Kolkata in West Bengal is nicknamed “The City of Light,” however, in Songhai, it is anything but joyful. Songhai, the red-light district in Kolkata has existed for centuries with hundreds of multi-story brothels built along narrow alleyways. Thousands of sex workers live and work here with their children in tow.
It is a place of such human misery; it’s hard to breathe as we walk the town. I notice young girls wandering the alleyways, wearing outrageous makeup, looking like children with their mother’s makeup on, trapped in a world of pain.
Here in Hell, the pimps who are men and women get them addicted to drugs keeping them dependent and jacked up so they can service more men a day.
Little girls peer through bars with desperate eyes knowing they will have to have sex with over a dozen men a day with no way out. These scenarios are everywhere you turn, and their suffering is indescribable.
In India, brothels are technically illegal, but here the law is irrelevant. To make things worse in many cases the police are willing participants, taking bribes and using the girls for their pleasure.
A palpable cloud of despair hangs over the town. The depth of poverty is striking, and the countryside morphs into bleakness. Beneath the beauty of the country, the hospitality of its people, and Buddha’s watchful eyes, a unique ugliness resides. Children become slaves to the perversity of men; expendable and abandoned by almost everyone in the world. The cruelty of what happens to girls is horrifying, but the global indifference they suffer is a silent slap in their face.