Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (19 page)

‘So how do you think you got this HIV?’ Leela asked.

‘The doctor said galat
sambandh
.’ Promiscuity.

‘And your mister? What did he say?’

‘Oh, isn’t he my heera-moti?’ beamed Ameena. ‘Straight off he said, “Whatever my wife may do, she’s never done galat kaam. I have full faith in her, don’t say another word.” Vicky is a
hamal
, coolie, you know, and he works so hard some nights I hear him talking to himself—“side
dena
side! Madam thoda right!” Just the other day he was saying we should move into a flat. Enough of this chawl bijniss, he said. How long are we going to live like the labouring poor? He may be a labourer, but wasn’t I Malvani
ki
shaan, the most famous bar dancer in the line? “Why not?” I replied. “Our little princess should grow up better than we did. Do we want her playing with the daughters
of pimps and the adopted sons of hijras? With dirty Banglas who teach their children-
log
to feed their goats at breakfast and to then eat them for dinner?” Of course not! Every parent wants what’s best for their child, am I right or wrong? Well, maybe not my parents. And I guess yours neither! But we are different, isn’t it so, Leela? Our children-
log
will have the sort of life we only dreamt of. What do you say? Don’t you agree?’

Leela nodded.

‘Well,’ said Ameena, ‘that’s what we tell ourselves now. Accha, anyway, that’s why my Vicky isn’t home today. He’s searching for a new place for us.’

Shortly after, Leela said goodbye to Ameena and, hugging her tightly, promised to return soon. As she walked out of Malvani, she happened to see Baby, who was on her way to Ameena’s. They discussed their friend’s health and then Leela, because of how things like these mattered to her, said, ‘At least she has her mister.’

‘Mister-twister!’ mocked Baby. ‘Her husband is keeping that woman!’

‘What woman?’ asked Leela, confused.

‘Shehnaz, you know Shehnaz? Arre, Shehnaz from Rhythm Palace who lives with Ameena, cooks her food, washes her clothes. She moved in when Ameena was no longer able to, you know . . . She sleeps on the bed with Ameena’s mister and Ameena and the baby sleep on the floor. Oh yes, that woman is sharp, sharper than the sharpest edge! Twice I’ve caught her with Ameena’s mister, twice my dear, and you know what I mean when I say “caught”. They weren’t praying to Allah that is for sure!’

‘Surprised?’ Baby laughed at Leela’s expression. ‘Why, Leela? This is your line. These are your people. This is how it is, you know best.’

Baby proceeded to Ameena’s house, leaving Leela alone with her thoughts.

‘I had to sit down, right there on the side of the road,’ she
said to me. ‘“God,” I asked, “what is this line you have condemned me to?” But Baby was right. Who was I to show surprise? I know how things work. Ameena couldn’t have sex so her husband took it from her friend. And her friend gave it to him not because she loved him, but because she had to. He would pay her rent, protect her from goondas. My head began to spin. I began to think. I want to get tested. And I want to work on my relationship with PS. Because if something happens to me, who will I turn to? If I fall, who will accept my hand? And if my pain is so great the only language I can speak is the language of tears, who will lend me their ear? Tell me? Oh, this line!’

The following week Ameena was back in hospital. Leela wanted to visit her and she asked me to come along. We were quickly lost. The reception was crowded and impossible to access. Even the stairs had been taken over by patients. Men, women and children slept on newspapers; they shook feverishly under shawls. The ones more able passed the time eating from tiffins, drinking tea, playing cards, reading aloud from newspapers and paperbacks. The hospital smelt of sweat and food and drink. It droned with conversation.

We finally found Ward No. 10 and spied Ameena lying on a bed next to a window. Although the ward was overfull, it was cooled by a lightly scented breeze.

Ameena was lying with her eyes closed.

Leela was right. She was so small, so rickety, she could have been mistaken for a child.

She must have been beautiful once. She had full lips and her thick, black plait coiled all the way down to the floor. But her skin was scaly and covered with a film of sweat and the pouches under her eyes were the colour and fullness of ripe plums.

