Only a Prostitute Can Teach You About Every Face of Humanity
- Madhukar Dama
- 3 hours ago
- 17 min read
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Prologue
We often speak of humanity as if it is pure. We imagine kindness, compassion, love, sacrifice. But that is only half the truth.
Humanity is not a single colour. It is a spectrum — good and bad, tender and brutal, noble and corrupt. The same hand that feeds a stranger can also strike. The same society that builds temples and hospitals also fills brothels and prisons. To see only kindness and call it humanity is to blind ourselves to what we truly are.
If we are to understand humanity, we must face all its sides: betrayal, cruelty, neglect, compassion, care.
But who has lived all of this? Who has felt both the sharpest betrayal and the rarest kindness on her own skin? Who has been broken by cruelty yet touched, if only once, by pure compassion? It is the prostitute.
She has met humanity in its rawest forms:
Loved ones selling her.
Traffickers drugging her.
Clients using her.
Police colluding or exploiting her.
Courts caging her.
And sometimes, a stranger showing unexpected kindness.
That is why she alone is the authority on humanity. Not saints, not leaders, not philosophers — but the prostitute.
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1. The Oldest, Omnipresent Profession
From Devadasis in temples to Mughal harems, from Sonagachi’s alleys to Kamathipura’s narrow rooms, prostitution has never vanished.
It survives not because it is chosen, but because society both consumes and condemns it — feeding on it in secret, denying it in public.
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2. How It Begins: Young, Drugged, Forced
Most journeys begin with betrayal.
Children are lured with promises, drugged, or sold. They are targeted because the young fetch higher price and are easier to control. Adults resist. Children cannot.
What begins in terror becomes a lifetime of captivity.
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3. The System That Keeps It Alive
Prostitution is not one man’s crime but a machine:
Pimps and traffickers move girls like goods.
Brothel-keepers enforce debt bondage.
Customers — men from every class — create constant demand.
Families sell or disown.
Police take bribes, tip off pimps, or prey on women themselves.
Courts detain women in the name of protection while traffickers walk free.
Politicians and local bosses shelter the trade.
Religions and cultures preach purity while tolerating exploitation.
Each part feeds the other. That is why the system never dies.
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4. When “Rehabilitation” Becomes Another Prison
Courts send many women to Nari Niketan — state-run homes meant to rehabilitate. On paper, a refuge. In reality, often a harsher captivity.
In a brothel, at least the rules are known; in a home, power is faceless.
Abuse by staff hides behind official seals.
Women are reduced to files, locked in indefinitely.
Escape is punished, complaints disappear.
For many, the state’s protection feels colder than the brothel’s cruelty.
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5. The Many Faces of Abuse
A prostitute is not exploited once; she is broken again and again, in different ways:
Physical: beatings for disobedience, confinement in locked rooms, denial of food or sleep, assaults by violent clients.
Sexual: repeated violation, forced unprotected sex, demands that erase consent.
Mental: constant reminders she is worthless, threats of harm to her or her family.
Psychological: drugs slipped into her body, humiliation repeated until resistance feels pointless.
Emotional: betrayal by those she trusted, abandonment by her own blood, the cruelty of being seen only as flesh.
Each layer is different, but together they grind down body, mind, and soul until survival itself feels like defiance.
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6. Every Face of Humanity
And yet, alongside cruelty, she sometimes meets compassion.
A doctor who heals without disgust.
A passerby who leaves food.
A social worker who listens without judgement.
A rare client who speaks with respect.
She alone lives the full spectrum: betrayal and mercy, cruelty and kindness, all pressed into the same life.
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7. The Mirror of Civilization
Prostitution is not just the oldest profession. It is the oldest mirror.
It shows the violence under respectability, the hypocrisy under law, the tenderness that survives even in darkness.
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Epilogue
We return to the word humanity. The world still tries to dress it in white, as if it means kindness alone. But kindness without cruelty is incomplete. Love without betrayal is incomplete. Care without neglect is incomplete.
The prostitute has lived that truth. Her body has been the battlefield where humanity shows all its colours.
That is why her knowledge is final. She does not describe humanity as a theory. She carries it in her scars, in her eyes, in her silence.
To learn from her is to see what humanity really is: not only our virtues, but also our violence. Not only our compassion, but also our cruelty. Not only the faces we show in light, but also those we hide in the dark.
Only a prostitute can teach you about every face of humanity — because only she has met them all, and survived to tell the story.
