Time

JANUARY 27, 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 4
ASIA

NEPAL'S LOST DAUGHTERS, "INDIA'S SOILED GOODS"

SOLD INTO PROSTITUTION AS CHILDREN, VILLAGE GIRLS ARE COMING HOME TO RISING HOSTILITY, PREMATURE DEATH

BY TIM MCGIRK/KATMANDU

Climbing for miles through the terraced cornfields of the Himalayan foothills, the Nepali porter finally reached his destination: a one-room clinic. He had been carrying on his back a teenaged girl, scarcely alive, who was so skinny the porter had managed to fold her up inside his wicker basket like a piece of cardboard. "I knew she wouldn't live," recalls Dr. Aruna Uprety. "But at the time, I wasn't sure what had caused her illness."

The villagers knew. The girl was dying of the "Bombay Disease"--AIDS. It is the custom among the Tamang highlanders of Nepal that when someone dies, the entire village takes part in lovingly washing and burying the corpse. But because the Tamang were afraid of catching the "Bombay Disease," the girl's mother was left to carry out the ritual alone. The girl had contracted the virus as a sex worker in India. She was hardly the only one: every year around 10,000 Nepali girls, most between the ages of nine and 16, are sold to brothels in Indian cities. According to international social agencies, this flow of Nepali girls into Indian whorehouses is probably the busiest slave traffic of its kind anywhere in the world.

As a result, a backwash of AIDS is starting to hit the Himalayas. Kicked out of the brothels after they develop the disease's telltale fevers and skin lesions, legions of forlorn girls are now staggering back to die in their Nepali mountain villages. Rarely are they accepted. The Nepali press, which often reflects the government view, refers to the girls as "India's soiled goods." As Durga Ghimire, president of ABC Nepal, a social agency in Katmandu, says angrily, "Nobody wants to speak about it, not even the girls' families. There are parents who have sold their daughters and husbands who've got rid of their young wives."

Depending on her beauty, a girl can fetch anywhere from $200 to $600--less than a water buffalo, slightly more than a video recorder. One girl named Anu Tamang, now 21, is afraid of going home. "I'm like an egg that's slightly cracked. Nobody wants me," says Anu, a slender woman with pale brown eyes who is staying at a Katmandu shelter. Fair skinned and delicate, the Tamang women traditionally had been prized concubines of the Nepali royal court. With the dawn of democracy in 1951, the Tamang beauties were diverted from the palaces down to the red light districts. Some experts believe that more than 200,000 Nepali girls are involved in the Indian sex trade. A few choose prostitution voluntarily to flee mountain poverty, not knowing the risk of disease and the prison-like confinement of the bordellos, but most are underage girls who are sold or tricked into the flesh trade.

India and Nepal share an open border, so there's no telling exactly how many infected ex-prostitutes are returning, but the number may well be alarmingly high. "It could be hundreds of women coming back every year or thousands," says Gauri Pradhan, head of the social organization Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Center. "We just don't know. There's no government monitoring or counseling."

The story of Geeta, now in her 30s, illustrates the hatred and suspicion they face on coming home. Stricken by AIDS-related pneumonia and diarrhea, Geeta had grown too ill to entertain the laborers and rickshaw-drivers who were her usual clients. She was dismissed from the brothel. As a parting gift, the Bombay madame gave her a gold chain and a few hundred rupees, enough for a train ticket back to Nepal. What Geeta wanted was revenge. In Katmandu, she hunted down the man who had sold her into prostitution as a teenager. Eventually, she found the pimp, but the police refused to help her. (Though Nepali law punishes traffickers, few have been arrested and even fewer charged; the racketeers are often shielded by politicians, social workers allege.) Frail, Geeta alone was no match for him. The pimp beat her up and dumped her, nearly dead, close to a Katmandu temple.

Geeta was rescued and taken to a hospital, but her troubles were just beginning. This was back in 1991, when Nepal seemed blithely immune to the AIDS scourge sweeping through India. The Nepali press sensationalized her story, so that when she was well enough to return to her hilltop home of Melamchi, with its views of Mt. Everest garlanded by clouds, a mob of Tamangs barred her from entering the village. Her mother pleaded with Geeta to return to Katmandu to spare her parents the shame of having a daughter who had caught the whore's disease. It didn't matter that none of this was Geeta's fault, that she had been forced to sell herself. Stubbornly, Geeta refused to leave. Today, her health is failing, and her chances of battling AIDS through medicine are nil. In Nepal, where the average yearly income is less than $200, the expensive drugs now offered in developing countries are vastly beyond the reach of these children.

As the sex trade flourishes, say social workers, younger and younger girls are coming back from the brothels infected with AIDS. Two Bombay girls, seven and 15 years old, were turned over to Katmandu police two weeks ago. They are victims of a growing superstition that men suffering from AIDS and venereal diseases can be cured by having sex with a virgin. "The worst part about this myth is that younger girls are extremely vulnerable to AIDS," says Amihan Abueva, executive secretary of the group End Child Prostitution in South Asian Tourism, which is based in Bangkok. 

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