Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (5 page)

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 side 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.’

But despite the woman’s familiar appearance—her coin-sized gold hoops, the umbrella sticking out of her shiny pleather bag—she was, Leela would soon discover, a brothel madam who pumped her business with runaways from the ‘chiller room’—children’s homes run by the government’s child welfare wing.

She took Leela to her brothel. It was a kholi, crowded, filthy and shrill with the sounds of a baby’s cries. Under threat of scarring Leela’s face with acid that she stored in a baby feeder, the madam forced Leela to have sex with several customers. Four days later, striped with bruises, Leela jumped out of a window and escaped. She eventually found her way to Night Lovers.

Leela was not surprised by what had happened to her. She was relieved.

‘Had that bitch not caught me, a policeman would have,’ she said. ‘And he would have stuck me in the chiller room in Mankhurd. Do you know what they say about that place? That it’s a brothel for Bombay’s
mantri log
, politicians. The police act as pimps. Why?
Kyunki
police
ko sirf
paisa
chahiye
. The police only want money. They round up orphans and runaway girls and then call the mantri
log
, “Please sirji, sahibji, come
na
, pick and choose.” The mantri
log
fuck the little girls and afterwards tip the manageress, “Thank you so much madam.” They are men, and that’s what men do. But she’s a
harami
danger-
log
! A bitch, a dangerous one. She’s supposed to be a mother to the girls, but during the day she makes them weave baskets and at night she cracks apart their thighs with a lathi!

‘What luck I got saved!’

It wasn’t mere luck, it was written, and that’s why Leela was unperturbed by the startling welcome Bombay had given her. It was the start of a new life as
jyotishji
had described it when he read her palm just before she fled Meerut. Even though it was understood he was meant to lie and prophesy only a peaceful marriage and a fertile womb, he couldn’t help himself. ‘
Kathin
,’ he had mumbled through a mouthful of
paan, juice slip-sliding out as he spoke. ‘It will always be kathin.’ Difficult.

Leela had smiled at jyotishji, even tipped him an
ek sau
, a one hundred. At thirteen she had the self-awareness to see and to accept the truth.

And the truth was this—she was no virgin, not even in the way some girls had sex with their first couple of boyfriends and when dissatisfied with the results, shrugged the young men off as mistakes and pronounced themselves pure. She didn’t come from a good family: her father didn’t have the upbringing to beat her mother behind closed doors and then, too, only after he’d gagged her mouth with his hand. Even his daughter’s bijniss he couldn’t keep quiet about,
gaandu
-maderchod. Wasn’t it true everyone in the cantonment knew how Singh had upgraded to a twenty-six-inch TV? Fucking
chutmaar
!

And the truth was that although she wanted to better herself she wouldn’t always be up to the task.

She was just a girl. No match for destiny.

In any case, she knew this too—you didn’t fight destiny like destiny was your mother and you could win. Destiny, Leela knew, like she thought she knew who she was, was an unbreakable promise. An infallible prayer.

She embraced it.

Leela had worked at Night Lovers ever since and she never did return to Meerut. She warned Apsara: ‘If you give Manohar a paisa of the money I have earned, I will come to Meerut and pry out every one of your teeth.’ Even Apsara, who many in the cantonment believed was mentally challenged, could understand that her daughter might harbour ill feelings towards Manohar. She took Leela’s threat seriously and until the time she could cash them in hid her daughter’s money orders in her underwear.

Manohar believed Leela’s whereabouts were unknown to his family. He tried to file a Missing Persons report with the police, but they were after all the same men he had rented Leela out
to. Believing he was temporarily hiding his daughter, as a way to increase their lust and extract more money, they paid him no heed.

‘Your little whore did not go to school alone,’ one of them informed him.

{ 3 }

‘A bar dancer’s game is to rob, to fool a kustomer’

I
met Leela six years after she had left home, those six years later she was only nineteen. Unlike many of the nineteen-year-olds in Mira Road—still studying and still living with their parents—Leela had a job, had bills, had sex. Her confidence in the sexually charged environment of the dance bar confused me. She was surrounded by men night after night and these weren’t just any men, they were often drunk and aggressively lustful. I asked Leela how she did it and shrugging she said, ‘Otherwise?’ She meant she had no option.

But she thought about my question and she answered, not that night, or the night after, but later. ‘When you look at my life,’ she taught me, ‘don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road. If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin, she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face, feel his fists against her breasts. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, “Get lost
oye
!” And they do. And if I want a gift or feel like “non wedge” I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. They thank
me
. Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my mother never had.
Azaadi
. Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.’

And so Leela chose azaadi, and she chose also to curtail
it, by defining the parameters of her life as the area from her flat to Night Lovers, a place whose rhythm and cadences she lived by. Anything outside these self-imposed boundaries, even if it was an adjoining suburb, she firmly referred to as ‘Bombay’, as though Bombay was elsewhere and distantly so. Bombay was also
bahar gaon
, out of the village, abroad. ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would tell me and I would gently rib her saying, would you like a lift to the airport? ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would say to me, and in her wistfulness she revealed her hidden yearning. Leela knew what it meant to go abroad, and for all her talk of freedom, she didn’t always believe she enjoyed it.