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Only a Prostitute Can Teach You About Every Face of Humanity
-- A Dialogue at Yelmadagi
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Prologue — The Gathering at Dawn
The homestead at Yelmadagi was a place that kept its own time. It had no telephone tower, no hum of city light; mornings arrived on their own schedule — slow, inevitable. Today the sky was a clean pale, the fields half-steamed with dew. Neem and tamarind leaves gave the air a small, bitter perfume. The courtyard, sun-bleached and mud-smooth, waited.
Madhukar had arranged mats in a rough circle beneath the shade of an old banyan. A low fire smouldered in a clay hearth; an iron kettle sang intermittently. There were no microphones, no press banners, no institutional logos. He had said, when he asked the visitors to come: “We do not come to fix. We come to listen. We come to meet the faces we prefer to hide.”
They arrived in the soft, human way of those who know why they have come. Some walked in from the village road, others were driven in cars that had to be left at the last mud track. Each carried a small thing — a bundle of bananas, a worn notebook, a camera wrapped in cloth, a folded saree, a plain pain that clung like a second skin.
Madhukar poured tea into clay cups and held the first cup for the Survivor. She took it with both hands, as if anchoring herself before speaking. Around them sat the Social Worker, the Feminist Thinker, the Grassroots Activist, the Writer-Poet, the Ethical Journalist, the retired Judge, the Kind Stranger (a farmer), the Young Seeker, and a few women who came as representatives of many — the prostitutes, who chose to sit together, their faces neither exaggerated nor hidden.
The invitation was simple: speak, listen, and let the morning do the rest.
A breeze passed. The birds kept time like a distant metronome. No one spoke yet. A silence like patience fell over them. Then the Survivor cleared her throat.
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Act I — Faces of Betrayal
The Survivor
“My name doesn’t matter here,” she began. “Names were taken a long time ago. I can tell you the first lie they told me. It was small and gentle, the way liars begin. ‘Come work with us in the city,’ they said. ‘You will earn. You will learn. You will be safe.’”
She touched the clay cup and let her fingers trace its roughness. “My mother wrapped me in the sari she’d worn on her wedding day and handed me to a man who promised a job. There was no work. There was a train. I remember the sound of the train like the first pain. I remember waking up in a room I did not know, with men I did not know. I could not speak their language. I was fourteen.”
She paused. The word “fourteen” was a stone. It fell in the circle and did not roll away.
“They beat me the first night. They told me, ‘This is how you earn.’ Then they taught me to be quiet. At home, there had been hunger; here hunger was constant and deliberate — a tool. Sometimes they gave food and then laughed when I ate because I was hungry. They said my family had sold me. That was betrayal’s first face.”
She swallowed. “Later, the police came. We thought the police were rescue. They took us away, to a place called Nari Niketan. The men who kicked me in the narrow room followed in my memories. The wardens in the home wore different clothes, but their hands were the same. They told us it was for our good. If betrayal can wear a suit and a badge, that was betrayal’s other face.”
No one interrupted. The Social Worker’s notebook lay closed.
The Social Worker
“I have two decades of these stories,” he said. “Girls lured with promises. Families who sign their names on papers they cannot read because the paper says something else. A villain doesn’t always look like a villain. Sometimes he brings a sari, sometimes a cigarette, sometimes a job card saying ‘training.’ I have watched a mother hand over her daughter with tears that look like surrender.”
He pushed his tea cup away and folded his hands. “When we bring them back, often they tell us, ‘Do not send me again.’ They are not begging to return to the brothel; they are begging to avoid the home where authorities speak in rules and not in faces.”
The Feminist Thinker
“You must place these betrayals within the long story of caste and gender,” she said. “Those who are trafficked are rarely the privileged. When hunger meets hierarchy, the result is predictable. The family that sells a daughter does so because systems have taught them that certain bodies are expendable.”
She drew a breath. “And betrayal is not only an act. It is a structure: social, economic, cultural. It is taught. Some betray by doing nothing. Some betray by saying ‘this is how life is.’ It is here, in the silence of the circle, that betrayal becomes a tradition.”
The Grassroots Activist
“Betrayal is also political,” he said, voice tight. “I’ve met police who tell girls where a raid will be held and then take a cut afterwards. I’ve met local leaders who own brothels through proxies. The betrayal becomes municipal. It has offices, schedules, receipts. That’s why it is hard to uproot.”
He looked at the Survivor. “Did your family, later, ever come looking?”
