Zana Briski

Beauty and her customer Naren in the brothel. Beauty is from Bangladesh and without papers she sleeps her way across the border in order to go home to visit her five-year old son. She is very popular with the customers. She says of them, “By acting like I’m in love, I get them under my control, so that they keep coming back. This is my way of earning money. I never truly love anyone.” 2001 © Zana BRISKI Inside a brothel room. 2001 © Zana BRISKI Paper butterflies decorating a brothel room. 2001 © Zana BRISKI A drunk customer who has fallen down the stairs inside the brothel. 2001 © Zana BRISKI A sex worker walks by in the brothel, going back to her room. 2001 © Zana BRISKI Detail from the wall of a brothel room. 2001 © Zana BRISKI A sex worker takes an afternoon nap on a bench in the corridor. 2001 © Zana BRISKI Negotiations between customers and sex workers on the third and fourth floors of the brothel. 2001 ©

I look like a witch. Tumpa has painted my eyes thick with kohl, my lips bright pink, my toenails vibrant blue. During this daily ritual my mother calls long distance from England on my mobile phone. “How is everything darling?” “Fine, everything’s fine,” I answer. I wince while Tumpa yanks my hair into shape. My mother doesn’t know I’m living in a brothel. Tumpa’s mother doesn’t know she’s living in a brothel either. Brothels are inherently places of deceit. Customers entering the brothel I have a mobile phone for my safety. Tumpa constantly uses it to call her lover Gautam, to find out when he is coming over. Gautam is a 26-year-old assassin. He tells me that his father was killed by political goondas (hooligans) just before he was born in 1974 and he wants revenge. Gautam claims to have killed eleven people so far, but he is aiming for the seventeen involved in his father’s killing. I ask him if he will stop at seventeen. He says he doesn’t know. Debris left in a