After the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) begins to remove portions of the six houses gutted in Wednesday's fire, the women who owned them may not be able to rebuild them. They are all penniless, with no hope of generating enough money to build houses.

What remains of these buildings now is the ground floor, which has some shops. The two storeys above have been completely destroyed and the remains of the walls and portions of the roof seem poised to fall at any time.

The brothels are over four decades old and hundreds of women and children have been living in inhuman conditions in cubby-holes there.

At present, the displaced sex workers and their children are staying in three classrooms in the neighbouring MCD school. There are about 200 of them with as many children. Councillor Ashok Jain got the rooms opened for them on Wednesday near the room where a non-governmental organisation, the Joint Women's Programme,has been running a daycare centre for sex workers' children.

The six women who had owned the six brothels in the building are not sure how they would rebuild what has been lost. ``I do not know how much it would cost because I have never built a house,'' said Rajkumari, who owned one of the brothels in the building. ``Who will give me loans and what can I give as security,'' she asked, adding, ``I have lost everything. Please ask the Government to help us.''

She limped, supported by her 17-year-old son, to meet the MCD officials who came to talk about the demolition but Shakuntala, the supervisor of the NGO-run school, did the talking for her and the five others.

And from what the officials first said, it did not seem as if Rajkumari would ever get to own another brothel there.

``We have to demolish it to prevent the remains of the building from falling on passersby,'' said an MCD official. MCD Commissioner V K Duggal told The Indian Express that the women would not lose control over thebuilding even after the MCD demolished it. Hence, the brothels may come up again but no one knows when. However, no one knows where the displaced women and their children will find shelter till the brothels come up again if they ever would. And whether, in the meantime, the women would use the opportunity to be free from their madams.

The women are not in a mood to think of their future as they are too immersed in their loss. Many of them showed boxes which had locks intact, but whose lids appeared prised open. ``The cops and firemen robbed us of all our jewellery and cash while they were inside the burning building,'' many women said.

Some rice and flour sent by councillor Ashok Jain has been the only gesture of help for these women and their children. A cook at the NGO-run school has been preparing meals for the refugees since Wednesday. ``But there has not been a single rupee offered to these women so far,'' Shakuntala said, adding, ``Is their helplessness different from that of other firevictims?''