Beautiful Thing Read online

  Even the dancers weren’t safe around Leela. Her kleptomania may have been an open joke in Night Lovers, but it was a joke taken seriously. If Leela asked to borrow a lipstick she might be told, ‘Accha, Rosy said first. After her, okay?’ And then Rosy would dilly-dally before lying with filmi dramabaazi, ‘Arre, I toh forgot! Pinky wanted to do touch-up. One minute!’ and so on until Leela’s interest wandered and with it she too wandered out of the make -up room, to the great relief of her colleagues who had over the years forfeited compacts of the palest powder they stroked optimistically across their bronze cheeks and breasts, and hairpins washed with gold and sets of mirrored choodis to Leela’s elegant if slippery-as-ghee fingers.

  Leela didn’t ‘borrow’ for profit; her intention was not to cause distress. Kleptomania was simply a part of her personality, an act as unconscious as the shake of her hips when a song played.

  Leela also felt she was owed for having been taken advantage of when she was vulnerable. She might never get back at those motherfuckers. But everyone else was fair game.

  ‘I’m a bar dancer,’ she would shrug. ‘Men want to spend on me. I let them.’

  Leela encouraged her customers to buy her presents not just on her birthday, which they never seemed to notice occurred twelve times a year, but every time they met.

  The other girls played the birthday game too and they conned customers into treating them and their children and their children’s friends to ‘burger-fry’ and made-to-order cakes frosted with flowers. They sighed about how lonely the days were, how hard it was to remain faithful and if only one could watch serials, in particular the ones starring Tulsi, Prerna and Ba—‘they were family!’—how quickly time would pass, and how quickly too might pass the temptation to stray.

  Such words, if repeated often enough, might result in the gift of a TV, perhaps even a mini fridge stocked with silver-foil mithai rich with ghee and thick with nuts, or of a new wardrobe, everything within ‘matching-matching’ and sequinned one hundred per cent, so at night in the light of the creamy street bulbs, the bar dancer walking from her flat to an auto-rickshaw would cause strolling couples and children playing cricket between cars to stare, for she would appear like she was draped in diamonds sparkling so bright they could only be living, breathing things.

  But Leela had no interest in merely big gestures.

  Her motto was ‘“Kustomer” is Cunt.’

  She didn’t often have sex with a customer and when she did, perhaps once every few months, it was for money. Leela required payment upfront (five thousand rupees for ‘one time’ of intercourse)—and this was non-refundable if she developed cramps and had to excuse herself.

  But even when Leela knew she would be paid, her customer was expected to suffer a trial period of humiliation before she would accede to him. He had to plead for her attention by phoning her dozens of times, by throwing money at her as she danced. He had to offer daily tokens—lipstick, earrings and perfume—through the security guard who stood outside Night Lovers, a giant of a man whose fiery red turban matched his temper.

  And he had to run her errands. A customer entering Leela’s flat, twenty litres of Bisleri water hoisted on his back, could be mistaken for a delivery boy.

  Leela had so little faith in the ability of men to remain loyal and persevere that even ‘husband’ wasn’t absolved from her itch to take advantage of the immediate. She would phone Shetty as he was driving over: ‘“Durrling”, stop by Apna Bazaar na?’ She would coo for rice and lentils, spinach and potatoes, for brinjals and beans that more often than not rotted in her Kelvinator in the same flimsy pink and white plastic bags in which they had entered her home. They rotted because they were never used: Leela refused to cook.

  Like the models in the L’Oréal hoardings, Leela wanted men to know she was ‘worth it’. But at nineteen, she was also aware that with girls like her opportunity didn’t always knock twice. So she squeezed the men in her life like they were lemons and once she was through, she discarded them like rinds.

  But every privilege has a price tag, and sometimes for money, and at other times because she had taken so much even she could not say ‘no’, Leela had to perform galat kaam, have sex with strangers in exchange for what she had convinced herself she had got for free.

