Beautiful Thing Read online

  Girls from other khandani communities like the Kanjar, Nat and Kalbeliya were often inducted into the profession at ages as young as six or seven—into street theatre known as tamasha in Maharashtra, into travelling groups of gymnasts, acrobats and trick-rope performers, into sex with long-distance truckers; in the lean season earning so little they could barely afford a sheet of plastic bags to separate their bodies from the highway.

  Around the 1970s, bars in Bombay began to employ young women irrespective of their experience. This was for a new innovation called ‘waiter service’. Waiters, in this context, referred to female servers. These women wore saris, not uniforms, and they were paid a monthly salary and did not have to survive on a collection. They were entirely different from the waiters who would go on to work in Silent Bars. Another innovation, ‘orchestra service’, referred to a live musical performance with a female lead. Bars then took a cue from Hindi films and the ‘item numbers’ gaining popularity—these were dance songs featuring starlets in plunging necklines and were conceptualized to sexualize a film without doing so overtly. Bars paid young women to dance to popular item numbers of the time and when this became their primary attraction they began to identify themselves as ‘dance bars’.

  Their success was evident in their growing numbers. In 1984, there were just twenty-four registered dance bars in the state. Ten years later, there were more than 200. And by 2005, this number had climbed to 1,500.

  For women not mired in sex work, bar dancing offered lucrative advantages over other kinds of low-grade employment. In 2005, a bar dancer in a mid-level bar like Night Lovers brought home in one night what a cleaning woman or bai earned in a month.

  More often than not, however, this new profession attracted girls like Leela—poor, barely educated runaways low on options. With its promise of immediate financial independence, bar dancing was a refuge from the horror of family life a young woman had no power to affect except by leaving.

  Still, for all these advantages, Bombay was unforgiving. It could be toxic, no less than an open wound. Naivety was fair prey and beauty unguarded deserved what it got. In a barwali’s neighbourhood it was said, ‘A “fresh piece” isn’t secure from a boy child.’

  To prove her point, Leela introduced me to her friend Anita. Like many bar dancers, Anita used only her first name with those outside the line, to protect her identity.

  Anita had been raped by her father. But that wasn’t ‘aaj ki taaza khabar’. Breaking news. She had had two sons by two different men. Or was it four different men? she said, with some confusion of how these things work. As she thrust and twirled to buy her sons milk and toys and to educate them in an English-medium school, she dreamt of when they would one day get ‘big-big jobs’ and say to her grandly, ‘Now you put your feet up Mummy and let your daughters-in-law do everything.’ But then her elder son, Sridhar, turned sixteen and one monsoon night he said to Anita in a voice as flat as water undisturbed: ‘Khat pe chal.’ Get on the bed.

  ‘I ignored him,’ Anita said. ‘Our chawl had flooded and the water had risen to our knees. Even my Reliance stopped working. So I thought to myself, “Poor boy, water is swimming in his brain. He’s having a fit!”’

  But Sridhar wasn’t having a fit and the night after he didn’t bother with the politeness of a request. He raped his mother. The night after that he raped her once more and when it was over and he had returned to his own bed in his own dark corner, Anita slid under her chunni and, gently patting her cheek, comforted herself, ‘At least he didn’t hit me. I’m an ugly face in a glamour line and had he damaged me further I would have been thrown out of the dance bar and forced to become a waiter in a Silent Bar. The humiliation! Merciful God, you saved me.’

  Later, Anita would become what her friends called ‘poetic’. On slow Monday nights when they took it easy in the make-up room, playing on the communal Sony music system not the item numbers they danced to each evening but the music they loved—old-time film songs like Waqt ne kiya and Chaudvin ka chaand and Inhi logon ne; songs whose lyrics they knew by heart, lyrics that would make them sigh—Anita and her friends would sit on the floor, each with a quarter of RC whisky by her side, and talk of things they could not to those outside their line. They would share old stories like they were sharing food; of how they had been forced into the line, of how the line had saved them from marriage to a friend their father owed money to; and they would share news, of a child who loved school, or a lover whose illness had spread to the mouth causing his gums to splinter and bleed—‘punishment perhaps for loving a barwali’.

