The Sex Worker as Storyteller

In her second book, Nalini Jameela shares her insights not only into the behaviour of men, but also the art of storytelling as honed by her professional skills

‘Sex workers are free in four respects: We don’t have to cook for a husband, we don’t have to wash his dirty clothes, we don’t have to ask for his permission to raise our kids as we deem fit; we don’t have to run after him claiming [our] right to property.’

With these words, Nalini Jameela stormed the imagination of Kerala in 2005. Her book, Autobiography of a Sex Worker, originally written in Malayalam, smashed sales records in Kerala. The first edition that printed 2,000 copies was sold out in a week. Over 14 more editions, more than 30,000 copies were sold. The book, also translated into English later, is a candid account of her journey from labourer to sex worker to an activist amplifying the

voice of the oppressed. It opens with her memories of childhood, when she started learning the lessons of survival, and offers a startlingly true picture of street sex workers; their exploitation as well as their pleasures and excitements in life.

Nalini has now completed a second book that will soon be published by Penguin. In the Company of Men: the Romantic Encounters of a Sex Worker is not merely an extension of her autobiography. In the book, she presents insights into the behaviour of men and facets of their personality—tenderness, romance, arrogance and power.

“My first client taught me one of the greatest lessons I learned. He was a police officer but very soft natured, romantic and handsome. He was just like a hero in my fantasies.” After a night she calls “joyous”, Nalini was dropped back on the road in a police jeep. She was then immediately picked up again by another team of policemen and beaten up severely in custody. The cops told her their boss, the same man who had slept with her a few hours earlier, had tipped them off.

Nalini lost another client when she started scribbling down the opening sentences of her diary: ‘I am Nalini. I was born at Kalloor near Amballoor. I am forty-nine years old.’ He happened to read it. She says he left her not in fear of being exposed, but because he found her age out. She had lied to him about being only 41.

Nalini’s journey to sex work had its origin in her brother’s marriage; he wanted to marry a girl three years older than him, and she supported his decision. In Nalini’s words, “This marriage shook the world and I was thrown out of my house.” Nalini, who was only 18 years old and without shelter, got married to Subramanian, a local gang leader. He would beat her every day. In her autobiography, Nalini writes: ‘He had all sorts of shady dealings. He was into womanising and heavy drinking. He did go to the sand mines, but the main work was distilling hooch.’ He died of cancer after three-and-a-half years of marriage, and left a son and daughter for her to bring up. The children were looked after by her mother-in-law. Nalini writes: ‘In those days (the early 70s) a woman worker earned two-and-a-half rupees a day. If the work was arduous, the pay would go up to four and a half rupees. My mother-in-law asked for five rupees a day.’ She turned to sex work to pay her mother-in-law. “My daughter might have thought of me as a mother who abandoned her at the age of two,” says Nalini. The boy died at the age of 17. The daughter, the younger of the two, continued to live with Nalini’s mother-in-law, who refused to let her see the child despite making her pay (in secret) for her upkeep.

Nalini married twice after her first marriage. She had a daughter in her short-lived second marriage. She then became Nalini Jameela after marrying a Muslim. She lived with her third husband for over a decade, abstaining entirely from sex work. Gradually, this relationship too began to fall apart, and she returned to the trade.

Till the late 1990s, Nalini was as invisible as any other sex worker. The turning point was a small incident. Nalini used to shower in public washrooms in her native town Thrissur. One day, she saw two sex workers fighting over the public toilet. A third one intervened and advised them to go use the toilet in “their office” instead. Nalini was surprised to hear of an ‘office’ for sex workers. She decided to locate it. It turned out to be a centre for sex workers run by an HIV prevention project introduced by the State AIDS Control Society. Called Jwalamukhi, this collective of sex workers that sprung up in Thrissur was the first of its kind in Kerala then.

Nalini had found a cause, and involved herself deeply with the project. Along with a few others, she took it far beyond its original aim of HIV prevention, giving it a rights-based perspective by advocating a radical form of sexual politics. Armed with her voice, she travelled through Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, interacting with community-based organisations of sex workers. Nalini became a prominent speaker at public gatherings of sex workers and their supporters. The Thrissur movement thus began spreading to other towns. She also got active on other rights issues. She participated in a satyagraha against the state government’s availing of loans from Asian Development Bank; she was present at another satyagraha to defend the rights of prisoners. In 2000, Nalini participated in a workshop on camera training for sex workers in Thailand, and then started making documentaries on the lives of her people. The first of these, Jwalamukhikal was produced in 2002, and a second in 2004.

