Al Ngullie
My sneakers were hapless against the numerous puddles and potholes which sloshed out contemptuously at my fairly-clean clothes. Litter and mini-garbage dumps spilled out from every nook as if seeking a nod of approval if they were in harmony with the tatters and flaking paint of the eroding walls against which they were piled on. The revolting stench of urine and faeces stifled my lungs while craggy buildings fought for space with wires of every sort joining the fray. Faceless faces in a faceless crowd, crowding the lone lane that passed through a dark row of nameless terraces. The place made me feel dead inside.
Even the foggy air seemed to hover around only for the sole purpose of mocking the unfortunate fate these people were trapped in by the terrible moods of life –drunk youths in small urgent groups debating on issues only intoxicated minds would understand; the luckier ones lay sprawled by the sewer pipes oblivious to the mud soaking them up. Drug-peddlers haggling with glassy eyed youths. Leery, fetid men flirting with scrawny hotel ushers at the doors. Bleary eyed ‘waitresses’ hung around in their gaudy dresses trying their best to feel part of a world oblivious of their existence. Maybe never will they be part of a compassionate world that accepts them. I‘d just walked into a humanity, lives away from my usual world of Music and healing. And home.
Most of the people who hung around there stared at me suspiciously. Maybe I should have come in simpler clothes. Or hair uncombed. Or look like them. Some thin girls, ragging in a corner, whistled and yelled out “free bura Koribo?” I smiled back nervously at them while pretending to be busy with my cell phone. A big mistake. Two scrawny girls walked up briskly and ask to see the thing. Then they doubled over with raucous laughter (and others joined in) when one of them chuckled “Etu deebi aro free koribi!”(Give me the cell phone and I’ll let you have sex with me for free!). I’d been warned of this. Thankfully, my three guides John, Sali and Sentila (names changed)–all NGO youth volunteers- were familiar with them so that thwarted any further embarrassment by leading me up a steps to one of the rooms above.
The walls inside, with all sorts of obscene graffiti, looked no healthier than those out side. Dried remnants of vomit. The stink assaulted me. John knocked on a door with a Jennifer Lopez look-alike welcoming us in Flowery bikinis on its front. “Koon asi?” a scratchy, irritated voice called out from inside. John mouthed off a phrase, I understood later as being a sort of passport. A thin girl, her face a rich, loud grey color from the cream that protested loudly against her dark skin, opened the door. She grinned at three of my companions only to withdraw the friendly grin when she saw me. A new face? I nodded a ‘HI’ to her as she led us inside.
Her room was, surprisingly, very clean and tidied-up though the sparse furnishing –a chair, a bed with only some thin blankets and a rickety table- told on the life she led. Suzy, (name changed), about 21 years old, will never see home again. She was “adopted” 20 years ago, by a man to work for him as the bread earner of the “family”. Suzy is a prostitute.
Her story was the same as any of the hundreds of others’ like her who used their bodies to keep them alive. The same old story yet so disturbingly new in all their depths of pain and deprivation: stories seeking redemption and escape from the dregs of life. Only their stories ended in unhappy endings. I was on an assignment to write a piece on sex-workers in and around Dimapur town. The acquaintance intended upon their side of life: sides which society has so come to lament as an unintentional fallacy of fate on the wrong side of paradise. Suzy’s life figured among one of these sides.
“I don’t know who my parents are. I only know that I came from Assam and that I’m not a Naga.That’s all” she says quietly. “There are lots of us here including your own people. Most of us are here because we have nowhere to go. We don’t know any other trade except…” her voice trails off. Suzy is only 21, yet have to struggle every day to look that age. The lines on her face and bony cheeks keep ahead of her. “I have to maintain my self all the time or customers won’t come back again -they go to the younger ones” she said, tears welling up her eyes.
“I’ve to depend on daily wages for food. But it’s not enough. My (master) gives back only a small amount of my daily earnings. The rest he keeps it. So without proper food I constantly fall ill”. She’s very thin and with a sickly countenance that there are many who suspect she might be infected with HIV/AIDS. “Just some weeks back one of the girls took away a regular customer of mine for her self by telling him that I have the disease. I don’t go for tests because I’m afraid of the results” She broke down, quietly sobbing. “I want to know how a home is like...How is it like? Do you have a sister? There wasn’t anything I could do to ease her misery as she cried uncontrollably. If there was anything that would ease her pain, then I didn’t know what. I still don’t. Only half an hour of conversation and it was time to go.
I knew she didn’t hear me when I thanked her for taking the time to share me a piece of her life. As I walked out the door, Suzy’s yearning lingered in the air. “I want to know how a home is like...”
