Nalini Jameela, sex worker

"I never thought I'd take up sex work as my means of livelihood... But once I got into it, I decided to stand firm, to face all the problems and dangers with courage... My early life had been so difficult, so painful, that I rarely took the time to look good. But once I became a sex worker, I had to pay attention to my body... I felt more cheerful, confident and active... My daily routine became more disciplined."

This is my first meeting with Nalini Jameela, and though I've read her memoir, Autobiography of a Sex Worker, with an editor's eye, I don't know what to expect.

Over the next three days, she and I spend time together, as she patiently allows herself to be hustled from one media interview to another. The media wants to know whether she doesn't think sex work is demeaning. No more than domestic work, where you deal with the filthy sediment of peoples' lives, their dirty dishes and clothes, she says. The media wants to know why she wouldn't give up sex work now that she's seen as an activist and a writer. Because it's what I do; and I get better rates now that people are reading my book, she says. The media wants to know whether she's a feminist. No, she says, she just believes that women should be allowed to make a living any which way they can without being harassed by the police.

She wears crisp cotton saris, waits anxiously for calls from her granddaughter, who's unwell back in Trivandrum. The calls come in on her cellphone, where she's stuck a glittering heart over the light; when her phone rings, it projects little rainbow hearts onto the wall. At dinner, after interviews, I see her stop and reach out to touch champa flowers, jasmine; she's unimpressed with the expensive, scentless orchid on our table. She has excellent manners, an old-fashioned courtesy rare among authors, and a quiet dignity in the face of the rudest or most insensitive questions. Sometimes, Nalini retreats deep into herself, and then she's unreachable; gone out, back later. Sometimes, she's larger than life--she knows how to command a stage, how to use bawdy humour, how to flirt with the editor's bemused but secretly pleased husband, how to flash her dynamite, mischievous, trademark smile.

She doesn't complain about the back-to-back, interview-and-discussion schedule; she manages to sneak in a little shopping, for cosmetics, and we discuss the merits of different skin creams, giggling like teenagers. Later, Nalini tells me how she looked up the history of the words they use for "prostitute" in Malayalam, how the line between an apsara and a vaishya is a thin, man-made one. She tells the cluster of fascinated readers at The Bookshop how a sex worker must be seductress and nurse to her client, but it also becomes clear that she sees the details of her job as boring, part of the average working day, as mundane as the filing and typing an office clerk might do.

I see her off at the airport, a small, neat figure with jasmine in her hair, making her way through the English-speaking world in Malayalam and Tamil, the woman who's fought so hard for the right to call herself "Nalini Jameela, sex worker", and to say it with pride.

Reviews and articles:

Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta, Indian Express:
"...Beneath the calm surface of the prose, there is a quiet anger against the hypocrisy of a system that criminalises sex work and punishes the sex worker while letting off the client; against the new misogyny that comes masked as moral outrage against sex workers..."

Marginalien, in her blog 'Yes':
Jameela's life and the lives of the huge majority of those amongst whom she lives -- not just sex-workers, but the tradesmen, the rickshawallas, the policemen, the small hoteliers -- are marked by unrelenting insecurity, hampered by such extremes of heartlessness that it is really difficult to understand how they can bear to face up to their realities...

From Jabberwock:


Jameela’s casual acceptance of sex as a service she provides to meet “men’s needs” has the effect of deglamorizing sex, turning it into something banal and quotidian (which means this is as far from erotic writing as it’s possible to get). The accent in “sex work” is firmly on “work”; prostitution is treated as a branch of domestic labour.
More at: The Hindu; MSN India; China Daily; Tehelka.

CNN-IBN's interview with Nalini Jameela.