Her statements as an activist were intended to provoke. This, for example: “There is no difference between a scientist who uses his brains, a teacher who uses his verbal abilities, a labourer who uses his hands, and a sex worker who uses her body.”

It was in 2001 that she decided to write her autobiography. “I have the habit of slipping into minute descriptions of life situations whenever I speak,” she says. Her colleagues at Jwalamukhi noticed this and started persuading her to write. It was in 2003 that Nalini finally began. Initially, she tried writing daily short notes in her diary, but found it hard because she could not write as fast as she thought. I Gopinath, an activist and a journalist in Thrissur, helped by taking down her narrations. The book, which took a year’s writing, was published some six years ago.

Not everyone in Kerala’s literary circles admired the book. M Mukundan, a renowned Malayalam writer, called it a ‘prurient money-spinner’. She was dismissed as an ‘intellectual among sex workers’. Nalini responded by saying that she is a ‘sex worker among intellectuals’. In her autobiography, Nalini talks about it: ‘When I made a film, people said a sex worker made a film. When I make a public speech, when I write a book, people used to say a sex worker did it. I dismiss this attempt to define me only as a sex worker. Hence I tried to throw their phrases back at them.’

On the other hand, there were writers who embraced Nalini’s book as a fine piece of literary work. She attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2004, her appearance facilitated by the poet K Sachitanandan.

The men Nalini writes about in her book are diverse in their needs. “You are wrong if you think that all the men approaching sex workers want only sex that ends up in ejaculation,” she says. There were men who paid her just to listen to them. They would talk about their marriage. While she often found it ridiculous, she was a careful listener because she was paid for it. There were men who used to come to clear doubts about sex and for advice. Some men simply liked to spend a few hours with her in a husband’s role. “Such people want me to wash their towel, hand them the soap and carry their suitcase and walk behind [them]. But they had to turn around and look at me every now and then to ensure that I had not run away with the suitcase,” she laughs. “I was most amused by this. Giving somebody a box and then worrying about it!”

Nalini also had dangerous moments. Once an auto-rickshaw driver took her to a deserted coconut grove and left. She remembered that a few months earlier, a sex worker had been brutally gangraped and killed in the same place. Sensing danger, Nalini dug up some sand, lay down, and covered herself with it. Lying still almost to her breath, she counted 17 men jumping the wall and coming in search of her. They couldn’t find her and went back. She spent the whole night there. “It was as if I was dead and buried.”

Reshma Bharadwaj, a friend of Nalini since she became an activist, says she has an unmatched talent for narrating stories. Reshma, a PhD scholar at the University of Bergen in Norway, along with Dileep Raj, a publisher, and Baiju Nataraj, a poet and translator, have assisted Nalini in penning her life stories down. “I am not very good at writing, but I have a rich memory of the people I met and their infinite world of emotions. But due to the struggles I have gone through, I was not able to compose the disjointed memories well. Reshma, Dileep and Baiju helped me reorganise and articulate my memories,” says Nalini.

They sat together a month, the three of them jogging her memory by asking questions. Nalini thinks it was how well she had attuned herself to them, by way of perspective, that let the stories emerge in cohesive sequence for In the Company of Men. Reshma, who has spent more than a year shaping it up, recalls her engagement with Nalini’s life stories: “Nalini chechi talks of becoming a sex worker. Of telling stories. Of both the subtle dangers involved in a woman being alone at night with a stranger and the institutionalised mechanisms that she has to grapple with. Also, this is about the creative energy that ordinary women bring into each moment of their daily life.”

Nalini shares a few lines from her new book with Open in which she talks about storytelling:

‘This is not a capability of mine alone. On becoming a sex worker many acquire this skill. A good sex worker is also a good storyteller; not necessarily a pretty person. The story should be logical. When the police arrests a sex worker with a man, they will separate us. As soon as we are caught we will say that we are husband and wife so as to escape the beating.

They will start questioning. “Where is your house?”

“In such and such place!”

“And yours?”……

And often when questioned separately the story will fall apart.

“Is her house thatched?”

“No sir, it is tiled.”

“Is your house thatched or tiled?”

“Thatched sir!”

Thus husband, wife and everything else tumbles down. So storytelling is part of the planning starting right from the moment you decide to take a room. To me this comes very neatly.’

autobiographyKeralasex workers