Leela touched her shoulder. Ameena’s eyes snapped open. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ she beamed, heaving herself up. ‘Visiting
hours are almost over and you are my first visitors today.’ Ameena reached under her pillow and withdrew a tube of Odomos mosquito repellent cream. ‘The mosquitoes will kill me if the HIV doesn’t,’ she whispered. She smeared her face and arms and handed the tube to Leela. ‘Take some,’ she said. Thanking her, Leela squeezed the tube into her palms and began rubbing the cream vigorously on her face, neck and cleavage.

I looked around for someone to talk to. A young doctor in a lab coat and jeans was standing a few feet away, leafing through some paperwork. Walking up to him, I introduced myself and asked about Ameena. He glanced over at her, ‘She’s come very late. Why didn’t she come to me before?’ I followed his gaze. Ameena and Leela were whispering to each other.

She’s been here before, I said.

The doctor shrugged. ‘She has HIV Wasting Syndrome,’ he said, tucking the paperwork under his arm. ‘She should have come earlier.’

HIV Wasting Syndrome is considered ‘Clinical Stage 4’, a late stage in the staging system designed by the World Health Organization. Other listed symptoms, as many as twenty, include Kaposi sarcoma and pneumonia, constant fever and diarrhoea. A patient with the syndrome could expect to lose more than 10 per cent of her body weight, which explained Ameena’s startling thinness.

The doctor walked over to Ameena’s bed. ‘We need to get started on ART,’ he told her.

ART, or standard antiretroviral therapy, is usually a combination of at least three antiretroviral drugs that inhibit the replication of HIV. They have to be taken every day for the rest of a patient’s life.

Switching to Hindi, the doctor repeated himself to Ameena.

‘It will help you,’ he said. ‘It’s good medicine. You’ll feel better as soon as you start taking it. Before we start though, we must run some tests—blood tests, X-rays, etc. It’ll take a few days. Once the results are in, we can move on.’

‘I haven’t walked in weeks,’ Ameena snapped. ‘And you want me to wait “a few days”!’

‘Counselling is mandatory,’ the doctor said.

‘Why? Why is it so? Is it because ART is something precious, something you cannot trust me with?’

‘Is it a diamond?’

‘Is it your wife’s mangalsutra?’

The doctor patted Ameena’s shoulder. ‘We’ll get started as soon as possible, don’t you worry. I promise it won’t take as long as it sounds.’ He turned to another patient, lying on the floor near Ameena’s bed.

I consoled Ameena. It’s not a diamond, I said. But it’s important, it’s a big thing. It’s a medicine you’ll have to take for the rest of your life.

‘Just a few more days,’ Leela said, patting Ameena gently.

‘It is a diamond!’ Ameena whispered, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Hear that, Leela? It’s a diamond; that’s why they won’t give it to me.’

We left Ameena and shortly after that Ameena left the hospital.

She couldn’t afford to stay, she told Leela when Leela called.

‘PS is paying,’ Leela said. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be on you.’

‘Not on me?’ snapped Ameena. ‘Do you know how much the old witch next door charges to look after my child? Sixty rupees! Per day! And money doesn’t fall from heaven, Leela.’

‘Why can’t your husband look after her?’ Leela asked.

‘How many things do you expect one man to do? He’s with Shehnaz looking for a new place for us; I told you that before, do you never listen? He says now that I’m sick, I should stay somewhere better. No, you shut up! You and your finger-poking! When you have a man like my Vicky then you can start distributing
gyaan
. Until then, keep quiet!’

Perhaps Ameena was right; Vicky had been out searching for a flat, something away from their ‘chawl bijniss’. But she would never know because he never came home and neither did
Shehnaz. When her next hospital visit was due, it was Baby who took Ameena, while a friend of Ameena’s looked after her daughter as a favour.

Only a few days later things took a turn for the worse. Baby phoned Leela to tell her that Ameena was being transferred out of JJ hospital.

‘Where to?’ asked Leela.

‘Where do you think?’ replied Baby.