  Although they all did it, no bar dancer ever admitted to galat kaam. The only answer to a question around it was, ‘Main mar jaongi magar galat kaam nahin karungi.’ I’ll die before I perform galat kaam. The brazen one who admitted to it, it was said of her, was a randi, whore, and you could openly say to her in a voice as loud as you pleased—even though you were as guilty as she—‘then you’re a shameless liar you are, saying you’re a bar dancer. You’re no barwali! You’re a waiter! A waiter in a Silent Bar and if you deny it your mother will rise from her grave and steal your booty from you. What’s left of it, that is!’

  A ‘Silent Bar’ or a ‘Free Bar’, as some referred to it, was often mistaken for a dive—it was poky, dark and loud and smelt strongly of incense, chutneys and tandoori meat. But in a Silent Bar men ordered food and drink so they could also order one of the ‘waiters’, as the women serving them were called, to give them a hand job. The waiters were almost always alcoholics or addicts. They tucked plastic bottles of cough syrup in the waistbands of their saris. They married men who would tear off and sell sewer covers in their desperation for brown sugar cash.

  ‘A woman in a silent bar is no less than a vaishya,’ Leela told me. ‘And like all whores, she gets no respect because she deserves no respect. She wafts like a ghost, her face concealed by shadows, her voice never heard. Only her hands are of interest to anyone and these she must use until they erupt with sores.’

  A Silent Bar was for destitute prostitutes, explained Leela, and in the hierarchy of the Bombay street, these women were to be pitied as much as the floating sex workers who sold themselves just about anywhere they could stand. Above them were the women in brothels who shared with their madam a fearsome relationship of slave to mistress. Above the brothel girls were the call girls who boasted, ‘I graduated from Mithibai!’; ‘I did English at Xavier’s!’ Who insisted, ‘I’m from a good family that has fallen on hard times.’ During particularly hard times, a call girl would slip into the lycra bikini she’d bought from Lokhandwala and custom-fitted with safety pins, she’d slip on her imitation D&G shades and, having slipped past security because she looked like she belonged, she would lounge by the pool of a five-star hotel and wait to be picked up. A call girl was no better off than a massage parlour girl whose pimp advertised her on the flyers he stuck on telephone poles, flyers that read ‘Thailand Best Bod Massage Total Relex Please Call 98201*****’. Such a girl would work out of the string of ‘beauty salons’ that huddled behind the Taj hotel, and she was arrested so often, generally on a tip-off from a competitor, that she kept an overnight bag by the door to take with her to the police station.

  But all of these women ranked below Bombay’s bar dancers, and this was partly because selling sex wasn’t a bar dancer’s primary occupation and because when she did sell sex she did so quietly and most often under her own covers.

  And so Leela, seeing no similarities between the bar and the brothel, convinced herself that she had earned the right to sneer at such women, and she did, with primness and pride, even though every one of them, like her, had been hurt and exploited, and often, if not always, she sold sex because she felt she had to.

  When some people saw Leela they saw a dhandewali, working girl. But when she saw herself—in the mirror that hung behind her bedroom door or in the mirrored wall that was the highlight of Night Lovers—she saw a bar dancer. And the difference to her was the difference, she said, between the blessing that was my life and the blight that was hers.

  Turning her gaze away from her customer, Leela looked at me, her Gold Flake still unlit between her fingers: ‘Light?’

  I was happy to oblige, getting up from where I’d been sitting cross-legged against the Godrej, insi
de of which was a hollowed out copy of the Hanuman Chalisa stuffed with Leela’s daily collection—the tips she earned for dancing.

  The kitchen adjoined the Indian-style latrine and there was a box of matches amidst the tottering piles of dirty dishes—the debris of the previous night’s mistakes. I looked around for some water to drink, but the Bisleri canister was empty and when I opened Leela’s fridge I had to shut it quickly: it was a potpourri of rotting vegetables, the vegetable-gifts she so craved, which symbolized something to her—success, perhaps security—but which she never could find use for.

  Opposite the kitchen counter was the only window in Leela’s flat. Sunlight streamed in and brought with it the sounds of the street—the buzz, the barks, the drill-like honking. I leaned over and out of the window and ran my eyes over what was now a familiar view.

