The Melamchi river flows placidly through Sindhupalchowk district north of Kathmandu (above). Many girls from areas like this in Nepal are sex workers in Bombay, 2500 km away.
Sindhupalchowk district, barely 20 km northeast of Kathmandu Valley as the crow flies, shares with Rasuwa District, to its west, the notoriety of being the pre-eminent exporter of girls to the brothels of India. Like so much other information on girl trafficking out of Nepal, the history of this export is apocryphal, there having been little in the way of serious research by dispassionate scholars.
Some of the Sindhupalchowk locals say that the sex trade originated in the supply of Tamang and Sherpa girls of this region to the feudal Rana court of Kathmandu. Apparently, it was just a step away from serving as bhitrini (concubines) and susaaray (maid servants) to the "cages" of the Kamathipura red light district of Bombay. The antiquity of trafficking may be murky, but there is no doubt that there is profit in selling sex. That much is obvious from even a cursory look at some of the households of Sindhupalchowk's villages such as Ichowk, Mahankal, and Talamarang.
There is a trafficking network which today continues to supply young women of Sindhupalchowk to Indian cities, and the fact that the locals are fully engaged in this supply is evident from the names of some of the largest brothel owners in Bombay: Lata Sherpa, Mala Tamang, Kabita Sherpa, Anita Sherpa and Maya (Tamang) Chauhan – all names which indicate to a fair degree the origin of the women in Sindhupalchowk. Vinod Gupta and Sanjay Chonkar, social activists in Bombay, say that in addition to these top five, there are many other small-time Nepali gharwalis (madams) engaged in running a fair number of the hundreds of bordellos of Bombay. According to them, altogether 25,000 Nepali women work in the brothels of the three key red light areas of Kamathipura, Pilla House and Falkland Road.