Cost of Living, Price of Loving

In Mumbai's Kamathipura, the business of sex fails to keep up with the profits of real estate

- Pritha Vashishth

HE signals at her to walk with him. She asks how much he can spend. He wonders if the money left in his wallet is enough to buy him sex before another stressful day at work. For her, it's another night of work with its own familiar stresses that have left her scars unlike his from a past accident.

Indeed, work, rather than sex, is key to Kamathipura. Even the well-recognised name of this 'red-light district' in Mumbai can be traced back to 'kaam', Marathi for work, via 'kamathi', or those engaged in hard physical labour, in this case, mostly Telugu-origin, but also other labourers who settled here in the 1790s, pulled in by construction sites as the once marshy land opened up for habitation with the building of causeways connecting the seven islands comprising the original city of Bombay, now Mumbai.