Windsor Johnston. Rashida Bibi came to Kolkata as a teenager with the promise of a job as a nanny β but then was told she had to become a sex worker. That's been her profession for some 30 years. When Rashida Bibi was 16, she left her native Bangladesh and came to Kolkata, India, with the promise of a job as a nanny. Tears well up in her eyes when she remembers that moment. Some 30 years later, Bibi is one of an estimated 11, sex workers in Sonagachi, a notorious red-light district in Kolkata.
And she is the mother of year-old Madhabi, who attends secondary school and dreams of being a hip-hop dancer in Bollywood. The teenager spends hours each week trying to perfect the art of "B-fusion," a mix of classical Indian dance, Bollywood choreography and hip-hop elements. She's teaching herself by watching TV and movie dance scenes. Shibani, left, and Madhabi, who live at the New Light residential home for children of sex workers, practice an Indian dance called "B-fusion. The reason that Madhabi has high hopes?
An organization called New Light, which educates and cares for children of sex workers in the red-light district of Kalighat in Kolkata about 10 minutes from the Sonagachi neighborhood where Rashida Bibi works. Basu is humbled by the honor. But she still worries about having enough money to pay her staff of 35 β teachers and tutors who help the kids with their homework, counselors, drivers who take them to and from school, a nurse and the day-to-day operations personnel.
It's India's highest honor for civilian women. Seema Mehta hide caption. Urmi Basu first came to Kolkata's sex worker neighborhoods 20 years ago. Sex work is legal in India although soliciting, brothels and working as a pimp are against the law. A sociologist who'd grown up in a family of social activists, Basu had heard about the plight of the women and their children in Kalighat and wanted to see for herself. I walked in through these narrow lanes with rooms on both sides measuring, more or less, five feet by seven feet.
At one point I saw a woman holding a baby right outside the doorway. Basu spent several weeks learning about the lives of sex workers. The women with children told her that they'd hide their kids under the bed or in closets while they were working. That was how they tried to protect them from clients who might come drunk or on drugs and sometimes become violent.
