Closed notebooks, open ears. And hearts, in our case. I was interviewing a group of sex workers in Delhi, scribbling everything they were saying into my black-bound diary. Even though this was during the pandemic and we tried to stay safe, at some point the masks came off. Theirs to be able to share details of their lives, mine to convey trust – that I was being sensitive to their revelations.
The act of writing was both a bridge and a marker of distance.
When our time together was over, the coordinator who had organised the meeting asked me if I could drop one of them home. It’s on your way, he said, introducing me to her. Her name meant boundary in English. We smiled at each other. She hadn’t been present in the group I’d spoken to. But as we sat in the car, we forgot our contexts. She told me about potential clients wanting to see the faces of sex worker before finalising an arrangement, and how this worked in today’s tech-driven times. I ventured to ask her intimate details about her work. She shared it all. We spoke about love. I drove slowly. Her eyes were beautiful. Heartbreak.
My hands were on the wheel. I wasn’t writing anything this time. She showed me old photos of her lover, still on her mobile. I couldn’t possibly put all this into the story – it felt like I would be crossing a line. Crude, even. So, I wrote...