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‘If you think it is the number of miles that matter to a traveller then you know the wrong kind of travellers’, remarked my father, restricting the scope of his approval to my first solo travel plan to Delhi (hardly 13 miles from where I stay). I was slightly cut up about it because as a nineteen year old, I wanted my first solo trip to be to a place I could flaunt and not just the city next door. Not that I had visited Delhi before, despite being so close, but I think we tend to underestimate the things we get easy. Yet such a ‘liberty’ wasn’t bereft of terms and conditions; I had to take a friend along, restrict the trip to just seeing the monuments and be home by seven in the evening. Arihant, my school friend, had visited Delhi before, so it was only logical for me to take him along and he readily agreed. As we embarked on our little excursion, Arihant and I decided to make my maiden trip to Delhi more than just about the monuments, he had visited most of them before and vacuously remarked ‘you might as well sit with our history textbook’. Be that as it may, his rationale swayed me and following a little brainstorming, we decided to visit the biggest red light area of Delhi on Swami Shraddhanand Marg, famously known by its colonial name GB Road. Growing up we had almost assumed the place to be fictional and now it was the time to know what it looked like. We were brimming with ambivalence. It was a typical market lane buzzing with people and nondescript shops on both the sides of the lane selling articles of everyday use. It felt as if all our efforts to maintain the made up nonchalance in our walk and on our faces were turning futile and just when I had thought that we were too uninitiated to get introduced to that part of the world, we were approached by Munna. ‘Desi (local), Nepalese, Bengali, South Indian, Marathi you'll get every kind of girl here’, he whispered in my ear. He looked meek and his aura was forbearing. He told us all about the place and how to look for brothels, we learnt that every shop has a brothel above it and is identified by a number written on the right side of the shop with an adjoining staircase that led up to the brothel, he then pointed his finger towards the skyline and said ‘I work for that one’ and as our eyes followed his finger, we saw a saree clad woman hurling kisses towards us through a tightly fenced window, it was the first time I had seen a sex worker in real life. What baffled me most about that place was the ostensible duality that it contained. You could see an old lady buying groceries from one of the shops and the same shopkeeper directing the ‘clients’ upstairs to the brothel. How two completely different worlds co-existed and overlapped with each other without acknowledging the existence of the other fascinated me. Surroundings tend to reflect the nature of people that inhabit it. We felt a weird comfort with Munna, his dainty figure and calm demeanour relaxed our mental faculties, so when he assured us that we could just ‘see’ the girls and then decide if we wanted to do anything or not, we agreed. We had only come to see and even though it felt like something could go terribly wrong up-there, the only people who could have stopped us were us and we were too curious to be stopped. He led us through a drab staircase and we saw that it opened into a large hall with three rooms adjacent to the entry door. As his clarion call faded we saw three women approaching us, he introduced two of them as his sisters and one as a wife. Arihant, in his rife ignorance, asked ‘how can you let other men touch your wife?’ to which Munna, with a pardoning smile, replied ‘so that my daughter can eat’. Embarrased, we looked at each other and silently walked out.