Coerced into flesh trade for years past, Bibi X has paid dearly for trying to break away from her tormentors who are now forcing her to sell her three-year-old daughter before she can send her off to Edhi
In December, on a balmy afternoon to be one with nature — as they say — I am all revved up to leave the ugliness of the world behind and retreat into the innards of a park, nestling against Islamabad’s beauteous Margallas. This God’s-acre actually is for children, but its caretakers, the adults, are conducting a messy business here.
And soon I find out how. There is this woman displaying her wares of open potato chips, peanuts and multi-coloured candy on a scrunched up stall, standing near the ticket entrance. Business seems ‘booming’ as her little customers; those excited school kids in uniform and with pennies to boot are all over, shouting and screaming and wanting to be served first. Shepherded by schoolmistresses, the innocent horseplay and the joy of life these little souls sprinkle around is like fairy dust.
Baby F (let’s leave it at that), meanwhile, has decided to climb down from the lap of her mother, the woman with the stall, and wobble across to the other side of the road. Her mother, Bibi X, runs after her to bring her back to her workstation. The child is defiant and in no mood to be harnessed by her mother’s arms. She wrestles free and dashes off again. It’s her own kiddy way of keeping herself amused.
Barefoot in the park, the mother-daughter duo make a good story, I mull to myself and reflexively pull out my camera, mindless of the bombshell waiting to explode. Pulled hastily by Bibi X the minute she finds out I intend to write about her, I find myself the recipient of a horror story with details so sick they sock me right in my face. Speechlessly and with a heart half-sinking, I hear the sordid tale of Bibi X unfold.
She vomits out her life story ... overwrought, she wants all to know what’s going on with her, who her tormentors are, and that her little girl is haram (illegitimate) ....
Instinctively, Baby F calms down as if her mother’s vibes have touched her, too. She sits idly in her lap and gives me a blank look. Those limpid eyes are so expressive, so knowing of life to come .... Her hair is all matted — probably she’s not been given a bath for days. Her striking bright-red frock with electric-blue plastic bangles adorning her chubby wrists, the sun-soaked golden streaks in her hair ... would wrench anyone’s heart at the sight of innocence stamped with the label of a bastard born. Bibi X volunteers: “F’s father is a policeman.”
Coerced into prostitution for years past, “I have had men come to my door in the middle of the night, beat me up, tear my clothes whenever I have refused sexual favours ... life has been a nightmare....”
“And whenever I got pregnant, these same men would get the baby aborted.”
Bibi X, a hobo today, is a wreck. Her clothes are so putrid, her face full of ravines, hardened and weary, her eyes sunk deep. The only life left in this woman — no, call her a sex slave — is her smile ... spontaneous in the face of adversity.
She says she has paid dearly for trying to break away from her tormentors: “I have been framed and wrongfully charged and thrown into Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi.”
Her male tormentors are now after her three-year-old daughter. “They have been forcing me to sell F for Rs5,000 and I am resisting because I know they will make her a prostitute as well...”
The woman wants to send her daughter to Edhi so that she may escape the hand that life has dealt her mother.
“My torture has gone on too long, I am so tired ... I have often contemplated going on TV and exposing this racket ... please write everything that I tell you ... I need help!”
Bibi X is talking so fast, breaking out in her own dialect, that to grasp quick the feverish intensity of her tragic life proves challenging. She looks terrified as she turns to a group of men sporting beards lounging just across from where we are conversing. They eye us suspiciously, as if they know what we are talking about.
“It’s them — the caretakers who have abused me by forcing me to give sexual favours to their bosses. In return, they have allowed me to put up my stall here.”
There is a lot more unsaid, but time is not on our side. The colloquy must be wrapped up post-haste before the men — desperately trying to eavesdrop — turn ugly.
As if to expunge our chat in a bid to throw off the men, with a raised voice, I ask Bibi X how business is going and what’s her take home?
Picking up the cue, Bibi X replies while turning to the men: “By Allah’s grace, I take home enough to support myself and F.”
In full view, we shake hands and part.
Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world, I drive to a fairly affluent neighbourhood to photograph a house where young girls were once held captive and forced to provide sex to customers who came in all day long in their big, shiny cars.
Peter Landesman’s outraging story in the New York Times Magazine, Sex slaves on Main Street, of girls smuggled into the US from Mexico, jolts me into a journey to the house where under-age girls were stashed, molested, raped and sold for sex. When the police raided the house, it found four girls — between the ages of 14 and 17 — living in a “squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ‘morning after’ pills and misoprostol, and anti-ulcer medication that can induce abortion.”
“The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.”
On a sunless day, with snow all around, as I drive on the Main Street towards my destination, I am literally sick in my stomach, thinking what these minors must have lived through at the hands of their traffickers and customers. Houses around, some of them quite pretty, still sport Santa Claus figurines with fairy lights and tiny icicle bulbs decorating their front yards. Children must live here, I tell myself. Normal, pampered kids, whose parents want the best for them ... could anyone know that in their midst lived little girls forced into sex, day and night?
Suddenly, I stop! Yes, that’s the house NYT Magazine mentioned: 1212 West Front Street in Plainsfield, New Jersey!
Plonked right on a busy traffic light, the house has a convenience store, a gift shop and a supermarket in front. On the side is the post office. And nearby is the fire station. Not too far on the same street is the police station. Ensconced among these government landmarks is the house where these girls lived and where cars drove up all day and dozens of men came and went. But no one in the area knew what was going on.
Sex trafficking has reached epidemic proportions worldwide. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world’s borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls and others as young as five who fall victim to the sex trade. “These are people with no choice whatsoever and they don’t earn a dime,” says Peter Landesmen.
“And let me throw you one more address that I couldn’t get into the story for legal reasons. But try the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the East 80s, a brownstone nine blocks from where my parents actually live!”
Coerced into flesh trade for years past, Bibi X has paid dearly for trying to break away from her tormentors who are now forcing her to sell her three-year-old daughter before she can send her off to Edhi 