She shook her head slowly. “They wrote sometimes — threats more than letters. Once, my mother sent a photograph. It was a family photograph with me airbrushed out. I learned that in the world that betrayed me, silence is an answer.”
Silence in the courtyard thickened, not empty but filled with the memory of the railroad tracks, the train whistle, the photograph with a missing woman.
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Act II — Faces of Captivity
The Social Worker
“I want to say something about the business of captivity,” he said. “People talk about escape. They imagine a door thrown open. But captivity here is chemical, economic, bureaucratic.”
He told them of accounting sheets fixed to a brothel wall — sums written in crude handwriting that never balanced for the women. “They are told they owe money for a train, for a sari, for food, for protection. The number never falls. It is always rewritten. They sleep, work, and their bodies are amortised.” His fingers moved as if tracing a ledger.
“Raids,” he continued, “are theatre unless they are accompanied by follow-through. We take them out from one door and deliver them to another. Nari Niketan is meant to be a sanctuary. But I have seen girls plead to be taken back to the brothel. They said: ‘At least there, I know my day. There is hunger there but not this blankness of power.’”
The Survivor
“In the brothel,” she said, “there is a schedule. You learn rules — who sleeps where, who pays whom. You learn to lie in ways that keep you alive. The home takes away even those lies. They call it rehabilitation and then they give you forms to sign in a language you do not read. They cut your hair sometimes, as if a haircut could cut memory.”
She became quiet for a long time. “One night the warden locked us in a room and told us we could not call our relatives. A young girl cried so loudly the walls shook. They told her she was hysterical and fed her pills to calm her. In the morning, she could not remember why she cried. I cannot begin to tell how that erases you.”
The Judge (softly)
“I was once sure the law could be a shelter,” he said, voice thin as a reed. “I signed orders thinking they would help. I did not see that when law operates without accountability, it becomes a tool. We write protective orders and place women into institutions that lack oversight. That is captivity with a name of care.”
His hands trembled as he folded them. “We measure safety by forms. We are not measuring life.”
The Feminist Thinker
“Captivity does not end at walls,” she said. “It continues in speech. The language of rescue often infantilises. It removes agency from the woman. Saying ‘we rescued you’ can sometimes mean ‘we know what’s best for you’ — which is, in practice, another form of control.”
The sun had climbed higher; a few vultures circled in the distance, patient and aloof.
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Act III — Faces of Cruelty
The Grassroots Activist
“When I speak of cruelty,” he said, “I do not only mean blows. I mean the everyday contempt. The men who come and do not see the woman as a person. The ones who spit words like it is nothing. I have confronted policemen who laughed about cases. I have seen pimps brag about their power like they were rulers. Cruelty has a public grin.”
He slammed his palm lightly on his knee. “There was a night raid where the police took a woman into a van and then came back to show us a bundle of cash. They said, ‘Reward for duty.’” He spat the words like sour fruit.
The Survivor
“They said I was a criminal,” she said. “They took our names, then the names were placed in files with boxes checked: Destitute, Immoral, Probable Offender. They labelled us through lenses that never met our faces. That labelling is cruelty because the label outlives any person. The label follows you home like a shadow.”
The Judge
“I have prosecuted traffickers,” he said, voice low. “Not nearly enough. Convictions are rare. Witnesses are intimidated. Evidence disappears. Our criminal procedure was not designed for organised fraud that hides within ordinary life. We are clumsy in dealing with a network that is subtle and criminal in the way it pretends to be legitimate.”
He looked at the Grassroots Activist. “I know the courts can look like protectors of cruelty when they fail. I have seen the cruelty of the bench become judicial cruelty when procedure is used as an excuse to do nothing.”
The Writer / Poet
He had been quiet; now he spoke like someone reading from memory. “Cruelty is a steady language. It writes itself on faces. It is the small boy who sees a woman, laughs, and passes on. It is a city that builds slums near palaces. It is the architect who plans a shelter with no windows. Cruelty is structural as much as personal.”
He read a few lines of verse about a woman whose tears hardened into the colour of rust and who, if she laughed once, would be accused of mocking fate. The words did not offer comfort. They were an incision.
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Act IV — Faces of Neglect
The Ethical Journalist
“I have sat in shelters with cameras and switched them off because the world does not want to hold the gaze long enough,” he said. “We parachute in, record a montage, and leave. Headlines move the story but not the life.”
He described a shelter where heating did not work in winter, beds were shared, and medicine was one pill for many ailments. A manager said, “We do what we can.” That phrase, he said, was the euphemism of neglect.
