I just had a beautiful body Massage in my Bangalore home booked via Urban Clap and it brought back memories of a dirty yet thoughtful experience I had in 2019.

I should have written this in 2019 but I was only a girl then, afraid what would people say when they read it. These days, I guess I have stopped giving a damn (well, almost). 

I did talk about it with a few acquaintances (because I have no friends) and kind of worried I'd come across as naïve (read: stupid). But it is what it is.

So it was a cold December of 2019 and I had just arrived in Delhi then for some work-related meeting. Our travel desk booked me a hotel near the airport because the preferred hotels near Gurgaon (where my office was) were unavailable. I was supposed to go attend a friend's wedding near Ghaziabad that night but a recent news of rape in the outskirts of NCR ticked me off. I decided to spend the rest of the evening in the hotel itself. 

In the evening I decided to just walk around, exploring the neighbourhood. The place is called Aerocity and I had only seen the shiny multi-coloured signboards that showed off the names of the hotels there from a distance. It always seemed to be like mini Vegas for me until that evening.

As I was walking on the road, crossing multiple vendors selling chaat on the street I couldn't help but notice spa places there. I am a Taurean and a true lover of body massages. I spend a lot on quality massages every month.

I went to the Spa that seemed to be squeaky clean from the outside with its bright white board and waiting room. I paid the Money upfront and the manager led me to the first room. Usually, in spas your masseuse leads you to a massage room and gives you some clothes (which are basically thin towels to cover your private parts) to change. Here, when I entered the room, a line of women came inside the room. The manager's assistant asked them to come one after the other. Some women even turned around to flaunt their bodies. I was supposed to choose one of them for my massage as per the assistant's instruction.

I was shell-shocked at this. I had just rejected a wedding invite because of an article on rape and the victim that I had read, so, naturally, my mind was clouded with fear. It felt like a trap, and although I was probably the perceived oppressor there but the red bulb in my head screamed and lit up as if there was fire. I didn't know what to do until I walked out of the room without saying a word.

I told the manager at the reception to give me back my 1500 bucks so that I could walk out of the place with my dignity intact. She asked me, "Why? Don't you like the girls here?"

I couldn't explain to her that I was not looking for what she thought I was looking for. I ended up saying, "I think it's something fishy." She took a few moments to understand me and then pretended to scold the staff.

She led me to another spa near the end of the road and promised there was no fishy business going on. Apparently, she couldn't return the money I paid and I had to take the service. I should have been more firm to decline the offer, but those days were my days of being a little timid. 

I followed her lead as she led me to another spa, another manager and another masseuse. Before getting into the room and changing my clothes, I asked the assigned masseuse, "Can I ask you something?"

"What is it, ma'am?"

"I don't want any fishy business. I am okay to just walk out of here without asking for my money back. Can I trust you to tell me the truth what is going on here?"

She seemed like an older lady than the usual women in massage parlours, probably in her early 40s. Something in me felt like I could trust her and she would tell me the truth.

"I promise I will not complain," I added. She reassured me that it is just going to be a massage and that that particular spa was one of the safest and reputed in the area. I only learnt later what she meant by that.

As the massage progressed, I realized this woman knew nothing about a professional massage. The skin on her palms were harsh and she missed the pressure points on my feet. I regretted every minute of the massage and just prayed it gets over soon. In retrospect, I was just scared, nervous, young and someone who couldn't vocalize things or offend someone. I wasn't always like this but I was definitely like this back in 2018 and 2019.

Eventually she asked me, "What did you mean by fishy business?"

I finally said what I should have said when I was trying to back out of the massage. "I felt like there's illegal prostitution going on in the spa I went to before this one, so I asked the same here."

She explained that all the massage parlours in that area were actually meant for exactly that. 1500 was just the entry fee to make things appear official and legal. Once the client enters the room, the attendee quotes her own rate which he pays in cash or via GooglePay,

Before I could utter my words of shock, she added, "but here we don't do anything like that." I was relieved for a bit. And then I wondered how could I not know this before, having lived two years of my life in Gurgaon.

After a few minutes of quiet, she added further, "Here, no sex at all. We only give hand jobs. No sex!!!" Jo bhi aata hai hand job toh maangta hi hai, she added.