  To the west, Mira Road shimmered with acres of salt pans, flat and blindingly white. Hundreds of minimum wage migrants, having left their families behind in Bihar and Gujarat, lived in tents they had pitched alongside the pans. Opposite the salt pans were residential buildings, their walls squeezed into one another like commuters on the Virar fast train. In these buildings lived ‘everyday’ people and here too lived some who elicited curiosity—Nigerians and Ghanaians about whom the local police would complain, ‘They destroy their passports as soon as they arrive in India and then use their relationships with bar girls to manage the money they earn from net fraud and drug peddling.’ The Nepali girls who lived in Mira Road in large groups in attic-sized sublets introduced themselves as Manipuris fleeing militancy. This protected them from prying neighbours who might discover they were illegal and for no reason other than maska-mari, to make themselves look good, squeal to the police—the overseers of Mira Road.

  The police took hafta-wasooli, cash handouts, from people they knew could afford it—builders and cable TV operators, dance bar owners and bar dancers. And from those who could not but whose existence begged punishment—drug addicts and sex workers and the hand-clapping, sari-lifting hijras who would say to a policeman be he good to them or bad, ‘Were you sent by the devil to create ashes from our lives?’

  A policeman could grab Leela and with the force of his legs and lathi propel her into an auto-rickshaw. ‘Paisa nikal kutiya,’ he might say, calling her a bitch, demanding hafta for not arresting her. ‘Arresting me for what?’ she might have asked the first time. ‘For being a randi,’ he would have replied. He could steal her money, rip off her gold chains and slap her around.

  Leela paid the police, because everyone she knew paid them too. And she was afraid. The police, she said, were quick with their lathi and leather belt, they had access to electric wires and a cattle prod, and they used these instruments without hesitation.

  Even a handful of the middle-aged, middle-class Maharashtrian women who lived in Mira Road paid the police. But they did so because they were in business. They waited for their husbands to leave for work, and once they were gone opened their doors to the local pimp and to his girls. As the housewife went on with her life, as she cooked and cleaned, swept and swabbed, her husband’s house would ebb and flow with visitors. At 5.45 p.m. the housewife would accept a slim wad of notes from the pimp, who moved quickly, pushing along his girls. She would then prepare for the return of her husband—set water for tea, fix a tray of snacks, refresh her lipstick. The housewife called this ‘chai-paani ka paisa’. Pin money.

  The street below Leela’s flat was crammed with fruit and vegetable stalls, video game parlours and liquor stores. An apprentice cook rolled chapattis on the pavement outside the local ‘hotil’, a videotape salesman drew and coloured pictures he’d stick on to the covers of his pirated wares, a teenager in shades pushed a handcart of CDs past Paresh’s Digital Photo Lab within whose walls Paresh Photowala was king, commanding ‘Mouth wash karo! Baal theek karo! Right leg little front! Turn your body thoda forward! Smile! Smile! Smile karo yaar! Okay, nice, done!’

  Then came along the strangest sadhu I had ever seen—a gnome of a man in purple tights, a purple puffer jacket and a knee-length orange robe. He bellowed, ‘Shani ke naam,’ in the name of Shani, to the jingle of his flask of coins and in doing so encouraged the crowded street to empty miraculously before him.

  Paanwala Shyam angled his brilliant white moustache to the sun, as though he knew he was being watched. He saw me and I waved down at him.

  Shyam Kumar dealt in supari, of the kind used in paan, and it was whispered he also dealt in ‘supari’, codename for contract killing, for the D Company—the underworld organization headed by Dawood Ibrahim, the global terrorist.

  Next to Paanwala Shyam, his paan stall and phone booth, sat Leela’s tailor friend Aftab. Aftab worked under a sign he’d painted himself, it read ‘Taylor All Tipe Alltration’. (To be fair to Aftab, his immediate neighbour was a ‘Key Meker’.) Every few months Aftab designed and stitched clothes worth thousands for Leela’s dance bar routine. The two would deliberate on the Yash Raj Films’ style of the moment—‘Cap sleeve, sleeveless, puff? Sharara pants, georgette sari, flared lehenga?’ They would haggle over lace, beads and crystals; if they had to, they would shame the other into getting their way with the garment.

