Homeless and helpless
PETALING JAYA: Life on the street as a sex worker is sordid and savage. Mala (
pix), who has been prostituting herself for nearly 40 years, can testify to that.
Blind in one eye since birth, the 55-year-old transvestite has been ravaged by a life in squalor and the sleaze of the sex trade.
She still turns tricks at the back lanes of Kuala Lumpur to feed her drug habit and try to fill the void in her life since she came to the city to seek her fortune when she was 15.
The only person who probably cared for her, her grandmother, died then. She stepped out on her own. She started off doing odd-jobs, including being a cleaner, before she turned to this life.