Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (11 page)

‘Have you gone mad?’ Priya cried. ‘What are you doing?’

Barbie held firm. Priya squirmed, and as she realized what it was she was touching she squirmed harder. ‘Ai hai!’ she yelped.

‘Are you mad?’ she gasped, genuinely worried.

Barbie smiled and let go of Priya’s hand. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Good men don’t grow on trees. They don’t fall from the sky. And let’s be franks, rarely do they enter Rassbery.’

‘And this,’ she touched her breast, ‘this will fade. It will be okay, I know. But oh, you should have seen Raj’s expression when I showed him. I could have eaten it! I would have paid for it!’ Barbie’s face was full with pleasure. ‘It was worth it, Priya, I swear to you. It was worth it.’

Priya stared at Barbie. She had no words. Her bravado. Her chilli powder, her torch. How ridiculous she was! Priya wished her pitiful little weapons would disappear and that she could disappear with them.

What good was a torch on the body of a woman who would mutilate herself so grossly for Raj’s affections? If Priya fought Barbie now, not only would she lose—‘Who am I fooling?’ she thought, ‘I
am
a sickly twig!’—wasn’t it likely Barbie would take a knife to another part of her body? What next? Would she cut off her entire breast? Scoop out her vagina to assure Raj she would never, could never, cheat on him?

Picking up her bag, Priya walked past Barbie and into the make-up room where the other girls had been following the fight, each with her own inverted tumbler against the wall.

‘I’m not a beggar for love!’ exclaimed Priya, throwing her bag down. ‘She can have him.’

She stared at the girls with a challenge on her face. They stared back with pity.

When I dropped by at Leela’s two evenings later, she and Priya were still talking about Barbie. Their voices held a grudging respect. Like Barbie, and like every bar dancer they knew, they too were cutters. Leela chipped away at the skin under her Timex. Priya burnt herself. They would use anything—cigarettes, lighters, knives, pens, beer caps, the flotsam in their handbags, the jetsam in their make-up boxes.

But Barbie had taken something not even worth commenting on for those in the line and turned it into a moment that would enter Rassbery lore. She was so determined to get that
mangalsutra
around her neck!

The friends wished they were as far-thinking. As innovative. As brave.

Leela explained her cutting to me. Every time she felt thwarted—when Shetty wouldn’t take her calls, and she knew it was because he was with his wife—she would drink. As she drank, the plunging sensation that had started in her stomach, tumbling and racing through her body, would begin to slowly dissipate. I had seen what would happen next. Leela would eat in grasping handfuls, she would crank-call ex-lovers, phone friends to insist they come over, badger those of us who were already there for approbation.

And then, when the euphoria died, she cut herself.

She cut deep, she liked bleeding hard. She would mock, ‘Knives are good for slicing
kuchumber
,
kanda
. But also good for slicing wrists.’

Leela cut herself over Shetty because Shetty was married and would never leave his wife. Priya cut herself over Raj for, although he was single, he took her love for granted, regularly stealing money from her secret spot, under her parrot Chinki-
tota
’s food bowl. Every time he did so Priya cut herself in frustration.

These were the men they hoped would marry them.

‘Do you know any bar dancers who are married?’ Leela asked. She was hoping to explain, but she was also asking with hope. ‘Properly married, the way you and your boyfriend will one day marry.’

No, I admitted. I knew women like Leela, who were in relationships with married men. Or others who had a live-in boyfriend they claimed they hadn’t got around to marrying.

‘Exactly,’ sighed Leela. ‘Men sleep with us. They give us money. They even take us to hotils. But the moment we talk of a proper marriage, your kind of marriage, they run away.’

‘And it’s not because we’re used goods,’ said Priya firmly. ‘Is there a single girl in this day and age who can remain a virgin until she marries? It’s because of our reputation. Men hear of it and want us only for sex and for money.’

Bar dancers did ‘marry’ though, as Priya and Raj had. Marriage to a bar dancer meant that she and her lover lived together in what they agreed was harmony. The bar dancer would refer to her lover as her husband. He would introduce her to his friends as their
bhabi
. Bhabi would fast on Karva Chauth; she wouldn’t eat until she had spied the moon through her dupatta.

But a husband such as this was often no more loyal than a casual lover. At any time he would discard his ‘wife’ for the same reasons he had claimed to want her. For her beauty and her availability.

Then there was the sort of man known in the code language of the dance bar, in English, as a ‘professional lover’. He pretended to fall in love with a bar dancer and after she reciprocated, beat her, cheated on her, stole her money and eventually ran away with whatever he could carry. He was such an experienced scamster, try as they might few bar dancers could elude a professional lover.

But even when a man wanted to legally marry a bar dancer and in return asked only that she give up the line, even then,
Leela was quick to inform me, the marriage wouldn’t work. ‘Such a man, what can he offer me?’ she said, glumly. ‘Okay, he’s decent, he has a good heart. But for sure he’s a simple-type who earns five thousand rupees a month, an amount he expects will buy me happiness. But how can it? Even if I tried to I couldn’t stop myself from wanting things, more things, bootiful things. Eventually I will return to the bar. And the moment I do so, the man I married will leave me.’

And yet, knowing all of this, and not wanting to be deceived or abandoned, even then, neither Leela nor Priya would stay single.

