Nalini Jameela’s ‘The Autobiography of a Sex Worker’

I was skeptical before I began listening to the Malayalam audiobook of Nalini Jameela’s acclaimed autobiography ‘Njan Lymgikathozhilali’. The first part of the book dealing with her childhood and initial foray into sex work was a drag. But towards the end, when she began writing of her activism and the socio-political context of the sex trade in Kerala, the narrative gathered force and hooked me.

Her attitude and take on the sex trade had a very libertarian ring to it. It’s a transaction like any other and if one is not coerced, the state should stay away. The police brutality and daily harassment that she casually writes about and the near-death experiences she’s faced with some of her clients remind us of the margins on which women in this trade live. In a moving passage, she describes the punitive “sex-worker premium” imposed once they are identified as such—hotel rooms, autorickshaw rides, and restaurant bills are invariably inflated. When she observes that most men, according to her, visit prostitutes for companionship and often just to hold hands and be held, she extends her critique to the urban spaces of our cities that kill all possibilities for such intimacies. She also lampoons the rehabilitation of sex workers as a solution and also explains the stigma attached to the concept of ‘brothels’.

In a comical section, she once falls into a well in the middle of the night and after many hours gets rescued by the cops. The driver and the police inspector who accompany her to the hospital turn out to be her former clients and they remain stoic and refrain from showing concern that might expose their familiarity. Even more amusing was to read about the clients who cut across social strata – drivers, traders, daily wage labourers, youngsters. According to her, many women in Kerala enter the sex trade through construction work. When masons and contractors demand sexual favours for better wages, most women end up embracing the profession as a more economically rational solution to their woes.

Jameela also writes extensively of the role that the activist couple Jayasree and Maithreyan played in mainstreaming the concerns of the sex workers during the late 90s. (The cine star Kani Kusruthi is their daughter). The book was also a reminder of the quality of the television content that used to get beamed to households in Kerala in the late 1990s. I remember as a kid watching Nammal Thammil, Kannadi, Nerku Ner and other talk shows and slowly trying to piece together realities of the world we were never exposed to. Today, all of that has been hijacked by Star Singer shows and Talent Hunts!