I felt like a bridegroom who had come to pick out one of the three beautiful sisters. Sitting next to each other on a blue sofa, they blushed and coquettishly glanced at us.
An old woman with a straight back and shining-white hair sat down on the floor and talked of the heat and humidity. She had a firm, commanding voice that sliced and rebuked the air with the sharp tanginess of a most refined form of spoken Urdu.
Unlike the brightly-colored and intricately designed shalwaar kameeze (Shalwar are loose trousers and the kameeze is a long shirt) of the girls, the stern woman stood apart in an off-white dress and a white netted dupatta (a scarf or covering for the head and upper body worn by women), carefully adjusted on her head.
It seemed like a cultured Muslim family, but the girls were not sisters. They were prostitutes. The old lady was not a mother looking for suitable boys for her daughters, but a pleasure-house Madam.
We were in Heera Mandi — ‘a bazaar of diamonds’ — Pakistan’s oldest red light district.
Crossing into the Red Light
Mian Naeem, a soft-spoken Lahore-based sculptor and art-critic, had agreed to take me for an excursion to Heera Mandi, a place I particularly wished to visit especially after reading an excellent book by the British author Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Ancient Pleasure District.
i was in Pakistan to take part in a conference for a visa-free South Asia and was tied up with a series of seminars and speeches during the day. Night was the time to explore the city and Heera Mandi had to be a necessary pilgrimage.
A Road Leading to Sin
Mian Naeem parked his vintage car outside the periphery of Heera Mandi. It was past midnight, perhaps the right time to take a dip into the secrets of the flesh.
The evening had grown slightly middle-aged. The madams and their agents were likely to be more tolerant towards pleas for cheaper bargaining. The available girls were unlucky to be picked yet and hopefully more resigned in their choice for customers. Further, the shield of the deep-night darkness made it easy to imagine that Allah would be too sleepy to notice his faithful venturing out to make sinful transactions.
The streets were crowded with the revelers of the night. Restaurants, and only restaurants, lined both the sides. The blazing fire in the tandoors, the complicated smell of chicken curry and gutter stink, the cries of the cooks, and the laughter of the diners combined to create a blurred sensation in the mind.
Lahore College Girls are Forced to Become Subhuman
In an eye-opening and very terrible report telecasted by a private news channel, many rackets are active, who in the name of marriage kidnap and then force girls to become call girls in Lahore.
These rackets employ women from the Bazar-e-Husan (the redlight areas of Lahore, which is now scattered in the posh areas like Model Town, Johar Town, and even Defense), who roam the colleges and cajole girls for the marriages. These rackets also employ young and smart boys who wheedle the girls outside the college gates and then sweet-talk these girls for marriage. Girls either leave their homes to marry these “dream-lover-boys” or girls force their parents and family for the marriage.
These boys take these girls away in the name of honeymoon after couple of days of marriage and then the family of girls never see their daughter or their “son-in-law” again. These girls become yet another sex machine in the huge brothels established in the posh areas of Lahore, where the the elite from every field of life in Lahore and from other cities come to relax to regain energy to “serve” the nation again.
These girls in the sex houses suffer what ordinary people cannot even imagine. They get sexually abused 15 to 20 times during 24 hours without any rest by as many people as they come. These girls are asked to perform all the perverted sexual acts asked by the clients. These girls are not even allowed to disappoint their clients during their monthly periods. These girls are beaten blue and torture upon them through knives, cigaretts, sticks and belts is a routine. They are given lesser food and there is no concept about medicine.
he cries of these girls remain imprisoned within the tall walls of brothels in Lahore.
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