Asha remembers how she ached to speak Bengali when she first landed in Pune’s red-light district some 17 years ago. Today, there are enough women for Asha to converse with in her mother tongue ? but she is still not happy. For gone are those days when Asha lorded over other sex workers as one of the few Bengali women there. Today, an estimated seven per cent of the 5,000 sex workers in Pune are from Bengal.

The swelling ranks in recent years of Bengali women, peppered with an increasing number of Bangladeshi recruits, in the flesh trade in western India ? namely, Mumbai and Pune in Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat ? is a tale of poverty and desperation.

The women have different reasons for leaving their home towns and states for a land they have never seen before. The anonymity that a big city several hundred kilometres away from home shrouds them with is a compelling reason. Asha, now a stocky 38-year-old, chose to stay in Pune’s Budhwar Peth over Calcutta’s Sonagachi because she was going to earn relatively more and live in marginally healthier conditions. But it was also because she was going to be away from home.

After the death of her husband, a municipal worker, Asha had to earn a living. The flesh trade was the way out, but not while her relatives lived in Kalighat. So Asha left town, to ensure that society did not stigmatise her. “In our society, if a fly falls in the milk, both the fly and the milk are thrown out,” she says.

Indrani Sinha, director of Sanlaap, an NGO working with sex workers in West Bengal, believes that women may be leaving their state because of increasing police pressures on traffickers in West Bengal. Debaprasad Pal, professor of microbiology at the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta, has another take on the subject. “Sex workers are also found to migrate when detected with HIV/AIDS,” he says.

Activists stress that wo-men from the east are often plucked from their homes with promises of money and love. Shabana, a 25-year-old sex worker in Mumbai’s Kamathipura area, was brought to the city from Murshidabad by a woman who said her daughter needed a baby- sitter.

Shabana was then sold to a brothel in Mumbai’s Grant Road for Rs 25,000. A client-turned-lover paid Rs 30,000 for her, enabling Shabana to function independently. Her “rescuer” manages her life and finances.

Seema, a sex worker for nine years in Mumbai, says she took to sex work after her husband deserted her, leaving her with two small children. She had heard of women leaving for Mumbai ? the city of gold ? and she too wanted to get there. She didn’t want to stay back earning just a few hundred rupees as a domestic worker or tilling the fields. She broached the subject with neighbouring women in Calcutta’s Beleghata during one of their afternoon chats and they gave her a contact.

But behind the arrival of most Bengali women in the brothels of Mumbai and Pune is almost always a man (aadmi, as he is called), who lures young women into the trade, through ‘marriage’. Typically, he is a lover, henchman, trafficker and pimp ? who exercises an iron grip on his women. Take the case of Nasreen, a frail and beautiful teenaged sex worker. Seeing her indulge in a light-hearted banter with some NGO employees distributing condoms, her “man” ? a strapping, 20-something ? publicly rebukes her, ordering her back into the brothel. Nasreen follows him meekly ? for any act of disobedience leads to abuse and violence.

The money that they earn goes to the pimps-cum-husbands, too. Yellava, a middle-aged sex worker from Karnataka, says that Nasreen’s story is that of many a Bengali sex worker. There are three Bengali women in her room, she says, and they are beaten up if they don’t pander to the whims of their “men”, who also take away a sizeable portion of the day’s earnings.

COLOURS OF LIFE: A sex worker at a fashion show

On the other hand, money is not what it used to be. The national AIDS scare has caused a decline in business, especially in the last six years. “The number of clients has fallen from an average of nine to 10 to two or three a day,” says Tejasvi Sevekari, director, Saheli, an HIV/AIDS intervention project in Pune’s red-light district. Sushmita, a sex worker in Mumbai, says she hardly earns Rs 15,000 to Rs 19,000 a month ? a quarter of what she earned five years ago.

Ageing sex workers see diminishing incomes. Rukmini, a Mumbai-based sex worker in her thirties, won’t say how much she earns now ? but it is significantly less than the Rs 40,000 she used to once earn. She blames her dwindling monthly income on both age and the influx of Bengali sex workers in her quarter. And equally responsible for her plight, she stresses, is the burgeoning number of minor Bengali girls in the area.

Two such fresh-faced girls, all set for business ? around noon ? have no qualms about that. “Business is good only when one is young,” chirps one of them, giggling. She earns Rs 30,000 from an average of six customers a day. Half of this goes to her brothel keeper and a sizeable amount towards the upkeep of her “man”.

The balance, she says, is sent to her husband and two children in Calcutta. And she is saving for a house being constructed there. “I plan to go home after four years,” she dreams.

The older ones will tell her that no one ever goes back home. For most of the sex workers who left home to ensure that their families were not stigmatised by their chosen profession, their temporary homes are fast becoming permanent settlements.

Seema, a sex worker in Mumbai, says her parents believe she is dead ? and she’d rather keep it that way, despite yearning to see them. The anonymity of big city life has grown on her. “I would like to live and die in Mumbai,” she says.