Topless Ukrainian women protesting outside Indian Embassy in Kiev 11 years ago:

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Inside India’s White Flesh Trade: Chilling First-Hand Accounts

Vikram Zutshi at Man's World India on 1/10/18

Sleeping with white women is an aspirational goal for many Indian men, for which they are prepared to fork out large sums. It is a task made easier by the hundreds of prostitutes from Central Asian Republics and Ukraine who frequently fly down to India. Here’s the story of one of these women and her experience working here.

Anya sat on a large couch with a floral chintz pattern, playing blackgammon with a friend. She tapped her cigarette and looked up at me with piercing blue eyes, slightly upturned at the corners, a sign of her Kazakh-Mongol heritage. She was tall and gangly, with a mop of windswept blonde hair and had a fragile yet steely air about her, like a porcelain doll which had taken a fall, shattered into tiny pieces, and been glued back together with the cracks visible.

A flamboyant Punjabi gent called ‘Tony’ had taken me to her Mumbai apartment. I had met him while researching a film on the white flesh trade in South Asia. He called himself her caretaker.

She was a professional escort, one of the thousands from central Asian countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, who travel to south Asian boomtowns like Dubai, Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad to ply their wares. The women are usually labelled ‘Russian’ for the sake of convenience. Sleeping with white women is an aspirational goal for many Indian men, and they are quite willing to fork out large sums of money – up to the equivalent of 1500 USD — to spend a night with them, considerably higher than the going rate for Indian women.

The prostitution issue had escalated to the point where the Indian embassy in Ukraine was asked to screen ‘suspicious’ visa applications from girls between the ages of 18-40. This action led to crowds of topless activists assembled outside the embassy, waving flags and protesting the stereotyping of Ukrainian women as sex workers. It was one of the more intriguing manifestations of runaway globalisation.

Laconic at first, Anya opened up after hearing about my escapades in Latin America. She listened in rapt attention as I described the three hellish days I spent in a local Mexican jail before being rescued by consular officials. I was interviewing a group of narco-traffickers for a documentary, when the local cops, the Federales, acting on a tip, gatecrashed our little party and handcuffed everyone present, including myself.

On her arrival in Mumbai two years ago, Anya was taken to a plush apartment in the suburb of Andheri, where she was housed along with two other girls from Kiev and Tashkent. A heavyset woman from Ukraine known as ‘aunty’ ran the operation. Aunty had started at the lower rungs of the trade and slowly clawed her way up the ladder. She had been living in India for over a decade and was now married to an Indian man. She had about twenty girls, maybe more, housed in separate apartments all over the city. Tony was her fixer and a local partner.

The girls were ferried to five-star hotels around the city to service well-heeled clients from the corporate world and entertainment industry. When the opportunity arose, she supplemented her income by moonlighting as a model-cum-Bollywood extra by day. She had signed a yearlong contract that took care of her bills in India and paid for the upkeep of her ageing mother and her younger sister back home in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She hoped to buy them a house where they could all live together someday.

“The girls are like Lakshmi”, said Tony, “they take care of me, and I make sure they get what they need.” He considered himself as a partner and protector of the girls and would not hesitate to rough up customers who manhandled his charges.

He had come a long way from his hardscrabble beginnings as an enforcer for extortionists running a protection racket in Mumbai. Pimping had been good to him. After a few years in the business, he was able to afford a one bedroom flat in a respectable suburb, where we had our first meeting.

One of Anya’s regular customers had developed feelings for her and brought her expensive gifts, things he knew she liked. He paid good money for Anya to accompany him on short holidays to Goa. He was a smart, educated guy in his mid-forties who ran a successful online business, and on one occasion had even proposed marriage to her. She kept him at bay, saying she needed more time to make a decision.

He would often cry after making love to her, struck with pangs of grief at the memory of his wife and young daughter who had been killed in an automobile accident a few years back. He had taken to remedy his grief with drink and drugs.

Occasionally she accompanied him to wild parties thronged by rich Indian kids, fashion models and Bollywood starlets, amped on coke, hash and ecstasy. The two of them ingested whatever was on offer and lost themselves in the flashing strobes and pounding bass rhythms of electronic dance music.

It was a startlingly brash and gaudy new reality for Anya, a far cry from her sparse childhood in the insular Kazakh town of Almaty. She learnt to zone out of the perfunctory sexual encounters with a cocktail of alcohol and various pharmaceuticals.

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