Rina is accustomed to suffering. She has been sold, trafficked, and has escaped from a foreign country. She has survived diseases and tropical cyclones. She was forced to abandon her son when she was just 20 years old.
And now her home stands to be washed away by a rising river. The brothel is a ramshackle village of sagging huts built on the banks of a sinking island called Banishanta. It is meters long, flat as a beaten coin, and as wide as a two-lane highway. Every day its muddy shoreline crumbles like stale bread into the fast-running current of the Pasur River, which, at high tide, threatens to spill over the embankment like a glass of water filled to the brim.
Every day, danger encroaches a little more. Banishanta was once one of the biggest government-registered brothels in Bangladesh. According to its older inhabitants, some 1, women lived and worked at Banishanta during the early s when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. In those days, sailors and merchants from Britain to Indonesia docked at Mongla port, which at the time connected with many other international harbours.
These sailors spent much of their free time and money on the island. But since then the brothel has been battered by cyclones and inundated by floods. Despite an economic resurgence in Mongla in recent years , there has been no knock on effect for the brothel. At the end of , Rina was one of sex workers on the island. Early one morning last November, while scientists and civil servants in Bangladesh sweated over climate change reports in stuffy state-owned office blocks in the capital city of Dhaka, Rina rolled herself a joint at her house on Banishanta.
Underneath a low-hanging roof, perched on a wide bed with gingham print sheets, Rina mixed the fibrous strands of tobacco with the sweet, ammonia-smelling cannabis.
