Manu Joseph: The fabled charms of heritage red-light areas are bogus

livemint.com:

I don’t know if Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been to Heera Mandi, but I have. This olden-day bazaar and red-light district of Lahore is the subject of a Netflix show by him. It is set decades before my visit.

By the time I got to Heera Mandi, it could have been the sets of a Ram Gopal Varma production, not Bhansali. I was in Pakistan in 2004 to cover a historic cricket series. In Lahore, it was inevitable that someone would offer to take me to Heera Mandi.

By then, the place had gentrified enough for the offer to be respectable, but still something of its ‘red-light’ part was alive enough for Indian cricketers not to visit, at least publicly. For instance, Rahul Dravid, who had thrilled Pakistanis by demonstrating his curiosity by visiting Mohenjo Daro, stayed away from Heera Mandi. I was a bit nervous because of an incident a few days earlier.

I had noticed that on street corners, hawkers sold pornographic CDs whispering, “Indian, Indian." Mystified, I asked what happened to Pakistani films. Such a thing, I soon understood, was not asked even by locals. No matter the actual provenance of the movies on sale, they were all called ‘Indian.’ Worse, it was clear I was Indian.

I had to leave immediately. So I wondered how an average Pakistani on the street in Heera Mandi would react to an Indian entering a house of ill-repute. I wondered how long I would take to say in Hindi that I was there just for the dance performances, assuming that was okay.