and they faithfully mirror the power imbalances in relationships between men and women.
The khusras imitate and exaggerate women’s mannerisms: talking in high-pitched voices, fluttering their hands, swaying their hips, and looking coquettish. They grow and paint their fingernails; wear thick, painstakingly applied makeup; and pay attention to their hair, which must be as long and as glossy as possible. Whenever the khusras want to impress me with their attractiveness, they undo their hair, arrange it over their shoulders, and tilt their heads back to emphasize its length. One of the most serious and cruel punishments that the khusras can inflict upon one of their own is to cut her hair.
Khusra behavior is a caricature of feminine conduct that extracts the most useful things from the women’s world and leaves out the rest. Most importantly, they don’t observe the restrictions placed upon women’s conduct. Dancing in public would be unthinkable for ordinary Pakistani women, and even the most devout khusras in Heera Mandi fail to observe that most important sign of Pakistani Muslim femininity: they never observe purdah and they wear veils only as a prop for some extra-piquant flirting.
Heera Mandi’s khusras are organized into houses based around a guru, a teacher or leader. Each guru has chelas, disciples or apprentices who live with them and are trained in obedience to the community’s rules. In theory it’s like a large family. Each person must do as the guru instructs and not act independently. The mohalla has a hierarchy of gurus, and the top guru commands a respect that verges on reverence. A network of khusra houses throughout Pakistan allows young khusras to move from one house to another with astonishing speed. A khusra who is expelled from one community will not be able to find support and succor in another. This is supposed to reinforce solidarity among khusras, but not all gurus are kind: in Heera Mandi many operate as brothel managers, squeezing money, work, and spirit out of the youngest and most vulnerable in their care.
It’s difficult to discover the origins of anyone in the mohalla, and it’s especially difficult to know about the early life of the khusras because most say the same thing: “I was born this way.” A few elaborate and say that they came to Heera Mandi because they could not be themselves in their villages—that there was no space for them, they felt wrong and out of place, and they shamed their parents. Some were forced out of their homes, and others left of their own accord, interpreting their journey to the city and to this life as something good—an escape. Others say they were sexually abused as children and many were prostituted. Indeed, there may be even more boy prostitutes than girl prostitutes in Pakistan. They work in garages, as helpers on buses, as assistants to truck drivers, or as waiters in tea shops. They are everywhere: impoverished boys between the ages of 9 and 14 who sell sex for a pittance. Tasneem says she was raped when she was young—so many times she cannot remember—and that it made her the way she is: she cannot be a man and she will never be a woman. She can only be a khusra and the only way she can live and survive is by selling sex. Men do not want her now her body is hard and she is able to grow a beard, but she can still cross the gender divide if she wears a pretty shalwaar kameez and matching lipstick.