Beautiful Thing Read online

  Leela danced alongside about twenty other girls on a slightly elevated stage in the middle of the bar. For the first few hours she was enthusiastic, for she was drunk and had dragged on an accommodating waiter’s joint. She feigned pleasure, winking naughtily at the customers, pouting at their glassy-eyed reflections in the mirrored wall behind her. And she was careful not to miss a single step of the dance routines she practised so diligently at home. That was what she was tipped for after all—to beguile like an Aishwarya, a Sushmita, a Priyanka.

  Do what you want, Shetty instructed his girls, but give kustomer-sahib paisa wasool. The customers should get their money’s worth.

  Leela wasn’t allowed to speak with customers during her performance and she rarely did. In fact, she noticed only those who threw money on her, as was the custom, or asked the steward standing by for this purpose to place a garland of hundred or five hundred rupee notes around her neck. If she was feeling wicked, she would accept the money and staring deep into a customer’s eyes, silently mouth: ‘Is this all you think I’m worth?’ She would rub her eyes and pout, murmuring, ‘Hai! Kyun na main sweecide karoon? Kyun na main apna sar ohven mein daloon?’ Why shouldn’t I commit suicide? Why shouldn’t I stick my head into an oven?

  If the customer was familiar with Leela’s ways, which, truth be told, were the ways of all experienced bar dancers, he’d swat her away with a good-natured laugh.

  Not so a fresh one. ‘No!’ such a man would cry, rummaging frantically through his wallet for more money, even if it was his last few notes, seeming to really believe Leela would kill herself right there on the dance floor. Leela would acknowledge the fluttering notes with a smile and for a few seconds, perhaps even a minute, dance as though the customer was the only man in the room. But even before he could settle back to enjoy her attentions, Leela and her unspoken promises would have glided towards another man.

  In a Bombay dance bar it was not just money that was power. Nakhra was power too, the power to break a fresh one’s heart.

  Soon, however, Leela’s intoxication, her playful moments of spinning around the dance floor, would evaporate. She felt as she always did towards herself, her job, her life—used, wasted, bored.

  Her customers were hardly hi-fi in their cheap, choppy bowl cuts. Their shoes were much too large as though they expected—at their age!—to grow. The chhotu-types wore heels and when they smacked their feet on the table tops like Raja Hindustanis, Leela was faced with rows of potato holes. She swore she smelt feet, despite the strong cologne her customers reeked of, and when I asked of the smell, she said ‘dirt’.

  They were predictable too in the way they started out polite, calling her ‘Miss’ to her face (if ‘pataka’ and ‘item’ when she turned) and how only a whisky-Coke later, they were indistinguishable from roadside Romeos—those open-shirted, deshi-drinking thugs who made caressing gestures with their hands as they muttered filthy words to passing women.

  Customers pretended it was the alcohol making them so, when the truth was they didn’t need an excuse to hiss at her breasts, ‘Ai booty, what’s your loveline number?’

  She disdained their amateurish attempts to get her attention. How one would say, ‘Here, take my bijniss card,’ as a ruse to hold her hand, even though he knew well that touching a dancer inside the bar wasn’t allowed. How another thought a hundred and a compliment about her ‘white-white’ complexion would get her to linger.

  When they were real drunk, they were real cunts. They would rate the girls aloud, shouting rudely, ‘Five on ten!’ ‘Eight on ten!’

  There was always one who would attempt to dance and that was so ‘no kalass’—the girls didn’t care if he was a ‘zabardast paisewala’, had plenty of money, or a ‘dus paisewala’, had none—they would mouth gaandu, arsehole, to his face. They would hoot when the bouncer dragged him off the floor.

  Leela dismissed young men her own age. They were strugglers, she knew, with little control over their lives. Their mothers and wives kept a steady grip on their earnings and monitored their social lives to protect them from women exactly like her. They were, at best, good for flattery and a few tens. They were dreamers too and they dreamt of things Leela had no interest in—of working in an AC office, of upgrading from a motorcycle to a ‘motor-gaadi’, of going on pilgrimage to Tirupati.