  ‘You must have eaten rohu today,’ Aftab would mock Leela through glasses shiny as sequins. ‘You’re behaving as tight-fisted as a Bengali.’

  ‘You must have had to fuck one of your wives last night,’ Leela would smile over her gold-rimmed aviators. ‘You’re in a mood blacker than a Bengali’s arsehole.’

  { 2 }

  ‘Manohar wanted me to start modelling; he said I was bootiful’

  Only bar dancers lived in Leela’s building. They lived openly, their doors wide open, they lived in sixes—six teens or teen-faced twenty somethings, six Bedias, Chamars, Nats; six Shias, Sunnis, Kalbeliyas. Six squeezed into a 1 BHK, living in such disarray to a stranger’s eyes it would appear they moved in the previous night. Six sprawled on mattresses that had, with time, been whittled down to a bony hardness, flat as the ground itself. Six had not a piece of linen between them. Six headrests were dupattas; dupattas were sometimes bed sheets. Six stuck their collection in their bras, their jewellery into shoes, their shoes and clothes into plastic bags.

  They gave the impression that any time now they would pick up and leave.

  Although their way of living suggested poverty, the bar dancers in Leela’s building were not poor. They were certainly not ‘Bombay’ poor, which implied the meanest existence in a ramshackle chawl in which home for a multi-generational family so large they slept four, even five, to a bed, was an all-purpose kholi, ten feet by ten feet. Nor were they ‘Indian’ poor—whatever their past, their present claimed no acquaintance with the poverty of slum life; a pavement dwelling no wider than the tattered sari it was shaped from, the branches of the closest tree serving as a hanger for clothes, its nooks a rack for utensils, toys, a toothbrush.

  On the contrary, Leela and her neighbours returned home with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of rupees every night and they paid as much as ten thousand rupees in bhada, rent. Money was easy come, easy go, and some bar dancers treated it as such. They bought as many as fifty packets of gutka a day; gutka killed the appetite and kept them slim. They drank beer, beer kept them enthusiastic. And they loved takeaway, ordering, almost daily, biryanis or kebabs. Leela bought clothes she wouldn’t wear twice, shoes she flung impatiently out of sight after a single use, and when she met someone she thought pretty she never hesitated to ask what brand of make-up they wore and then bought it for herself, never mind the price.

  Partly because she spent so much, but also because she didn’t know how, Leela made no investments. ‘Banks require identity proof,’ she said. ‘Only God knows who I am,’ she grumbled, meaning she had no paperwork at all.

  Leela was paid in cash and she paid in cash too because her landlord was a gangster. Without a rent receipt she couldn’t prove her resident status and receive a PAN card or ration card or open a bank account.<
br />
  But the bulk of Leela’s money, and that of every bar dancer, was spent on family members—parents and siblings and siblings’ spouses and children. And so the first thing Leela did at the start of every month was send a cut of her money home.

  ‘Secure the land,’ she would call down the phone. ‘Start building an extension to the house.’

  ‘Look after the girls,’ she would say of her nieces.

  ‘Send them to school.’

  ‘Don’t send them to me!’

  Home for a bar dancer like Leela could be Bombay itself—it could be Kamatipura or nearby Foras and Falkland roads, famous for selling sex.

  Home could be Sangli, an agricultural district near Bombay that witnessed the highest number of farmers’ suicides in western Maharashtra due to farm-related debts. A bar dancer from Sangli might be the daughter of a dhoti-topi-clad farmer forced to sell his land due to a single insufficient rain, left with no option but to allow his child to seek work in the big city.

  Home could be the industrial cities of Lucknow and Agra up north, where the khandani families who traced their lineage to the courtesans had once thrived. Their historical patronage—the royals, the land-owning zamindars and briefly the British—had died out, leaving them marooned. For families such as these dancing for money was ‘izzat ki roti’. Respectability. It signalled independence and upward mobility. Parents would exhibit 4×6s of their daughters singing and dancing in bars with enthusiasm and pride, giving these photographs greater prominence than even the sepia portraits of their revered ancestors.