Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (14 page)

And then she met Raj, I said.

‘Raj!’ Leela sniffed. ‘Yes, she met him, they got married, their baby died. You know all that. But time passes, time changes things. Maybe with time our luck will change for the better? Who can tell?’

Once the girls were satisfied with the stylists’ work, they hopped into an auto-rickshaw to the train station, travelling first-class in the ladies’ compartment from the suburbs into South Bombay. Often, they would travel ticketless, not because they couldn’t afford it, but because neither thought she should stand in queue at the ticket counter with the other passengers, most of whom were apparently of ‘no kalass’ and proved it by spitting paan or phlegm whenever, wherever, they saw fit.

From Grant Road station in South Bombay, they took a taxi to neighbouring Kamatipura, Priya riding shotgun so she could control the rear-view mirror to focus entirely on her.

To ensure ‘max-joy’ they began to fortify themselves with marijuana they had bought in fifty-rupee paper twists from Priya’s shared boyfriend, Raj.

Raj was ‘shared’ because he was still seeing Barbie. (That Priya went with another man, the customer she had introduced me to, was irrelevant. That was her right because it was her livelihood.) Raj acknowledged the state of Priya’s wrists, but he was impressed with Barbie’s ‘Chop Suey’ breast as he described it. No woman had loved him so much.

Raj was a sturdy, confident fellow with thick, wavy hair dyed
to match his light brown eyes. He wore tight pants with flared bottoms and satin shirts in bright colours. He worked in the branch office of a well-known insurance company, but as a peon, he confided. He served tea, carried files, modulated the air conditioning and when the boss’s wife visited, carried her handbag and Pomeranian in a bag, to and from the boss’s silver Lexus. Raj was aware that in the world outside the dance bar he was no catch. ‘In this line though,’ he explained to me, ‘while a woman’s booty is considered her wealth, a man’s booty is the simple fact of him being employed.’

It was possible that Raj was waiting to see if Priya would go further in her demonstrations of love. But Priya said she wouldn’t. ‘What kind of man isn’t satisfied with one woman chopping up her breast for him?’ she wondered. That she didn’t know kept Priya intrigued—she thought it suggested hidden depths. She decided it was worth sharing Raj for the purpose of plumbing these depths.

Kamatipura was named for the Kamati tribe of artisans and labourers who migrated to Bombay from Andhra Pradesh in the late 1800s, seeking refuge from famine. While their men laboured with concrete, Kamati women made bidis that took the entire day to stuff and roll and for which they were paid ten annas—six less than a rupee—for a thousand. By the 1900s, the state’s apathy towards Kamatipura was visible in the absence of public lighting and a police force. The area was overcrowded and its migrant families suffered poor sanitation. They were ravaged with diseases, particularly venereal. In 1917, Bombay’s police commissioner, the Englishman Stephen Edwardes, described these families as being of a ‘low state of evolution’. Kamatipura’s marginalization encouraged all manner of illegal activities including gambling and the sale of intoxicants, and in time the area came to be known as Bombay’s red light district.

Not much appears to have changed. Kamatipura remains a
warren of brothels teeming with sex workers and madams, pimps and children, with their dogs and cats and goats and with raucous parrots whose language is as vivid as their plumage. Side streets of sweatshops are crammed with squatting men working furiously on sewing machines and with women threading sequins through saris in the flickering light of kerosene lamps.

That evening, however, life appeared less strained. Perhaps because it was the weekend, perhaps because more people than usual were celebrating birthdays, weddings, participating in religious festivities. I passed several tents pegged between streets and inside each one was a lavish shrine filled with gods and goddesses garlanded with flowers and ropes of twinkling lights. Giant speakers belted out dance songs, and the sex workers who could had gathered their children in prayer. Others went on as before. They unfurled their hair, powdered their faces and outlined their reddened lips with black eye pencil so their mouths popped suggestively and were visible from afar. Leaning out of their brothel windows in sari blouses scooped low and petticoats that clung, they called repeatedly and with unflagging enthusiasm, ‘Ai, hero! Want some company?’

The red light district was divided into numbered gullies and by unspoken agreement each belonged to a single community. Female sex workers had their territory. Hijras theirs. Men had their territory, too. Like a pack of dogs, each group knew better than to stray, for the punishment for forgetting could be severe. Even if all you were doing was trailing around a corner daydreaming—of falling in love, of having the right one waiting at home for you patiently, monogamously—but say you were doing this dreaming-sheaming looking what they called ‘heroine-like’, making yourself attractive to customers who were, by rights, not yours, and say the ones who worked the street spotted you, then it would be within their rights to teach you humility. And they would, and then your gums would run like water and you would never again stray.

Having parted ways with Leela and Priya in order to explore
Kamatipura, I now sought to rejoin them. As I entered gully no. 1, I heard Leela before I saw her.

‘I’m going to skin your flesh,’ she was screaming, ‘and throw it to the dogs!’

Leela was standing outside Gazala’s brothel and the person she was threatening was a constable gripping hard at his lathi. Surrounding him like bullies at the school water cooler were a dozen hijras dressed for the party in saris, bangles and breasts. ‘I’ll piss in your mouth!’ one of them warned. ‘Your children will be hijras!’ hexed another. ‘You’ll die a hijra!’ screamed Leela with delight. She gleefully pinched a hijra standing beside her.

Leela was always up for confrontation. She thought it synonymous with passion. If a fight occurred in her presence, it didn’t matter who was involved, or over what, she would launch herself in with gusto.

Leela took the side of the hijras, but Priya would have none of it. With her back pressed against the brothel wall and her silken hair billowing about like an unpinned dupatta, she played with her rhinestone-encrusted clamshell phone with an expression of boredom. A joint dangled out of the corner of her mouth.