  Many young men flush with hundreds and excited to spend it all were, typically, new recruits in local gangs. They were boys really, who had gone from being useless and unemployable to becoming ‘men’, paid regularly for their allegiance and muscle. Few had known temptation and as they faced it now, they didn’t quite know how to respond. Their first taste of dance bars would come courtesy of a senior gangster, a Bada Don, for gangs routinely used places like Night Lovers to impress future recruits.

  ‘See all of this,’ the Bada Don would say gesturing grandly, the gold chains around his neck gleaming brightly. ‘All this can be yours to enjoy if you have the money. But how will you earn so much money, my young friend? Tell me? Think! That’s right! It will happen if you work for me.’

  This lot was under no illusion. They expected to die young or live behind bars and boasted a heady recklessness Leela found profitable, but distasteful. Playing games may have been part of her job, but life itself, she knew well, was no game.

  But the worst customer barring none was the ‘chhota mota sindhi chamar chor’. This peculiar dance bar phrase amalgamated the qualities a bar dancer considered most undesirable. These included being stingy and of low caste—sometimes as ‘low’ as that of the girls themselves. A chamar chor was a misguided young man, most often in his late teens or early twenties. He robbed things shiny and expensive-looking from his parents’ home and sold these to his friends or the petty thieves they knew, for what was known as ‘cheating ka paisa’, small fraud money. He’d snatch cellphones laid casually on shop counters. Racing past on a stolen motorcycle he’d tear purses from the arms of women in auto-rickshaws.

  The only place a chamar chor could enjoy his money without coming under suspicion was in a dance bar—even though a bar dancer like Leela, knowing well the source of his largesse was no more than a fistful of jhol, stolen goods, would accept his notes with a grimace.

  Bar owners like Shetty encouraged men like the chamar chor. They were fair game. Shetty enjoyed playing games. Unlike Leela, he was sure of winning.

  He would welcome the chamar chor with fanfare. ‘Consider this your home,’ he would say, pulling the chamar chor into an embrace. ‘Think of me as your father. Fathers and sons don’t count money between them, do they now?’

  Once the chamar chor ran out of money, he ran up a debt, siphoning Officer’s Choice and 8 p.m. down his throat, demanding garlands of notes. As soon as he got drunk he became a real cunt. Typically, he would take over the dance floor, offering his best imitation of Amitabh Bachchan in that most raucous of Bollywood songs, Jumma chumma de de.

  ‘Chumma!’ he would scream, begging for a kiss.

  ‘Chumma!’ he would lunge across the floor, sliding this way and that.

  ‘Chumma!’ he would sigh and soon enough, with a ‘chumma’, collapse.

  And that was the beginning of the end of his simple life.

  For when the chamar chor’s debt touched a comfortably round and suitably large figure, say one lakh rupees—an amount, given the temptations, he could spend within a week—Shetty would move in. He would tell the chamar chor to pay up, or else. That the chamar chor couldn’t was a given. So there were two ways he could resolve the problem he had created. He could go to jail—which implied not just a meeting with a magistrate but beatings courtesy an accommodating policeman. If he was vegetarian, finding chicken skin in his food, if he was non-vegetarian, discovering worms. Or he could do Shetty a favour. The favour might involve six months of washing dishes in the kitchen, or running errands—ferrying the dancers back and forth at all times of night and day. But if the chamar chor was unlucky, he would suffer what men like Shetty called a ‘Bombay
Special’ and the only response to a command involving those words was ‘Yes sethji’.

  A Bombay Special was Bombay; it was everything the name evoked: shock and awe, expectation, desperation and always the underlying question, ‘Why me?’

  A bar owner says, ‘I need someone shot. Here’s the gun. Now scram, cunt.’

  The chamar chor replies, ‘But . . . but I don’t know how to fire a gun!’

  The bar owner responds, ‘Ai, taking part in a competition? Want to win first prize? Arre, hold the gun two inches against the head and pull the trigger. Ekdum khallas. Smooth as butter.’

  Then he laughs, ‘Why the fear, my friend? Afraid of firecrackers?’

  And so it was that a young, silly, petty thief would come to kill for a bar owner with a gun, a grudge and a penchant for gangster films whose script he claimed as his own.

  So it was that a killer was born.

  If the chamar chor completed his Bombay Special there was no way back. If he did not, there was no way out.

