Life crawls on for Sonagachi's young

Kolkata (Reuters) Every time her mother brings a man home, little Pinky picks up her infant sister and goes out to play in the grimy lanes of Kolkata's rundown red light district.

That is, if it is daytime.

At night, the scrawny girls sleep under a cot lifted by layers of bricks because their mother might need the bed to entertain late night customers.

Seven-year-old Pinky's sordid life echoes the existence of thousands of children in Sonagachi, one of India's biggest red light centres where childhood is about battling life's murky side and often losing it.

A documentary on these children of the bordello won an Oscar this year, but recognition worldwide has meant little for Sonagachi's estimated 12,000 children, life for whom remains a cycle of poverty and prostitution that is difficult to break.

Many of these unschooled children of sex workers are employed in small factories, shops and cheap eateries where they scrub dishes and mop floors for as little as Rs20 (about Dh1.5) a day.

The very young ones like Pinky spend their day babysitting their infant siblings in the narrow lanes of Sonagachi exposed to drunken men, street brawls and heroin-shooting pimps in one of Asia's biggest red light districts with 6,000 sex workers.

"We tell our mothers from outside the door when we are hungry. We play on the streets until we are called in," says Pinky, rocking her little sister in her arms.

"The men who come are not good people. They swear and drink. But they give my mother money."

The world saw the children's struggle, humiliation, exploitation and also their craving for freedom from their squalid existence in this year's Oscar-winning documentary Born Into Brothels.

The children themselves helped make the movie, written and directed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman. The children were given cameras so they could learn photography and possibly improve their lives.

But the global recognition that the Oscar brought for Sonagachi hasn't translated into benefits for its unfortunate children.

"We have heard that some film has been made on our children. But I don't know much about it," says Minati Das, Pinky's young mother. "Anyway, it doesn't make a difference to us."

"Life remains exactly the same ugly way it was for Sonagachi's children before the Oscar award," said Mrinal Dutta, secretary of a group set up to represent the sex workers of Sonagachi.

But British-born Briski said she planned to set up a school for the children.