Spying me, she waved me over without a smile. ‘You wanted to know us better, Sonia,’ she said, sardonically. ‘Come, come. Have your fun. Take foto,’ she taunted.

What’s happening? I asked.

I had no intention of clicking photographs. A camera in a red light area is like a gun in a classroom. Something unfortunate will happen. The stage was already set for more drama than I was comfortable with and I didn’t want anyone to think I was alone.

What’s happening? I repeated, rubbing shoulders with Priya.

Priya resigned herself to being intruded upon. Using his lathi as encouragement, she recounted in a bored voice, that ugly motherfucker—she pointed a talon at the policeman—had demanded hafta from Gazala’s hijras. While elsewhere he might
have made his request bashfully, amongst sex workers and hijras the expectation of politeness was a fantastic one. Angered by his belligerence and edgy after a long day of preparation and prayers in honour of Gazala’s birthday, the hijras had refused.

It was an unusual response, Priya said thoughtfully. Paying hafta should have come as naturally to them as squatting on the latrine in Gazala’s brothel. Even the hijras were surprised by their response, and hooting, they made a run for it. Then brazened by the confidence of their head start, one of them turned to taunt: ‘Hey, cocksucker, hurry up!’

The constable embraced the challenge. He caught up with the hijras as I reached the brothel. I memorized him, to be safe. He was short, skinny, pockmarked and aggrieved. His uniform was crumpled. A pair of sunglasses was falling out of his pocket.

Appearance notwithstanding, the constable seemed to know that he was better than the hijras and that it was his right to demand hafta from them. Even as they railed—‘Money? I’ll show you money! Look under my sari!’—the constable went on the offensive. If anything happened to him, he knew, as did his friends, where the hijras lived.

He pointed to a pretty young thing called Maya. ‘Want to spend the night in lock-up?’ he demanded.

‘To meet my future in-laws?’ Maya said cheekily.

‘Take out a hundred, I said!’

‘Ohho, a bribe?’

‘Bitch!’

‘Cocksucker!’

‘You whore!’

‘Maybe so! But even a whore like me wouldn’t fuck a cunt like you!’

The constable rammed his hand into Maya’s broad flat nose; his anger split open her lip, it split open her blouse freeing fistfuls of paper napkins like doves from a cage. As they settled gently on the ground I read what they said—everyone saw that they said—‘Gokul Lunch Home’.

Maya’s hand went up to her mouth. To be humiliated in public was one thing. It was a hijra’s life. And it was the police most of all who loved to taunt their kind with catcalls of ‘original or duplicate?’ and ‘what have you stuffed your blouse with today?’ But to be stripped of her womanhood in front of her peers who would cry with her now and then laugh hysterically behind her back—intoxicated with the relief that it was she and not them, this time at least. On such a day. At her doorstep.

The constable stepped back a pace, and then two—but there was no way he could retreat far enough. His face turned translucent with regret. Or was it fear?

He had overstepped, he knew—not because of what he had done, but because he had done it on his own, without the buffer of his friends, to one among a dozen hijras. Now they would get their revenge, because he was alone, because he stank of fear, and fear was a stench the hijras picked up on immediately because often they stank of it too.

They crowded in, their breath hot, their voices harsh. Wasn’t it enough they paid this sister-fucker a daily bribe of fifty rupees? Did he need his cock sucked as well?

‘O son of a Kanjar,’ screeched an elderly hijra with watery eyes. ‘If you have shit in your arse speak up, speak up now and apologize!’

Just when it appeared the mob would have its way, we were startled by a shriek.

Now what?

I knew it, I sighed. This was Kamatipura. I mentally scanned the contents of my handbag—a pen, a bottle of water, a sandwich, my wallet. No possible weapons.

Then a hijra cried, ‘Dekho!’ and pointed to a shower of green and white sparks illuminating the clouds over Kamatipura. Then came a terrifying wail and cascade after cascade of golden stars poured like heaven’s tears. More fireworks thundered past and now we saw no stars, no sky, but colour, all colour, dazzling colours everywhere we looked.

Ratatatatat
went the fireworks, quietly went the constable.

We watched him lope down the street.

‘Just as well,’ shrugged Maya, turning her face to the sky. ‘If we had given it to him, we would have ended up in lock-up. If not today then tomorrow.’

‘One way or the other,’ said Maya, transfixed, ‘we suck his dick.’

Spying me, Leela companionably linked her arm in mine.

‘See how they bully us?’ she grinned, pulling me away. ‘But how we made his
hawa
tight? Ha! And did you hear what I said? “I’ll skin you like a stray dog, make a parcel of your brains and courier it to your mother.” Ha! Cunt ran faster than a cheetah!’

Flicking the joint to the ground, Priya shook her head at Leela. ‘Happy?’ she asked.

Leela nodded vigorously. ‘So happy!’

I had never been to a brothel and had no idea what to expect. Gazala’s was straight out of a film. Her brothel was a baggy, blousy monster with four storeys and two small windows that glared down like glaucomic blue eyes. The interior exceeded my first impression. Drafts spun like tops. The stairs were uneven. The banister trembled like a bad knee. We walked into cobwebs, past rooms scooped clean of furniture.

Batting about were the hijra sex workers and they too appeared as though in a film. Maya’s lehenga-choli, she told me, was from Chor Bazaar, a flea market nearby. The pearls she wore around her neck were a gift from a customer. She had tucked a peacock feather behind her ear, and on her arms she had, just that morning, tattooed the name of her father dead of alcoholism, of her mother lost to HIV and of the sister who had run away from it all. Maya said these things to me in the same tone I would have used to describe where I had bought the clothes I was wearing. She didn’t want me to commiserate. I asked her, she told me.