I would like to introduce you to one of my clinic assistants, Agnisikha Roy (name changed), who is actually a teacher in one of the centers at sonagachi. Agnisikha does not have any formal paramedical training but she is a sensitive person and does her job exceptionally well and I have nothing to complain of.
Agnisikha Roy, unmarried, aged 41 years, MA (philosophy honours) and a B Ed, is highly qualified and still has opted for being a teacher in the red-light area of sonagachi. The payment is meager but that did not prevent her from taking up the job. She has been teaching for the last 20 years and wanted to do something different, so when this offer came her way her curiosity about the social fabric of sonagachi won over her initial hesitation and apprehension. She felt that there was really no need for her to know from where her students came from and her duty only lay in teaching her students and helping them to excel as good human beings and establish themselves as productive members of this society in the future.
I once asked her why she opted for such a job. Agnisikha replied that she could have easily earned thrice as much by teaching children of the average middle-income families and this was exactly what she was doing for the last two decades. She now wanted to perform in a more challenging field like teaching the children of marginalized people, such as the sex workers, who are a taboo to the general populace.
Agnisikha finds that the average sex worker child is no less intelligent than his/her counterpart in the modern society, only the child is in need of more love, more care, more protection and empathy. She has been working at this center for the last two years and feels that she has been a recipient of much love, respect and regards from her students, their parents, her teacher colleagues, her supervisor, the dance teacher and “daktarbabu” whom she addresses as “Sir”. Agnisikha feels that the children are going astray due to parental misguidance and the particular environment that prevail in the locality.
She has been a keen observer of the local rowdiness and hooliganism, the frequent police raids, the excessive use of abusive language, the uninterrupted availability and consumption of liquor, the frequent social functions with blaring hindi music and the great celebrations duing “Durga and Kali pujas” and even during pujas like “Manasha” and “Kartik”. She has also been a silent witness to the politicization/unionization of the trade and its ineffectivity in changing the lives of the sex workers for the better. She feels that the unwanted and untimely knowledge of parental involvement in the sex trade at an early impressionable age has catalysed the early sexual initiation of the boy child in the role of a tout/liquor vendor. Such knowledge has probably also resulted in a much more earlier sexual initiation in case of the girl child at times by the mother herself and/or her baboo or some elder sibling in the family. Agnisikha knows that the traditional thought of considering the girl child as a future earning prospect is gradually undergoing a change and that though it is a herculian task to bring about such a change, even a minor change, there is no better way to pursue her dream than by joining Women’s Interlink Foundation, where she will get a chance to work and probably effect certain changes in her own way, through her personal advocacy and teaching efforts.
She always has a silent prayer and a hope in her heart, that the girl children may be able to flourish in an atmosphere away from the overcrowded dinghy lanes of sonagachi where mothers are forced to degrade themselves in front of their own children and jostle with friends, foes, touts, dalals and clients alike, to eke out their daily existence.
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