The Cage Girls of Bombay...

"Today the trade in voyeurism has been turned about. After the curious European visitor has inspected Bombay’s famed Towers of Silence, where the bodies of the Parsi dead are picked clean by vultures, he may then proceed to Bombay’s famed libidinous quarter – to streets with old Imperial names, Grand Road and Falkland Road, where Indian prostitutes solicit their clients from cages. Many of them are children, kidnapped or bought from Indian villages. Others are hijras, transvestites or eunuchs castrated shortly after birth. Prices are cheap the average in rupees is the equivalent of 20 pence but few Europeans who have come to scoff remain to pay, and trade is mainly plied with Indians of the lower middle-class. For the European, therefore, the common Bombay prostitute has remained merely a tourist curiosity, a beckoning unfortunate imprisoned in a cage."
{From a London Times Article, 1981}

Seems that everyone wants to get with a girl even if the girls are sometimes really boys. It doesn't seem to matter, femininity is the battleground of lust.

See more of Mary Ellen Mark's brilliant Falkland Road photo's here.

Snarky note to self: Formula for winning Best Documentary Oscar - take an old but great photography book that lots of people have, but have forgotten, make a cloyingly sweet documentary on the subject, put your concerned visage on screen a lot too, act like Audrey Hepburn in Kate Hepburn's hack-around slacks.