These men can fly straight into Goa on tourist-load charters; they can also go to Goa through Mumbaii, now an important hub for paedophiles. An entire South Mumbaii road—otherwise a commercial, movie theatre, residential strip—teems with young boys. Confirming this is Mansoor Qadri of Saathi which works with street youth. ‘It begins from one end of the area which links to the upmarket and rich side of Mumbaii and at the other side is the Gaandu Gardens.’ The garden is actually called something else, but in typically Mumbaii black humour has been rechristened the gaandu bageecha, gaandu means anal penetration. Qadri also says he has heard of an all-boy brothel in the area too, which a lot of foreigners and ‘office-going Indian men’ visit but has yet to get confirmation. What he does confirm is what is being whispered: the elderly and heavy aunties who set out for drives during the early evenings from their plush areas on the other side of the strip, they swoop in during the city’s rush-hour and quickly pick up one of the young lads holding a massage kit. The boys, like the rest on the strip, are between twelve and sixteen years of age, except that they stand specifically opposite one theatre, on the pavement next to a well-known clothing store. The aunties drop these masseurs back to the same spot soon enough so that they are well in time before their lords and masters get home.

Who cares, why should they care? There is money to be made all around, and so what if it is blood-money of the innocents? In Mumbaii, in the lanes around the Gateway of India, small hotels are run in a warren of rooms. Boys check in here by the hour, or stay the night with foreign male tourists who have checked in earlier. Well-dressed, young college boys also make money from the foreigners staying at the better hotels in the area. They are contacted by college pimps who do it to fund their drug habits.

Vikram does it because he is collecting money to settle abroad. ‘It is easy money,’ says this handsome fifteen-year-old who exercises and works out for an hour every day to maintain his well-toned body. ‘I don’t have to do anything except lie down and enjoy it while the foreigner fusses around over me. Then I have to just do it to him.’

Vikram’s sister is also in the business, as a ‘beer bar waitress’ which can be read as a euphemism for a call girl. Her make-up and clothes make her look like a twenty-plus year old, she is all of sixteen. Their mother walked out on them when she caught their father red-handed in their bed, with a pretty boy from the neighbourhood. The brother-sister duo are ‘a team’ from the day their father raped him three years back. They protect each other by sleeping together in one room of their father’s flat, in a high-rise at Mumbaii’s upmarket Cuffe Parade. The sister does not like what she is doing in the beer bar, she prefers the foreign customers who would, in turn, prefer girls. She uses words like chocobar and cone ice-cream for oral sex and ‘fuse uda dena’ for very quick oral sex. She, likewise Vikram, refuse to believe that Aids can be contracted through oral sex. Both of them feel that if they share ‘tenderness’ in the nights, it is mutual and therefore all right compared with what their father did to Vikram. They make plans for when they will migrate. The ‘Hansel and Gretel Syndrome’ as some psychiatrists call this, after the children’s folk tale about a devoted brother and sister.