“It is neglect because there is no will. It is neglect because the systems think out of sight equals out of mind. It is neglect because the public wants easy moral answers — rescue now, discomfort later.”
The Survivor
“Neglect is the slowest violence,” she said. “Violence hurts quickly. Neglect erases. When you are ignored, you begin to forget how to be human. I used to stand on a balcony and watch lights, thinking a lamp was a promise. Then one day, I realised lamps mean nothing if no one looks at you with care.”
The Young Seeker
“In college we studied rights on paper,” the student said, voice tentative. “But the faces here teach me rights without hearts are mere ink. Neglect is a civic failure.”
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Act V — Faces of Kindness
The morning had warmed. Tea had grown cold in some cups, but in the circle, tenderness found a way to surface among the heavy truths.
The Kind Stranger
The farmer, leathered and kind, stood and moved a little closer to the Survivor. His hands were large and honest.
“One day in the city, I saw a woman sitting alone. She had a blanket over her knees. People walked by. I bought her a tea and sat. She told me a small story about her son. I listened. For me, that was it. For her, she told me later, it was the only day someone asked. We think kindness must be grand. Sometimes it is small.”
The Survivor looked at him and nodded. Her face, for a moment, softened.
The Writer / Poet
He read again, but this time the lines were simple: a woman given a shawl by a child, the child too shy to know the value, the woman later keeping the shawl as if it were a relic. “Kindness remains,” he said, “like a pebble in a river. It does not stop the current, but the sound of it remembers.”
The Social Worker
“I have seen care that is quiet,” he said. “A doctor who wraps wounds and does not ask how the injury happened. A neighbour who gives a bowl of rice and leaves without words. These acts do not solve structural violence, but they are water in a dry throat.”
The Survivor
“I remember a woman standing in a queue who handed me a stale bun,” she said. “She did not say a word. I ate it and cried. Why did I cry? Not for the bun alone. It was because someone had acted like I was a person.”
Kindness in their conversation never became sentimental. They did not pretend it erased the system. It was simply recognition that, amid cruelty and neglect, human tenderness still appeared, small and irrational and necessary.
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Act VI — The Young Seeker’s Reflection
The student had been watching like someone watching a difficult film. He closed his notebook and said, honestly, “I came here thinking I could learn about helping. But what I am learning is humility. I learned that our moral language is insufficient if we do not also learn to see. The prostitute who has lived all these faces is not a case study. She is a teacher. And we — all of us — are poor students.”
He looked at the Survivor. “How do we learn to stop making her a problem and start listening?”
She looked at him. “Stop making us fables. Start making us people. Sit. Hear. Do not make our narratives into your trophies.”
The student swallowed. It was a small, direct command: stop spectacle.
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Act VII — The Teacher of Humanity
The circle had reached a point of accumulated witness. Voices paused and measured themselves. Madhukar rose to speak, not to lecture but to gather the sound of the morning into a single thread.
Madhukar
“Today we sat in a ring because the world builds rings of a different kind: courts, brothels, homes, shelter walls. In those rings things happen. People are bought and sold. Names are changed. Paper replaces story. This morning we heard many faces: betrayal, captivity, cruelty, neglect, kindness.”
He let the list hang like a litany, then continued, quietly: “We have, without intending to, also shown another thing. Each of you is part of how humanity looks. The Judge has within him the law and its failures; the Activist carries the fire of outrage; the Social Worker carries the tiredness of repeated rescue; the Journalist carries the guilt of spectacle; the Writer keeps memory alive; the Farmer keeps simple tenderness; the Student carries the possibility of future witness. But look at the Survivor: she bears them all. She has been betrayed by family, caged by traffickers, hurt by clients, neglected by police, misled by rescue, and sometimes, once in a while, comforted by an anonymous kindness. She knows every face of humanity.”
He looked around slowly. “She is the authority not because she wishes to teach, but because life has taught her all the things we prefer to avoid. That is the seriousness of our listening. We must not come to her as saviours. We must come to her as students.”
The Survivor folded her hands. “You speak of teaching, but I do not want your lessons to be platitudes. I want you to learn to stop turning our wounds into your lectures. If you must write, write truth. If you must listen, listen without the need to conclude.”
Madhukar
“The need to conclude is itself a face of our civilisation,” he said. “We like tidy narratives. But these lives are not tidy. They are knots and thread. If the prostitute is the mirror, then look at the mirror unblinking. Do not flinch.”
