Implanted within the knotted lanes and on the grey, dusty streets of this city is an entire workforce of a guesstimated hundred thousand who are unseen in plain sight, except by two kinds of people – those who ardently demand their services and those who avowedly want them out. Millions of people who call this city their own and boast about having lived here for decades may either be in denial of their existence or would have simply not noticed the armies of women and men who wait for customers to sell their service – sex. Practically every corner of Bangalore is frequented by street-based sex workers, but one reason for the obliviousness towards this huge and omnipresent workforce may not always be due to the denial that is usually varnished by concerns of morality or intentions of revanchism. It may simply be because most of them do not stand out in appearance in any way as sex workers.

Street-based sex workers in several parts of Southeast Asia or in the West and, of course, in the red-light areas of Delhi, Calcutta or Bombay, would find some similarities with stereotypical images of female sex workers, but in Bangalore city these workers barely fit such a typecast even by an inch. They are, for the most part, not sharply recognisable because they look like anyone. They are the vendors who sell you mint and coriander on the street, the domestic workers who come home, those who would be on their way to garment factories and small manufacturing cottage units, those who sweep the streets and collect garbage, those who work in small shops and hotels, those whom we see standing on the front end of the everyday bus trip; anyone. Only their customers and the police would know them for sure, for contrasting reasons. The rest of us, especially Citizens, would recognise them if and only if they stood in street corners well after dark and a car, which appeared incongruously expensive for a woman like that, swooped by and picked them up. Only then would we be aghast at what is happening on the streets of our beloved city.