  But Anita always took it too far, they said. She never could draw the line between sharing and simply ‘being bore’. For no sooner had the quarter gone to her head, brightening her eyes and reddening her face, she would start to recite that old psalm, and with tears, lament as though she hadn’t so many times before: ‘The evening of the rains God cried. And with him, I cried too.’

  Her tears were forced, dismissed her friends. ‘Tears,’ they would sneer, ‘are the indulgences of those who haven’t suffered enough.’

  To avoid experiences like Anita’s, the bar dancers in Leela’s building refused to allow men to live with them. One might come across a child too young to understand what his mother did—who believed his mother and all of her friends worked in an ‘oh fice’, or that she taught ‘two-plus-two’ in a school far away. I might pass a man on the stairs, pressing his finger down hard on a doorbell, pressing his forehead against a door, but he would be a hotil boy delivering dinner or a manager desperate to cajole the shaan, the glory of his dance bar, to please return to work, he was sorry he’d called her a chalu chamak challo, a rapchak, a fast one, behind her back. ‘Arre, he was only kidding, no?’

  Men were chutiyas, Leela dismissed, making a fucking sign with her fist. They lived to profit from the women in their lives. Anita was no exception. I could do a survey with that little notebook-pencil of mine if I didn’t believe her. It would reveal that every one of the bar dancers in Leela’s building had either been sold by a blood relative or raped by one.

  She knew one girl forced to take the virginity of all three of her first cousins. The other cousins had videotaped her.

  These demons weren’t prologue.

  In the world of the dance bar, a mother could be convinced to rent her daughter out for twenty-five hundred rupees and something irresponsibly enticing—a TV perhaps, the first six months of cable paid for. She was petty and tight-fisted and had she any teeth they were orange—she was addicted to gutka and her favourite brand was the pungent Goa 1000, which she carried compulsively in her bra, in the waistband of her sari petticoat, or held in her hand, handkerchief-style. Mother drank on the sly and given half a chance would poach her daughter’s customers. Not for sex, for conversation. She was that ‘krack’ from loneliness.

  If mother wanted better for her daughter, and if she couldn’t save her from the dance bar, she would find ways to compensate: she would cook hotil-style khana for her—mutton swimming in ghee, Chicken Chinese Punjabi style, buttery aloo-parathas dripping with fresh malai. She would order Guru Beer or a bottle of Old Monk rum, and she would ready all of this food and drink stylishly on a tray, intending to hover eagerly over her daughter when her daughter returned home from work, cajoling her to eat, drink, fatten up. But if her daughter returned with the dawn, then mother would put aside the tray, turn the cooler up high and, heating almond oil in a miniature kadai, massage the bruised soles of her little girl’s feet. She would kiss her toes, calloused and hard with stamping thud-thud to draw from the ghungroos knotted around her ankles a sound sweet and inviting, and sing softly to her baby girl her favourite lullaby:

  Go to sleep, princess, go to sleep.

  Go to sleep, my precious one.

  Sleep and see sweet dreams, in the dream see your beloved

  fly to Roopnagar and be surrounded by the maidens.

  The king will garland you and—

  Here she would kiss her daugh
ter—

  Kiss you on the forehead.

  She would whisper: ‘With a daughter like you only a fool would regret not having borne a son.’

  If opportunity soured and galat kaam was inevitable, mother would spare her daughter the shame of being a raste-side dhandewali forced to round up her own customers. She would have a quiet chat with the local paanwala and with the auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers who never said no to a money deal, especially on peak summer days when work was slow and hot winds struck a driver’s face like a million slaps.

  Some of these men were, in fact, pimps with a taxi or an auto-rickshaw at their service. They would listen for coded phrases like ‘college girl’ or ‘back drive’ or try to elicit interest in these matters by murmuring ‘full service?’ Some of them had been brought into the business as children—their mothers were sex workers for whom they pimped once they came of age. But they were not the only ones benefiting from the want of others. In Bombay city, it was whispered, for a certain kind of man born into a certain kind of life, only two things guaranteed money. Sex. And supari.