A man would protect them from other men. ‘Kustomers follow single girls home,’ said Leela. ‘And if she doesn’t let them in they threaten to tell the police, even her neighbours, what she is.’

A man would protect them from themselves. You could never, ever, said Priya, underestimate what a relief it was to have someone waiting for you when you returned from the dance bar.

‘To be held,’ she said, ‘even in the arms of a thief, is worth something.’

Most importantly, love was the only legitimate way out of the dance bar.

Falling in love and legally marrying one’s beloved would absolve Leela and Priya of the loss of their virginity and of their sexual affairs. Marriage equalled redemption and would introduce them into respectable society. If she stayed single, Leela said, she would always remain in the eyes of the world a barwali. Years after she retired, she would be an object of suspicious derision.

Leela and Priya wanted to be rescued through romantic love, even though they had chosen bar dancing for the independence it allowed them to enjoy; independence, in particular, from men. This was one of the great contradictions of the line and of bar dancers themselves.

And so love was the constant in every conversation, an
audience to every silence. Thoughts of love filled the emptiness of Priya’s evenings with Leela when the sun began its descent into the salt flats and with its vivid colours faded Priya and Leela’s ability to lie to one another. The idea of love was a comfort when Leela suspected Priya was thinking of where her life was headed, and she worried that hers was going the same place because unlike ‘good girls’ no ‘decent’ man would have her.

Above all, the cutting was an expression of the girls’ fear of what would happen to them if they didn’t marry. If they didn’t marry, they would have to work. And if they couldn’t find a job outside the line they would have to remain in it. But not as bar dancers—soon they would be considered old—as madams.

Dalali
, pimping, was the natural next step because no one was better equipped to sell women, it was believed, than one who had been sold, or who had sold herself. And no one was exempt.

Not the
kaali-billis
—the dark-skinned girls pejoratively referred to as black cats. Not the Bengalis who were ‘dirty’ or the ‘Telugus and Madrasis’ who had ‘paise
ka lalach
’—coveted money. Not even the optimists who tried to make do by embroidering kerchiefs their children would sell on the local trains, five in five different colours for ten rupees, or the ones who married with little or no discernment, believing that marriage alone was enough, even if it was to the sort of man of whom it could be said with frank acceptance of one’s fate, ‘sometimes he works and sometimes he does not,’ and ‘one day at work, ten days at home.’ And if one was in a nudging-winking sort of mood: ‘My mister didn’t go to work today. He drank too much deshi at our wedding.’

‘Oh, congratulations, when did you marry?’

‘Ten years ago!’

Bar dancers like Leela and Priya hoped for a different destiny. A hensum man from a ‘good bijniss family’ would enter the
bar, stop in his tracks in love with her and proclaim: ‘Your past is past!’ He would stretch his arms to show his love—this wide, okay wider, all right baba, as wide as the shores of Chowpatty beach! He would marry her in a temple and take her with him to bahar gaon, someplace special like ‘Yurope’ or Lundun. There she would eat fully well and nine months later promptly bear the first of many sons she would name not after her father who was inevitably a
haramzada
, bastard, but after her husband, who so far was not. Or, entranced by her beauty, that two-minute twirl she’d mastered, a famous Bollywood director would insist she star in his next film. He would promise in his
angrezi
accent, his new Mercedes SUV
ki
kasam, that the title would bear her name:
Priya Ki Aayegi Baraat
.

I wondered what the friends were doing to ensure the happy ending they wanted and deserved. How did they plan to make love happen?

‘But love is destiny!’ exclaimed Priya, taken aback. ‘How can you predict when you will fall in love?’ She turned to Leela with a disdainful shrug. ‘Timepass!’

She turned back to me. ‘You should just sit tight and wait for it to happen. Keep your mind fit with other things. Go shopping. See a good “fillum”. Soak your hair with Parachute and sit in the sun. Accha, do you know Leela’s paanwala is a part-time with the D Company? Oh and he has a white “pomerian”, Laloo P. Yadav! Laloo sits in his lap and eats
meetha
paan all day long, can you imagine it! If nothing, he will keep you entertained.’

I have a boyfriend, I said.

‘Really!’ Priya said. ‘Is he hensum?’

Very, I said of the man I would marry.

She assessed me.

Was I the sort of girl who could rig herself a setting? Sure I was hi-fi. Smartish in my jeans and silver watch. Skinny. But was I even wearing the right sort of bra? The pointy-paddy type that should draw attention down there?

She leaned forward to investigate.

And was that Vaseline on my lips?

Vaseline!

Priya sat back, flummoxed. Stepping out of the house with Vaseline only, imagine it! Let me tell you something, men want better than real life.

She decided to settle the question. ‘Are you carrying a foto of him?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘Not even on your phone?’

I shrugged.

That settled it for Priya. A bored expression washed over her face. She ran her little pink tongue over those magnificent pearls searching for cavities that couldn’t possibly exist.

Turning to Leela, she changed the subject.

{ 7 }

‘I too love you, janu!’

T
o take her mind off Raj, Priya became exclusive with one of her customers—a forty-five-year-old wine shop proprietor who lived in Mira Road with his wife, son, motorbike and an Alsatian he called Tiger.

Since Priya was a ‘booty above average’, explained Leela to me, she could enjoy dozens of lunches and dinners and was entitled to significant presents before it would be considered appropriate for the customer to introduce the possibility of sex with her into their conversations.