He poured more tea for the quiet, for the ash, for the calm that followed a thunderstorm. The circle remained still for a long time, each person looking into their own reflection, the Survivor like a hand-mirror held steady.
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Epilogue — Silence at Noon
The sun had climbed to its own blunt apex. The courtyard warm, the cups emptied, the fire a shrug of grey. The visitors rose slowly, dressed themselves in silence, carried their small things with the care of those who had been offered something raw and unsoftened.
There was no applause, no concluding statement strung like beads on a speaker’s lapel. There was only this: the Survivor walked to the edge of the courtyard, looked at the fields, and for the first time in many months said, “Thank you for listening.”
The Social Worker and the Activist continued to argue softly about method and outrage, but not angrily; there had been too much to carry. The Journalist folded his camera and did not ask for shots. The Writer tucked his small notebook with a look of uneasy joy. The Judge walked slowly, his gait less certain than when he had entered, but his shoulders had eased.
Madhukar stood on the steps and watched them go. He thought of the line they had all said, in pieces: that humanity cannot be claimed as only goodness. It is a gallery of faces, some kind and some monstrous. The prostitute had looked into that gallery and had been forced to learn each portrait by heart. She had not asked to be a teacher. Life had placed the course on her body and told her to study.
As visitors left the homestead and the road dipped towards the village, the Survivor stayed a little longer. She sat down where the sun hit the ground and rested her head against the banyan trunk. Someone — the farmer, perhaps, or the student — placed another cup of tea beside her without a word.
Madhukar closed the gate behind the last car. The day held the residue of conversation — not resolved, not healed, but known. That knowledge is the first, and perhaps only, necessary step.
On the table inside lay a single sheet of paper. It would be a long work to write what had been said. It would be longer still to make the world see it. For now, the day ended with the sound of distant tractors and the slow, honest creak of the homestead gate.
The dialogue had no tidy finish because life does not. It had only the witness of voices and the patient lesson of one woman who had known every face humanity shows. She had taught; those who had listened were changed, just enough for the morning not to be wasted.
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Every Face of Humanity
she sits in a room
where the paint peels like dried skin
in Kamathipura, Sonagachi,
or some nameless street in a town
you’ve never visited but always judged.
the newspapers call it
the oldest profession.
they forget to mention
the oldest betrayal.
a mother’s silence.
a father’s absence.
a promise wrapped in train tickets.
the girl is drugged,
her childhood swallowed in one sip,
and the men arrive —
policemen in khaki,
clerks with briefcases,
farmers with calloused hands,
sons of priests,
sons of politicians,
all equal in desire,
all equal in forgetting her face.
this is humanity:
a coin dropped on the floor,
a handcuff polished with sweat,
a body written on like paper
by men who never learned
to read her eyes.
but listen closely —
there is more.
there is the court order,
stamped in red,
sending her to a home
called protection.
Nari Niketan,
a cage built with soft words.
inside, the wardens learn
how power tastes at night,
how silence can be bought cheaper
than food rations.
she learns again:
the brothel has rules,
the home has shadows.
both demand obedience.
still, she survives.
because surviving is
the only rebellion
no one taught her.
and in the middle of this machine,
kindness arrives like a cracked clay cup.
a doctor who does not flinch
while touching her wound.
a farmer who buys her tea
without asking her name.
a child who gives her a shawl
and runs away shy.
that is also humanity.
we like to believe humanity is
charity, prayer, temples ringing,
politicians waving from jeeps.
but humanity is also
a police boot,
a judge’s signature,
a neighbour’s silence,
and a stranger’s unexpected hand
holding hers for a moment too long.
she has lived it all:
every face of humanity.
the cruelty,
the neglect,
the betrayal,
the false rescue,
the rare compassion.
and if you ask who knows humanity best,
do not look to your gurus,
your philosophers,
your saints in saffron.
look to her.
the woman who has carried
the entire weight of our species
on her tired body
and still breathes.
in the narrow lanes
where gods avert their eyes
and men bargain with shadows,
she sits,
a teacher without a classroom,
a scripture written in scars.
her lesson is simple:
this world is not made of saints and sinners.
it is made of faces,
every face,
and she has seen them all.
if you want to know humanity,
stop building temples of excuses.
sit with her.
drink her tea.
listen without fear.
because only she can show you
that humanity is not good or bad,
holy or profane —
it is complete,
like the monsoon sky,
holding thunder and rain,
darkness and sudden light.
and she,
the prostitute,
is the only mirror
that has never lied.
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