  Mother would promise men such as these a fifty-rupee commission on every customer. ‘Tell your catch I offer a discount on festivals,’ she’d encourage. ‘And 25 per cent off the hour if he breaks night with my child. I’ll throw in dinner. Tell him that.’

  ‘Dinner!’ the men would snigger amongst themselves. ‘Why dinner? Isn’t your girl a feast in herself?’

  But whatever mother did, and by God she did some shameless things, it was, I knew, almost always because she wasn’t permitted, by virtue of her sex and class or her status as a financial dependant, to have a say in the things that mattered.

  Fathers on the other hand had no excuse.

  And yet, they were always Manohars—variations of the man Leela had been born to.

  Manohar worked odd jobs in the military cantonment in Meerut, in Uttar Pradesh. He and Apsara, who had worked as a housemaid until recently, had Leela in 1986. She was their youngest and followed three boys. Apsara and her children were united in their fear of Manohar, who was an alcoholic and, from what I gathered, schizophrenic. For a time, Apsara suffered the most. There was the forced sex in front of the children. The stripping. One night Manohar tore off Apsara’s Patiala suit—a voluminous item of clothing that covered her arms, stomach and legs—and kicked her out of the house. She crouched in the darkness until Leela was able to sneak out with a towel.

  ‘We’d hear our mother being beaten and wouldn’t know what to do,’ Leela said. ‘We had one of those old-fashioned irons; do you know the kind you heat with hot coals? I would heat it and start ironing all the clothes in our house. I didn’t care whether they were dirty or clean, ironed or creased. Until the screaming stopped, until mother stopped sounding like a goat under the butcher’s knife, I ironed.’

  The cantonment was familiar with Manohar’s temper. Apsara cleaned an officer’s house. He pitied her, of course he did. But it was none of his bijniss.

  ‘We had a lot of family around. My uncle, a cook, lived next door; my father’s sisters lived close by. But there was no unity in our family. No response.’

  For Apsara’s suffering to end, Leela’s had to begin.

  And it did, when her daughter entered puberty.

  ‘Manohar wanted me to start modelling, because he thought I was bootiful. So one day he brought home a video camera to make videos, for big-big Bollywood directors, he said. He asked me to take off my clothes. I was a child, remember, but I was smart. Not like my mother, dense as seviyan! I thought, “These are for bad films, blue-type films.” So I said, “No. No, Manohar, I don’t want to be an actress.” He said nothing. Some days passed. One evening he came home and again he said to me, “Let’s make a film.” Again I said “no”, confident-like. “Okay,” he replied, “but if you don’t act in my film the police will arrest you for being a disobedient daughter and push you into lockup.” I started to cry. “Is he lying?” I asked my mother. What could she say? “Don’t be a stupid girl, stupid girl!” she said. “Do as he says!” That evening a policeman came home just like my father had threatened. He took me to the lock-up. I was terrified. So terrified I started doing su-su in my knicker. But the policeman didn’t put me in jail. He raped me. His friend raped me. When they were done they said, “Ghar chal.” Next month same thing. Again next month, and then the month after, regular as schoolwork. What did Manohar do? He called me a bad girl. “Bad girl!” he said. “I wanted you to be a model and an actress but look at you bringing shame on us.” But he was smiling a joker smile. Manohar made sure I visited the police regularly and soon they came to know me well. Some of them were good to me—when they were done they would give me chai or a Marie “biscoot”. They would say, “Tata! Bye-bye!” And they would make winking faces at me—as though I was a child!’

  One afternoon when she was thirteen and visiting a friend—‘I had only one friend and she was slow. I guess that’s why she was my friend!’—Leela caught her reflection in a full-length mirror. It was the first full-length mirror she had ever looked into. For the first time in her life Leela saw herself not just in her entirety, but as an individual, an entity. It was a startling feeling and it revealed to her things she had never before seen.

