Dressed in a printed cotton sari, with her hair tied neatly in a bun, she looks like any ordinary Indian housewife. But Nalini Jameela, 52, has supported her family for more than two decades as a prostitute in southern India. Now she's written a book about her life and it's flying off the shelves.
A surprise best-seller, Jameela's Autobiography of a Sex Worker is already in its second print run after being released by DC Books last month.
Based in Kozhikode in Kerala state, Jameela is quite unlike most other Indian prostitutes, who are too ashamed to reveal their faces, much less their names. Indian sex workers invariably are seen as victims. Not Jameela. Confident, unembarrassed and cheerful, she defies every stereotype. Like most, she entered the profession because of poverty. Nevertheless, she says she's content. In fact, she intends to continue as a prostitute for as long as her body 'holds'.
'It's not that I'm dying to do it, but when I need the money, I do, because it's the only work I know,' she says.
Her husband died of cancer when she was 25, and she was unable to feed her two daughters on her salary of two US cents a day as a quarry worker. It was about this time that she met a prostitute in the neighbourhood.
'She told me that I would be able to earn more than 50 rupees in one go,' says Jameela. 'I decided to give it a try because I'd been reduced to begging to feed my children. My first time was when a police jeep took me to a government guest house in Thrissur to serve a senior police officer and a politician.'
Written in the local language, Malayalam, with the help of a social worker, Jameela's life is recounted in a sober narrative, peppered with her forceful comments about sex and society's contempt for prostitutes.