schoolgirls who come first

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!/ Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?/ Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!/ He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones./ He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Her name was Kanchan, which was almost certainly a fake, and she came from Bharatpur, in an Indian state famed for desert romance. She was in an electric blue two-piece outfit, with a soft little tummy showing between. She had bruises on her bare arms, and should have looked younger.

Directions to Sonagachi are among the most frequently-asked by single men travelling through Kolkata, and you can walk into the houses at any time of the day, even through a blazing hot afternoon, and still find girls inside, pimps hanging out by the doorways. Kanchan will cost you Rs.1,500, but you get all kinds, even “schoolgirls who come first in their class.”

“There is nothing you will learn about Kolkata here,” shouted Kanchan, as she threw me out into the sun, after extracting a 500-rupee note for time wasted (hers). “No one will tell you anything.”

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