Many prostitutes become mothers. The father of these children are illegitimate (the word unknown is too mild). They grow up with a mother and many aunts, loved and cared for; it feels like a joint family with hardly any adult male.

It's a professional hazard; they end up mothering a child. There are regrets — not that they were born, but their notional absence in seeing them grow up under the same roof. Mothers' working hours are through the night; at dawn they are knackered and doze off just as their children wake up.

There are two million female sex workers in India, according to one estimate. Needless to add, most are forced into the flesh trade. There is no official count of the number of brothels in India, as running, owning, or managing one is illegal.

One such place is in Meerut's Kabadi Bazaar (Junk Market). A congested market, where people trade in all kinds of goods — spices, clothes, grocery, and, we already know, flesh.

I went there to capture the daily life of sex workers in a brothel. It's not easy, and there's no room for intelligent guesses. Their throats go sore haggling for the best price. They come to an agreement, sooner rather than later. The pants go down. The client enters. Soon, finished. "Next, please," she calls out, as if a doctor's clinic.

They offer inert intensities. Brothels are also known as the shock absorber of society — a sociological metaphor suggesting that commercial sex vents sexual tension and, in this way, prevents greater social harm. A brothel is a secular place; here, considerations of caste, creed, and religion — both of the sex worker and the client — are immaterial.

I want to make special mention of Nihal. His father was a wealthy sheikh in the UAE who took a special liking to his mother. He was conceived in a suite at a luxury hotel there called Nihal — that's how he got his name. His mother died soon after his birth, and he is taken care of by several of her aunts, who share the same profession as his mother.