Cops Call It Forced SurrogacyFEED FOR THE LIFE FACTORY Girls rescued from traffickers reach Ranchi railway stationPHOTOGRAPH BY TRIBHUVAN TIWARIMailPrintShareShareAAA INCREASE TEXT SIZE
There’s something almost eerily Nazi about this. Not in terms of formal politics, of course. Only ordinary people are involved here. But their actions speak of a rarefied universe of cruelty—elevated to an organised, clinical, coldly amoral enterprise. At the heart of it is the idea that one can exert absolute control over another’s body. The terms of abuse go beyond even sadism; the human body here is just a device and also its product. The stories offer no great cause for optimism, but avoiding the dark dramas, and pretending they don’t exist, is precisely what allows them to grow.
The first story. We’ll call her Soni, as many of them are indeed called—an adivasi name that contains resonances. She is at an undisclosed location in Bihar at present, in hiding, fearing for her life, recuperating from the injuries to her soul. She breaks down often over the phone as she narrates her story. Of how she came to Delhi as a minor and, in stages, passed through a dark mirror—to enter an unreal world of slavery that awaited on the other side, a tiny house, where unknown men set in motion a whole cycle of sowing and harvesting on her body. And that of other girls like her.
As the story starts, life looked cheerless but sufficiently normal. Soni was 15 in 2010 when she, along with four friends, moved out from her village in Jharkhand, joining the tide of humankind flowing out from that immiserated state. Volitional, but only to a degree. For there was an agent, as always, and then a sale and transfer of ownership to an agency, and then the drudgery of housework in a typical Delhi home. She lost track of her friends. Six months on, a man came to see Soni, and said he was from the “office”. He said nothing else—just saw her and left. Days later, another agent came, took her along to a new house. The people at the first house were nice, relatively. They slipped her Rs 10,000, which she concealed in her salwar.
The new house was tiny and surrounded by narrow lanes. Soni was made to sign papers she couldn’t read, something written in English. Then a strange routine started—regular check-ups at a hospital, blood tests and, most importantly, strange injections. She didn’t understand why she needed them. There were other girls at the house, all secluded. The curtains were always firmly drawn. There were guards, agents, staff members and a caretaker, a woman from Jharkhand she called ‘didi’. The rhythms of life seemed regular—sleeping, waking, cleaning, eating. “I would want fish and they would get me fish. Nobody refused me anything. They were nice to me, I didn’t know why,” she says.