‘Home?’

‘She doesn’t have a home, Leela,’ Baby said.

‘She’s going to Trombay.’

In Trombay was a hospice for the destitute. Ameena would go there to die.

So what will happen to her child? I asked, after Leela recounted this conversation to me.

‘What will happen?’ Leela said. ‘I’ll tell you.’

‘Someone has the child for now,’ she said, as though to herself. ‘But soon they will realize that a child is not a table, it is not a chair. It must be fed, it must be clothed, it needs toys. One day the child will go to school. What will happen? I’ll tell you what will happen, because I have seen it with my own eyes. One day I happened to pass a
kachre ka
dabba and in it, not even deep inside it, I saw a dead baby. What had been a dead baby. “I’m losing my mind,” I said to myself, “I need to get some sleep.” And so I rushed off. It happened again. Another kachre
ka
dabba, another baby. “I’m drunk,” I said to myself, running away as fast as I could. But I was not sleepy that first time, nor drunk the second. Because this is what I learnt, and I learnt it soon: a woman, if she has to, can bang her baby’s head on the wall,
dhar
! She can bang it
dhar
!
Dhar
!
Dhar
! And once she has reduced it to
bharta,
she can walk to a street far from where she lives and throw it into the garbage. The stray dogs will eat her child. What they leave, the birds will eat. What they leave, is kachra. If a mother can do something like this, can you expect less of a stranger? We can pretend all we want, but ultimately
the world sees us, why, our parents see us, as pieces of meat they can buy and sell, meat they can consume, meat they can throw away when it starts to stink.’

‘Ameena will die alone. And mark my words, so will her baby.’

And that’s why Leela decided to get tested again.

{ 11 }

‘I sell watermelons. Watermelons and watches’

L
eela considered other ways in which she could reinvent herself. Her fondness for
ayashi
, she concluded, would have to be addressed. A characteristic of the line, like dancing, drinking, cutting and customers, ayashi implied a hedonistic lifestyle in which one sought pleasure’s tightest embrace. It was in acquiescing to ayashi’s demands on one’s body and finances that snatched from so many bar dancers their dream of leaving the line.

On a typical night off work, Leela and Priya would slip into hipsters and halters, spray perfume between their breasts and grab an auto-rickshaw to the hijra Masti Muskaan’s flat fifteen minutes away. The shabby omelette-coloured building was Mira Road’s party central.

Masti made no concessions as host; she didn’t even wash her face. But at 9 p.m. each night she dimmed the lights in her flat, maxed the volume on the Windows Media Player of her ageing desktop computer and poured herself a whisky.

No invitations had been issued. Masti expected her friends, they always turned up. Bar owners and bar dancers, hijras and madams, pimps and small-time politicians chewing paan poured in.

Boys in acid-wash jeans came by to hang out with Masti’s
chelas
, followers, their ‘girlfriends’.

The guests were at home; they whipped out packs of cards, brewed tea, poured drinks and danced, sometimes with one another, at other times on their own, unto themselves.

At about 10 p.m., Masti’s chelas Happy, Ramona and Gauri would be ready to leave for work. They would request Masti’s blessings, blow kisses at everyone else and promising to return ‘soon-soon’ clatter down the stairs in their saris and sky-high heels. If Masti had been in an expansive mood, the driver of her white Ambassador—a gift from a former seth who had to mysteriously leave Bombay—would be waiting for them, holding open the door of the car.

Once they were let off on the highway, the hijras would instantly quieten. They would link pinkie fingers and their every instinct, like that of an animal in enemy territory, would be on alert.

Hijras, more so than female sex workers, were harassed constantly. Pedestrians mocked them, ‘
Teri kundi kitne ki hai
?’ How much does your arsehole cost? Goondas would encircle a hijra, even in daylight, drag her to the undergrowth and take sex for free. Boys as young as ten approached hijra sex workers, less intimidated by them than by their female counterparts standing a few metres away. Hijras earned two hundred rupees for every five hundred rupees a female sex worker could demand for a ‘shot’, a sexual service.