  But if his success was no fluke, if he could go on to shoot another and one more, he could perhaps one day become a Bada Don.

  A Bada Don was a gangster without regrets. He was a man like Feroze Konkani, a Dawood man, now dead, once the city’s highest paid shooter who by the age of twenty was said to have been involved in eighteen killings. Dawood rewarded Konkani with a flat in upscale Juhu, a car and pillow cases of cash he lavished on bar dancers.

  His women would have known that Konkani’s money, like that of all Bada Dons, was ‘haram ki kamayi’, unclean and immorally obtained. It was ‘dadagiri ke paise’, acquired through extortion. They didn’t care. They didn’t care because in their business honesty was no virtue—it only equalled greater poverty. And poverty eventually made criminals of everyone, even those who swore to resist—it was the only way to transcend the free fall of their marginalized lives. So everyone was a ‘history-sheeter’, a person with a record of committing crimes, and it was considered better to be with a successful thug, a Bada Don, than with a chamar chor who depended on his woman even for his evening paan.

  A bar dancer who found herself dancing regularly for a Bada Don and then one night having with him ‘filmi sex’—sex practices he insisted she copy from pornographic films—would quell any second thoughts she might have on the matter, by repeating to herself, as though in doing so it became true: ‘Men are all gangsters anyway. So why shouldn’t I throw in my lot with a successful one?’

  She would reassure herself, ticking off the fingers of her left hand as she spoke aloud to anyone who would listen: ‘Gangsters have money. They’re smart-looking. They have tashan, style. What’s not to like? And they’re straight talkers. “Fuck me,” they say, straight off. They don’t suck your blood, choos choos ke, choos choos ke, like other men do. And even if they are troublemakers, they aren’t trouble that lasts long. Here today, dead in a police encounter or a gangvar tomorrow. A Bada Don knows death is his shadow. He understands that the life he has chosen can be so rich, so fulfilling, bursting with pleasure and with pain, because it is also so brief. So today means everything. Today my gangster will feed me and drink with me and we will go driving in his Honda City to Aksa beach and behind the bushes we will lie down, and afterwards, when we are done, we will have chai and samosas, and if not him, then at least I will pretend we are husband-wife.’

  Leela said, ‘A few girls do get scared once they discover their man is a murderer, a don. They stop meeting him, change their cell number, change even the dance bar where they work. But what does he care? As long as he has money to spend, he will find women to spend it on. We are all the same to him. The living same-same, the dead same-same. But sure, there are others who will only go out with gangsters. They find it thrilling! The first time a chamar chor kills a man he sees his life flash before him. He goes home, says goodbye to his family, locks his bedroom door and waits for the police. But do the police care if some do take ka bhonsdi ka lund, two-bit cock of a whore, was shot in the head while pissing on the wall of the JW Marriott? Days pass; days without money. What does the chamar chor do? He goes back to that same dance bar. He begs the bar owner to find work for him, any work will do, he says, making his meaning clear. And so he kills again. But this time the killing doesn’t scare him. It’s a thrill, a powerful thrill, because he killed a man and suffered no retribution; because for a few seconds of work he made more money than his father has ever brought home, forget in one month, in six months, and his father is fifty years old and still has payments left on his two-wheeler. And it’s a thrill because he knows that the only thing that stands between him and money is his conscience. He can make money for the rest of his life because in Bombay city if there is one thing you are never short of it is people. He thinks to himself, so easy! “Trigger daba, figure kama!” And this power, this freedom, this is what attracts a bar dancer to a killer. Do you know why? Because we yearn to be free.’

  Of course, a true Bada Don like Dawood wouldn’t visit a Bombay dance bar, or a dance bar in public. But a Bombay don was no Dawood and neither was the average Bombay man. And of all the customers from all over India Leela would perform for at Night Lovers, no one was more vulnerable, or to use her word, ‘pathetic’, than the middle-aged Bombay man.

  ‘Give him a chance to say two words,’ grumbled Leela. ‘Two! He’ll say two hundred.’ As evening’s shadows lengthened, so would the stories—the unhappy marriage, the wife who might as well have padlocked her knicker-bra, the children who flippantly nicknamed him Mr ATM.

