Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (2 page)

So our often one-sided relationship may be characterized thus: I called Leela. She ‘missed-called’ me.

But for now let us return to that Tuesday fresh in the New Year, when Leela’s only worry was that the afternoon would end in a fight. I had dropped by to visit Leela and, having shaken my hand, she motioned silently to the figure sleeping off his excesses. ‘
Dekho, lund-fakeer
,’ she said uncharitably. Check out the sex maniac.

I assessed the man’s face—scarred, pouchy, pocked with bristles—the way I might have a small animal discovered under the bed. I didn’t get close. I searched for signs of aggression. And I wondered if the man would leave voluntarily, or if Leela and I would have to take advantage of his stupor and kick him out of the flat.

What’s his name? I whispered.

Leela shrugged.

What should we do? I prodded.

She yawned.

We might as well have been talking about a stranger.

Then I realized we probably
were
talking about a stranger. Leela almost never asked questions of her customers—they didn’t interest her. And as a matter of principle, she always told them lies.

Then I recognized him, or I recognized rather the lumpy scar that ran from the side of his forehead all the way down to his chin. It was a scar Leela liked to believe had been earned in a ‘gangvar’, tackling an assassin’s .45. But if I recalled correctly, curled up before me was the manager of hotel Pure Vegetarian, a man referred to by his waiters as a
bhonsdi ka
, son of a whore, for pinching their tips; a man who had cut himself having fallen off the footboard of the local train attempting to spit out a
mouthful of paan. If I was right then I was looking at the man whose wife, Leela and I righteously agreed, was a bit of a
besharam
, a shameless one. When visiting a friend in the building, she sashayed about in a nightgown and slippers, which was regular on their street, but she refused to cover her breasts with a chunni, thus revealing even to Feroze ‘
Andha’
Bashir, the neighbourhood’s cataract-eyed egg seller, that she fancied lime green bras from Thailand.

Leela wanted her customer out because she was ‘bijniss’-like. He’d done his bijniss and now, she believed, he should beat it
patli gali se
, by the quickest way. But she was also in a hurry because she had to leave for Night Lovers, which was owned and managed by Shetty.

Because they were ‘husband-wife’, Leela said to me, she had to be scrupulously professional. She couldn’t be late. But neither would she leave a customer in her flat, even though she referred to this particular customer as
bhai
, even though ‘brother’ probably knew Leela had never got around to fixing the broken latch on her door.

Despite this lapse Leela thought a great deal about her safety. She carried a piece of glass. She carried a plastic whistle she had, to date, used only to toot her favourite song,
Tujhe dekha to yeh jaana sanam
. And she fretted constantly about being blackmailed.

Who are you afraid of? I once asked.

‘People will take advantage of an alone girl,’ she insisted.

Leela hid postcards she received from ‘friends’ who worked in dance bars in Dubai; postcards of places like Wild Wadi and Jumeirah Beach and Safa Park, places it pleased her to doubt her ‘friends’ had seen for themselves. ‘Whores in fancy places. Huh!’

She ripped takeaway bills and tore or burnt with her lighter anything that could identify her by her real name or address.

She possessed no photographs of herself or anyone else.

She had one cellphone but three SIM cards, and the extras
she secreted in odd places—inside a shoe, at the bottom of a jar of dried red chillies, the stems of which she poked into her teeth, sometimes absentmindedly, at other times with a purposeful desire to clean.

And she wouldn’t trust anyone with the bare necessities placed haphazardly around her flat. Leela had inherited a Godrej steel cupboard from a friend who had married a wealthy customer Leela jealously said was too old to piss without help. The cupboard overflowed with clothes—twenty-five pairs of jeans, half a dozen belts, enough t-shirts to stock a small shop.

She slept on a threadbare mattress, watched an LG television, assessed herself in a full-length mirror. She had a cooler; an old, overstuffed Kelvinator fridge, its surface plastered with stickers given free with her favourite cumin-flavoured biscuits, chocolate and toothpaste.

