35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
hide this skin colour, but actually emphasising it in a macabre way.
Their lips, too, thickly daubed with red, looked purple, like the lips
of dying people. Their clothes glittered, sewn from the same
crackling fabric used to dress the ethnic dolls sold in airport souvenir
shops. Rather than the cloth of gold it was meant to suggest, it
reminded me of Christmas tinsel.
Beneath this finery the caged women frequently displayed pudgy,
misshapen bodies, doughy, waiflike faces, and pathetic stares. They
did not seem unhappy. Instead, a mood of Felliniesque gaiety
prevailed along the rows, pink little tongues flicking suggestively
through the bars, forefingers humping fists decorated with patterns
in henna like dried blood, grimy little breasts revealed and squeezed
as if proving their freshness. And everywhere we walked the cackling
laughter and calls of Hey, American: fikky fikky, sucky-sucky . . . Mister!
Sahib! Nice girl, good girl . . . Sahib! You like? Best girl, good girl, clean girl . . .
A Feringhee would be the best catch any of these girls could make
– for the pimps who owned them. They had to pay back the money
their parents had sold them for originally before they would ever
see a rupee of what they earned on their backs or their knees – and
probably none knew much about accounting. Used up at eighteen,
they would end their days begging, if disease did not claim them
first. The average life span for India’s poor is still well below thirty
years – as it was in nineteenth-century London.
‘Buck a fuck,’ said Ray, as we walked down the sad row of cells.
‘Deal of the century. Actually, for a buck you could fuck the whole
cage twice – if your dick hadn’t festered down to gristle after the first
three.’ He brayed laughter, some of the hellish dolls laughing back,
laughing with him.
I told him this was awful, sad and awful.
‘Occasionally you see a real cutie,’ he replied. ‘I had one once
like Raquel Welch’s little sister. Kept her for a month in the hotel –
twelve times one day! Twelve, man. Can you believe it? Tight as a
cat’s snatch.’ He sounded almost sentimental. ‘And tits! Tits . . . like
. . . well. Then the little cunt rips off my Rolex and wallet . . .’ He
sighed.
Fortunately the produce on display that evening did not strike a
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