Sudharak Olwe, India
A Threshold

It was once a desire to visit Kamathipura, the famed red-light light area in Mumbai to document and research commercial sex workers (CSW) from the traditional devadasi castes. From my repeated visits, I learnt of the pending escape of one of the CSWs with the help of a client who wished to marry her. I pursued the story.

Moments of transition are awaited eagerly by the lens of photographers; transition temporally, spatially, emotionally and of any other kind. It is this moment of transition of a young girl from a prostitute to a respectable housewife is what I shot literally at the threshold of her brothel. It was to be the first in a series of documenting a life, its reformation, its value, and through it, the value of many more such lives.

Pervez Khan wished to marry Ambika Jeroo Nepali. Once again, in the capacity of a press photographer, I liaised with the Mumbai Police and eventually introduced Pervez to the Deputy Police Commissioner, Mumbai. The sheer effort involved in the legalities of rescuing Ambika, made me an important player in the story, making it a very personal experience.

I witnessed the marriage of Ambika with Pervez Khan, as she became Zarina Khan. In the transformation of this name was the transformation of a life and a human relationship. I was involved in seeing the couple settle into the domesticity of married life. Due to the immediate problems we had encountered while rescuing Ambika, I had quite simply forgotten that the couple was HIV infected. The issue resurfaced.

The next obvious step for the couple and me was to find them a good, reasonable centre for treatment of the disease. Little did my friends and myself know that awareness campaigns for AIDS were in reality emotional deterrents. We were aware of the disease, its symptoms, and that it required medication. However, we were unaware of the lack of an infrastructure for treatment. There was a negligible number of centres for free or reasonable medication for AIDS and none that could promise the sustenance of free drug administration for the required period of time.

I tried to follow up with doctors, NGOs and affluent donors in the city. The conclusion was that crores of rupees had been pumped into AIDS awareness campaigns; victims from all strata had been made aware of the disease, but unfortunately when they woke up to the necessity of treatment, there were no facilities for the same. The cause responsible for furthering this problem is that donors continue to give money for awareness campaigns; there is no agency to point out the fact vociferously that donations need to be now made to the next essential step in the AIDS Project – treatment. It is indeed a disaster in project management to make patients aware of their plight and the urgency of treatment without making provisions for the same. There is a certain impossibility being perceived in treating AIDS afflicted patients; instead the thrust is on creating awareness so as to prevent the next generation from becoming victims to it.

I have recorded a gamut of victorious, happy moments, which have in a sense provided for the climax of Zarina's life story. It would be an anti-climax to watch her die in pain and misery. I want this pictorial documentation to conclude not in death, but in change, a change in her life and a change in our socio-economic approach to AIDS. This change shall form the next part of my project. Now, it is I who am at a threshold.

I foresee the photographs shot thus far as kick-starting a movement through a single patient's story. Visibility to this collection will indicate the lack of infrastructure for AIDS treatment programmes. A travelling exhibition of this collection will communicate the problem to other developing nations and appeal to donor agencies working actively in AIDS projects worldwide.

My commitment to the cause over a period of time will shine through a positive conclusion. In the future, I wish to document the rectification of the above-mentioned problem and the benefits gained thereof by Zarina. This shall be a sequel to my present body of work. It is rare for any development programme in our country to be pictorially recorded from start to finish. This project not only promises to record, but also goes beyond, in attempting to point out a lacuna in a development/health programme and directly contributing towards rectifying it.

The movement to bring in Free Aids Treatment can only gain momentum when the victims' lives are valued. I wish to lead people into valuing Zarina's beautiful life. People light a spark through words, dance, poetry, music, theatre, cinema and more. I seek to do it through two colours, which aren't really colours. Black and White. A threshold bridges the two.