Letters from India
“Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,” Rani Bai said. “Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one who is gentle …”
She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. “But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.”
“And eight of them every day,” her friend Kaveri said. “Sometimes ten. Unknown people. What kind of life is that?”
William Dalrymple had an excellent piece on the lives of devadasis–sacred sex workers–in a recent New Yorker. The piece is faithful to its subject: the writer simply records their words–or so it seems in this account which is actually quite artful and even novelistic. Dalrymple tells me that ten such non-fictional stories will make up his next book on India.
As William’s story is also about the depredation of AIDS, please check this report about a new anthology, AIDS Sutra.
More: a very affecting memoir-piece by Ananya Vajpeyi on death and a hunger that can’t be fed.
