Nalini Jameela: "A certain dignity"

Jaya Jaitly reviews Nalini Jameela's Autobiography of a Sex Worker in Outlook:

Now in her 50s, she does not flinch from the choices she made, whether it was to sell her body to maintain her children, or the many liaisons, short and long term, with men. She negotiated life on her own terms, and is clear-eyed that men need psychological or physical comfort just as she needed a roof above her head and her children needed care. As a sex worker, she merely tried to fulfil those needs. A survivor, she used her intelligence to gently manipulate her clients to accept her terms, sexual or otherwise. What comes through is the need for self-worth, dignity and trust and that finally circumstances alone define how each individual translates these into acts of daily life....
....An Autobiography of a Sex Worker is an unwaveringly honest, intensely personal yet universal book. Like Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, it helps us understand the underbelly of our many-layered, exploitative and highly complicated society, held together by its multiple moralities, and that true empowerment means having the courage to guide one’s own destiny and living bravely by the consequences.

Here's Madhu Gurung in The Hindu:

“I wrote this book because of the great divide that exists between the sex worker and the client. The man is seen as upright and moral while the vaishya (prostitute) stands around to seduce, and so deserves to be punished. But are the men really seduced?” Nalini Jameela asked an audience at the Indian Women’s Press Corps in Delhi, where she had come to promote her book, Autobiography of a Sex Worker.
Jameela, now in her fifties, was dressed in a pale gold cotton sari, her hair worn loose framing a calm face, with black, intense eyes as old as time. There is a certain dignity in the way she puts her point across in unhurried Malayalam spiced with logic and courage.