Reportage: Archana Masih
Photograph: Jewella C Miranda

Policemen and women from the Maharashtra Police and Railway Police Force are the keepers of the law at the terminus.

Many of them are in plainclothes, in mufti.

Head Constable Sunita Nalwade was at the CST station doing her usual 12-hour duty when she saw a teenage girl weeping.

The girl told Nalwade she was brought on the promise of work in Mumbai, but had been abandoned.

Minor girls being brought on the pretext of work and then pushed into the city's brothels is not new. The girls, who escape, are often detected at the neighbouring CST main station. The 16-odd policewomen do the paperwork with the juvenile courts and direct the girls to shelters.

When Prince Charles visited the terminus on his visit to India last year, the instructions were -- keep him at such a distance that if anyone were to throw a mobile phone it shouldn't get anywhere near the prince.

"I think there were more cops in mufti than regular commuters to see him that day," says a railway employee.