She was massaging my left hand at that time. Well, it would be wrong to say she was giving a  "massage" because she was just pressing my muscles and pulling my fingers the way a grandmother does to a small child. Suddenly, we both heard a loud sound of breaking bones. I screamed my lungs out partly from the fear of getting my hand broken again and partly from the grossness of what she had just said.

I had broken my finger back in June 2019 and my hand was a bit frozen and twisted, even after the surgical operation and physiotherapy. I still can't move my finger very well because of the unformed ligaments there, but before entering the parlour my hand didn't look very good too because of the slanted finger.

In her efforts to give me a good massage she had pulled my hand too hard but just enough to bring the slanted finger straight. Surprisingly, I didn't feel any pain and the hand looked better. I was so thankful to the Universe for leading me there because she did what the doctor or physiotherapist avoided doing. She put my finger back to where it should be. 

What a "hand job"!, I thought to myself and chuckled. 

My fears vanished by then because I was happy about the little accident that happened. I started telling her about the fracture I had and reassured her that she didn't break any of my bones.

She opened up about her experiences in the various spas in that area aka brothels. I was just thanking my charts that I was not married because I wouldn't be able to stand the thought of my hypothetical man visiting such places.

"Maybe they thought you were married and looking for some fun when you went to the first spa. Mostly married women come here when their husbands are away at work," she said. Damn, I needed to lose some weight to look younger and single, I thought.

She then told me about her life. She was originally from Nepal, got married too soon and started living in Delhi. She had an alcoholic husband and two kids. Her husband wouldn't lift a finger to bring money home, so she had to do what she was doing.

I asked her if she would like to take up a job in my organization. I had enough credibility in my organization to give her a good life. She declined the offer because she would bring more money home doing what she was doing. I gave her my number to keep in case she still needed one.

She said she had better offers.

She had a lover - a rich man who keeps calling her on her phone and comes to meet her often. He has promised her the moon and the stars. He has asked her to elope from her home to live with him. He has offered her marriage. He has offered that he would take care of the kids too. He has promised her that she wouldn't have to work anymore.

"Wow! Why wouldn't you take it up? Just run away with him and take the kids too. Amazing!"

"Par log kya kahenge?" she said.

I couldn't convince her to take up this financially and emotionally brilliant option in the next ten minutes. Her lover had called on her cell and she waved me goodbye. The massage was over but the countless thoughts in my head were not.

What would people say? - What a horrible thing to ask oneself and take decisions accordingly. The rich is worried what would people say and so is the poor too. A respected well-known woman would worry what people say and so would someone who is in the business of earning, well, not so much respect.  (To be fair, there is supply because there's demand. There's a product in the market because there's a buyer. There's prostitution because there are people looking for easy sex they can buy. There's no shame in having unmet physical needs. I am all in for prostitution to be legal like they have in Amsterdam. If anything, everyone should be free to make their choices, both the clients and the prostitutes alike. But all these thoughts were easier in theory, like I had already experienced by then). I was worried about what would people say about me and here, she was too.

The people in her neighbourhood knew that she works in the spa and does a job she doesn't particularly enjoy but that doesn't bother them. But the same people would be bothered if she left her husband to rot and live a financially better life with her lover. 

What a crime to even expect people to say nice things about you! They are probably going to say miserable things anyway. I had stopped blogging in 2015, bothered by the countless comments my peers in my MBA college would say. After I joined my job in 2017, I would still blog less so that my image of being a corporate workaholic doesn't get tarnished by my liberal thought process that shows up in my writing. My books did attract a few jokes from my colleagues when they were initially released but I had no choice but to release them. It was a matter of "life" or "death" for me, figuratively speaking.

All these years I didn't write about this one experience because my MBA peers would say things like - "Why did you even go there at the first place?"  (Why did you not do this or say that are questions I hate answering.)

But at the heart of everything the fact still remains that if that woman who was mentally strong enough to be doing what she was doing, still fears what would people say if she chose to be a little selfish, and if I, who is a typical millennial snowflake aka marshmallow, still fears what would people say if I chose to be a little more emotional, then who, in this country, really is free?

It's true when they say - Duniya ka sabse bada rog, kya kahenge chaar log!

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P.S. Maybe if you want to live a life free from judgements, you have to stop judging others. We create the society we live in. Change begins at home.