Born Into Brothels: One Boy's Story

      Walking down the narrow alleys, colored cloths hanging from lines and balconies, women and children screaming, I am transported. I am not sitting on my bed watching a documentary on my laptop, scribbling notes furiously - I am in Calcutta, India, smelling the curry, feeling the dirt under my feet and the splashes off the pot that Kochi is carefully scouring, listening to her soft, high voice of truth and desperation as she says, “The women ask me when I‘m going to join the line. They say it won’t be long.” Kochi is just one of the eight young girls and boys that Zana Briski takes under her wing in the documentary Born into Brothels.

      Zana Briski is a photographer who decided to live in India, among the women of the brothels, in order to be allowed to record their lives. “As soon as [she] entered the brothels, [she] met the children.” She bought them, and taught them how to use, cameras, in order to “see this world through their eyes.” The result of her teachings is inspirational. Because of her efforts and her dedication to these kids, and to getting them out of the brothels -- the bleak future to which they seemed destined -- and into school, Briski gave each and every one of them a real shot at a “normal” life. She had been teaching this ‘class” with them for two years.

      The opening scene features one of the girls, Puja, giving a very terse description of each of her fellow “classmates” in “Zana Auntie’s” photography class. As the film goes on, though, these children fill out, exceeding Puja’s limited descriptions and becoming three-dimensional. The way this film pulls in its viewers and gets them really rooting for these kids is amazing. That a medium that seems so one-sided, a one-way form of communication, can really reach out and grab its audience, the way this film did me, is all too rare.

      I found myself really gravitating toward Avajit, and rooting for him in particular. Avajit, Puja initially tells us, hates being called “fat.” This is the first impression we get of him; when he comes on camera later in the film though, the viewer can really see his talent, his wildness, his fickle temperament. Avajit is a poet at heart, but a poet with a camera and a paintbrush instead of a pen. He sees photos as permanent, a way to keep people alive; he also sees them as the perfect form of self-expression. He says, “I want to put my thoughts into colors.” He takes his pictures with a specific vision and great care. He’s really big on angles, layers, and colors. There is one picture he took on their trip to the beach. To prepare for it, he filled a bucket with water; he angled himself so that he could pour out the water and snap a picture at the same time. The effect was really beautiful, and it caught me off guard. In the picture, on the left, in the foreground, you see the water pouring from the bucket. Toward the center and streaming to the right, in the background, you see the rest of the kids walking and playing on the beach. The colors are vivid, the picture is clear, and it is just incredibly hard to grasp that a ten-year old boy took this picture.

Avajit’s talents do not go unnoticed. He has won many awards for his paintings and artwork. Furthermore, through Briski’s connections, he is given a chance to attend a week-long photo “camp” of sorts in Amsterdam. Amidst the incredibly frustrating process of obtaining a passport, Avajit’s mother dies. While he wasn’t close to her, it affects him terribly. He lost interest in school, in photography, in art of any kind. I was really frustrated at the insensitivity with which Briski was handling the situation. His father is addicted to hash and completely out of touch with everything, “but even then [Avajit tries] to love him a little.” Avajit’s mother left. “My mom [lived] in the village. Nobody [cared] about her.” She died when her pimp set fire to her in the kitchen.

Facing such odds, it is no wonder he was feeling apathetic. He is, after all, just a child. Luckily, Zana is able to get him the required paperwork to obtain a passport and attend the conference in Amsterdam. As soon as he is away from home, he is again overtaken with the need to take pictures. In Amsterdam, of one photo he is shown, he says, “Though there is sadness in it, we must look, because it is truth.” Upon his return from Amsterdam, he agreed to attend Future Hope, a school in Calcutta.

I use his story to illustrate the extent to which Briski’s goal was attained. If she had taken all the pictures, and had remained an outsider and observed from her limited standpoint, there is no way we would have gotten the stories of these children in such detail. Their stories needed to be told through their eyes. I heard many stories; Avajit’s story was one of the few with a “happy” ending.