Kamala Das Let us invade the brothels and rescue the children! P erverts are on the increase in my home state, Kerala. Newspapers are no longer squeamish about reporting indiscriminate rapes.
The victims are invariably children. Parents of young girls have become nervous wrecks, living in perpetual anxiety. They are not sure if the girls will return from school, unscathed. Till recent times, we were not acquainted with crime. During feudal times I was a little child and could not connect the death of any poor girl of the locality with crime. The rich men threw them into wells when they became conspicuously pregnant.
Morality in those days meant the effective concealment of crime. But those pillars of society spared little girls. Perhaps I was the only writer to write of a child prostitute. If the editor's chair was occupied by an Indian, my story would not have been published. Years later the story that offended the sensibilities of the so-called virtuous was made into a film.
The producer went bankrupt. He could not find a distributor for it. Smug society-women declared that their husbands would net let them see a film set in a bordello. Child prostitution was not to be discussed. Seventy per cent of the inmates of Indian brothels are children below It is still not time to discuss the problem.
There were more men than women in the auditorium. I had handed over a video cassette of my film Rukmini to the chief who was a foreigner. Something has to be done quickly, I told him. But afterwards there was no response, no communication of any kind.