  Leela may have found her customers pathetic, but they made me sad. For a few, visiting a dance bar was no more than a boys’ night out. But others were clear, even humble, in their loneliness. I knew this not because these men hit on Leela—not all of them did and many took their time doing so—but because of their consistent, often futile attempts to get her to talk to them, to listen to them and to remember them when they returned.

  Bombay has a torrential number of people. There are people everywhere, and they are confined not just to public spaces and the interactions of push, shove and pull but to what should be personal spaces. For want of space children sleep with parents, for greater want parents sleep in the doorway of their homes. Husbands and sons heft their bedding down the street, unfurling it on the floor of their local temple or mosque.

  In its death, privacy takes with it intimacy. And so when men in situations like these seek intimacy elsewhere, one of the first places they go to, because it is socially and economically accessible to them, is the dance bar.

  But Leela didn’t see nuance. She didn’t have to.

  What are they like? I asked of her customers.

  She shrugged.

  What do you know of them?

  ‘My head,’ she said, tapping her temple, ‘is not a computer. I have no place for altu-faltu info.’

  Perhaps because Leela enjoyed B-grade horror flicks, she remembered the ones with the terrible features. Those she hoped wouldn’t return. The gangster with the cauliflower ear, the construction worker with the forest of hennaed knuckle hair. That Parsi fellow with a hole in his tooth so large Leela swore she’d once seen him pour a quarter into his mouth only to have it come tumbling out.

  To Leela a customer was a ‘Ramzan goat’. Destined for slaughter. And she, Leela said to me, must wield the knife that would slit his throat, cut his head off and hang his carcass to drip, drip, drip. Never forget, she instructed, a bar dancer’s game is ‘lootna’, ‘kustomer ko bewakuf banana’. To rob, to fool a customer. And every bar dancer prayed for the sort of client whose indulgence would make newspaper headlines. A scamster like Abdul Karim Telgi, who was rumoured to have lavished around ninety lakh rupees on a bar dancer. Or Aman Mishra, a young man who became famous for spending over twenty lakh rupees on a bar dancer he was infatuated with. (Two years later, after he was revealed to be a conman, Mishra kidnapped the bar dancer for ransom.)

  Although Leela had yet to be discovered by an Abdul or an Aman, s
he was undeterred, rarely allowing her distaste for her current (what she considered lowly) crop of customers to show. She was professional and she knew that sort of behaviour would get her fired, wife or no wife.

  But of course, if Leela didn’t know her customers, fewer knew Leela. They didn’t even know what to call her, she was always calling herself something different. One night she was Kareena, having just watched the actress Kareena Kapoor in Dev. On another night, she would introduce herself as Rani, for Rani Mukherjee in Yuva.

  When she was done with work, Leela would clean up in the make-up room, say her goodbyes and stop by Shetty’s office for her money. All the money thrown at her was picked up by a steward and placed in a dabba with a single key Shetty kept in his wallet, which was, in turn, chained to the pocket of his front shirt. Shetty would open the box in front of Leela, note the amount in a dense, cloth-bound register and pay her cut accordingly. Leela could never be sure that everything she earned went into her dabba and not into that of another girl’s by mistake or into Shetty’s wallet on purpose. But she had no choice but to believe him, just like every bar dancer in Bombay believed her manager.

  Tucking her money away in her bra, Leela would head to the back door to avoid bumping into customers. She’d pass through the kitchen, inevitably filthy at this time of night, through the alcohol-storage area with its imported whiskies and country liquors, even with packets of haath bhatti—home brew sold in plastic bags for a few rupees, and slip into the auto-rickshaw that had brought her to the dance bar.

  Leela had known her auto driver Badal for several months; he was her protégé. They had met in Kamatipura when he was fifteen and his mother Bani’s pimp. Leela saw her childhood self in Badal. She could see his adolescence was as much a zone of desperation as hers had been. When she wasn’t engaged with customers Bani lavished her energies on Tommy, a pet goat with a rosy red collar she hoped to train for the circus. How quickly money ran out! Sometimes there was so much of it, Bani would order beer and biryani and suddenly all the building’s ‘whores’, rendered shameless by hunger, would decide she was their best friend. They would eat until they burped and then Bani would order Badal out to buy paan so sweet it made the teeth squeak, and the women would chew and gossip and gamble away whatever little money they had left.