She Promised No Woman Would Die Alone. I Knew I Never Could.

On generosity, cost, and the limits of my own goodness.

📍 Mumbai, December 2013 (Robin)

Zarina loved to dance.

As a little girl, she danced while her mother cooked, while clothes were washed by the pond, while life unfolded around her. When her mother died suddenly, Zarina was six. Her stepmother wanted a worker, not a dancer. Within months, Zarina was starving, beaten, and finally thrown out of the house.

She walked six miles toward town, crying the entire way. No one came after her.

There was a circus in town. Zarina offered to dance, so the circus took her in. For three years, she earned food by sweeping floors and running errands, dancing everywhere she went, convinced that someone would notice her.

Someone did.

A man promised her a real stage. A better life. Bollywood.

Instead, he put her on a train to Mumbai and sold her to a brothel.

At nine years old, Zarina was already being spoken about as an asset. She was sold for a sum large enough that adults began planning her future around it.

The brothel owner fed her, clothed her, and waited. Zarina was told to run errands, to learn how to clean and cook, to stay quiet and useful.

If she had known those were her last days of freedom, running through lanes, watching birds, wandering wherever her feet carried her, perhaps she would have slowed down. Perhaps she would have remembered them more carefully.

Her body matured early. And with that, the waiting ended.

A local police officer had been watching her for months. He didn’t need to negotiate. He threatened to shut the brothel down unless he was given access to her. The math was simple: if Zarina didn’t comply, she would be locked inside and made to work for years to repay what she was “worth.”

The brothel owner booked the police officer a bed for two hours. He didn’t last even two minutes: Zarina screamed, bit, hit, and did everything possible to escape him. She spent the next 24 hours locked in a cage.

The brothel owner finally came to check on her investment, carrying a small bottle which Zarina hoped was water. But it was crushed red chili peppers. As Zarina howled, the woman locked the cage and said, “the policeman will be back tomorrow, remember the chilis when you want to bite him.”

The next night, Zarina didn’t make a sound the entire two hours.

Years later, in December 2013, I was in Delhi when I got a call that Taniya’s mother had died in a government TB hospital in Mumbai. There was no time for grief. The hospital needed the body removed immediately. I had heard what happens when sex workers die without family or money. I couldn’t let that happen.

I called the one person I knew would not hesitate.

Zarina.

She wasn’t even in Kamathipura at the time. She said she’d go immediately.

An hour later, she called back.

“I don’t know if she wanted to be buried or cremated,” she said. “So I arranged a Muslim burial for now. I borrowed money. And Robin, I promise you this: I will never let a sex worker die alone or be left on the street like a dog. I don’t care how many customers I have to sleep with to keep this promise. Every woman who dies here will be buried or cremated properly.”

Three sentences. Ten seconds. And everything I believed about myself cracked open.

I had always thought of myself as generous. People told me so all the time. I’d “given up” a comfortable life in the U.S. I donated. I showed up. I cared deeply. I thought that made me good.

But could I promise what Zarina had just promised?

Could I commit my body, my safety, my entire future to strangers’ dignity, again and again, knowing I would have to follow through?

The answer arrived instantly, and it terrified me.

No. Never.

And in that moment, I understood the question I had never dared to ask myself before:

Is generosity about intention? Or is generosity about cost?

Zarina didn’t speak in metaphors. She didn’t talk about values or missions or impact. She talked about what she would do. What she was willing to sacrifice. What she would become responsible for.

By the end of that day, I knew something else too: I might never reach her level of generosity. But I could no longer pretend I already had.

If anyone asks me now who my hero is, who I want to be more like, I don’t hesitate. I want to be like Zarina.

Not because she is extraordinary, but because she refuses to look away. Because her compassion has consequences. Because she made a promise she knew would cost her everything.

And because she showed me that the hardest moral reckoning isn’t witnessing cruelty.

It’s discovering the limits of your own goodness…and choosing what to do next.