  She was scrawny, yes. But at five feet two she was already taller than her mother. Tougher than her mother. And she was sharper than her brothers, all of whom had played hooky through school. The twenty-year-old used his fingers to count three pigeons nibbling grain. The one in the middle had a leg shorter than the other and used his disability as an excuse for petty perversions: he would take advantage of the rush and confusion of students leaving the local school to feel up girls under the starched chunnis they draped protectively over their indigo kameezes. He would pick the boys’ kurta pockets for coins, sweets, ballpoint pens.

  With the suddenness of a shove, Leela realized she was better than everyone around her. With adult-like clarity, she knew she could do better.

  But if she wanted change, she would have to seek it for herself.

  ‘By then the girls in my school knew what I did and when I passed by they would hide behind their hands and whisper, “Leela is dirty, don’t talk to her.”

  ‘So I thought, “Why should I spoil my name? If I’m forced to do ganda kaam, I should do it where no one knows me. Otherwise, what chance will I have in life? And why should I feed my father with my money? I do the kaam and he gets the inam! Arre wah!”’

  Leela stepped away from the mirror.

  A few days later she stole money from her father’s pants pocket for a train ticket to Bombay. An older woman she knew from around town had moved there and begun working in a dance bar called Night Lovers. She agreed to introduce Leela to the owner.

  He was a God-fearing man, the woman said to Leela on the phone from Bombay. He was the father of two children, so no ladkibaazi for him, don’t take tension. He was a south Indian Shetty, first name Purshottam.

  Someone warned Leela, ‘Mira Road “tation”!’ and so she knew where to get off, even though what she knew she momentarily forgot when she saw before her Bombay.

  ‘So big!’ she gasped with wonder, descending on to the platform with her shabby little suitcase. ‘Too, too big!’

  Unsure of what to do, Leela did nothing, and that was a misstep she was not likely to repeat. She was elbowed and shoved and her breasts were squeezed like oranges for juice by half a dozen hands. She would have fallen off the platform and on to the tracks if she hadn’t grabbed on to a coolie hurrying past.

  Bombay was crowded, Leela concluded as she dusted her salwar kameez off with what was to become her trademark equanimity. And it wasn’t anything like a Bollywood film, she admitted to herself with a sigh. She took another look to be ‘double-sure’.

  Where were the white mountains, the shiny red gaadis, the yellow-haired firangs?

  Which way was Marine Drive, where did Amitabh Bachchan live, and was it true this was a city where women drank side by s
ide with men and men wore shoes crafted from the skin of cows fattened on ‘Lundun’s’ greenest grass? (‘Accha where was Lundun? What do they wear there?’)

  And yes, Bombay smelt. Not in the manner of the Meerut cantonment with its profusion of giant, flowering neem trees, their branches shooting out like the fingers of a ravenous dayan, witch. Back home, when a woman stepped out of her house and into the courtyard to dry her freshly washed hair, the breeze carried with it the scent of Chandrika soap and Amla Shikakai. And when a father was clever enough to marry his daughter off well, the air scooped into its arms the aroma of the finest vegetarian delicacies and of garlands of marigolds and gajras of jasmine.

  Not like that at all!

  Bombay smelt of shit. And everywhere she looked, from the train tracks, where people were strolling like they were in a park, even laying clothes out to dry, to the hillock that sloped into the opposite side of the tracks, between the neatly plotted lines of the spinach and potatoes someone enterprising was growing, all Leela saw was shit.

  How her eyes smarted!

  And that tatti smell combined with all the other station smells—of sugarcane juice and vada-pav, fresh fruit and flowers, fish spiced and fried, and of the hot, steamy fragrance of milk being poured into a giant utensil of freshly brewed masala tea—made her giddy.

  In the midst of these thoughts, Leela was accosted by a woman who enquired in a kindly tone if she was lost and on hearing her story, commiserated. ‘Let me walk with you, beti,’ she said. ‘Of course, I know where Night Lovers is, so famous it is, and only ten minutes away. No, don’t argue! You are like my daughter only.’