Leela also collected Ganesh idols, and she loved each of the dozens she owned like a little girl loves her Barbies. But she didn’t love them enough to keep them clean.

I once walked in on a customer flicking at them with his kerchief.

‘Achoo!’ he explained, apologetically.

Now Leela murmured into her customer’s ear, ‘
Jan-oooo
, wake up,
jan-oooo
.’ He slept on. She raised her voice, ‘“Hensum”! Ai, hensum!’

The customer, who was not handsome, turned towards her and exhaled full-throatedly. ‘
Saala chutiya
!’ cried Leela, leaping out of bed. Fucking cunt!

Leela’s customer stank of vodka-chicken-onion-chilli-lemon and clearly he was no hi-fi-super-
badiya
-tiptop type. He had no upbringing.

‘Dinner means drinks,’ Leela agreed. She wrapped her slippery hair into an elegant bun and stuck in it a greasy spoon she found under the bed.

But this
maderchod
, motherfucker, seduced her into drinking so much she’d passed out and given him sex for free.

How had he done that, what did he say?

‘“We’ll go shopping,” he said to me,’ recounted Leela. ‘“Make a list, Leela meri
jaan
!
Sone ki angoothi
? Write it down! Silk
ki
nightie? Write, write! No, wait, write two-two silk nighties
andar ke kapde
matching-matching. The new Nokia that will go so well with your red handbag? Write that too!” And I fell for it! So busy I was making lists, drinking drinks, dreaming dreams of all the goodies fatso would buy for me, I forgot myself! And for what?’ She motioned towards the customer, thin-lipped with distaste. ‘This
khatara
pair of shoes?’

‘Zero “kalass”!’ Leela murmured to herself in the American accent she’d acquired watching MTV. ‘Total
bakwas
.’ Full of crap.

She made bad choices, Leela admitted, reaching for the Gold Flake she had secreted in the pocket of the customer’s boxers.

Although she earned so many thousands every night she didn’t know where to put the money, Leela was time and again seduced by the promise of more. And she loved not paying for her pleasures. After the dance bar closed for the night, Leela would waltz from table to table helping herself to half-smoked cigarettes. She would press her cherry-red lips to abandoned beer bottles. That the men whose leftovers she consumed with such relish had thrown all their money on her was an irony not wasted on Leela. It made the beer taste ‘tight’, fresh. Leela didn’t believe this money should place her above such behaviour. On the contrary, she was transparent in her freebie-glee, failing entirely to notice how her curious behaviour was commented on by the other bar dancers. ‘Not only does she put her lips on our boss,’ they sneered, ‘she puts her lips on those who boss our boss!’

Even the dancers weren’t safe around Leela. Her kleptomania may have been an open joke in Night Lovers, but it was a joke taken seriously. If Leela asked to borrow a lipstick she might be told, ‘
Accha
, Rosy said first. After her, okay?’ And then Rosy would dilly-dally before lying with
filmi dramabaazi
, ‘
Arre
, I
toh
forgot! Pinky wanted to do touch-up. One minute!’ and so
on until Leela’s interest wandered and with it she too wandered out of the make -up room, to the great relief of her colleagues who had over the years forfeited compacts of the palest powder they stroked optimistically across their bronze cheeks and breasts, and hairpins washed with gold and sets of mirrored
choodis
to Leela’s elegant if slippery-as-ghee fingers.

Leela didn’t ‘borrow’ for profit; her intention was not to cause distress. Kleptomania was simply a part of her personality, an act as unconscious as the shake of her hips when a song played.

Leela also felt she was owed for having been taken advantage of when she was vulnerable. She might never get back at those motherfuckers. But everyone else was fair game.

‘I’m a bar dancer,’ she would shrug. ‘Men want to spend on me. I let them.’

Leela encouraged her customers to buy her presents not just on her birthday, which they never seemed to notice occurred twelve times a year, but every time they met.

The other girls played the birthday game too and they conned customers into treating them and their children and their children’s friends to ‘burger-fry’ and made-to-order cakes frosted with flowers. They sighed about how lonely the days were, how hard it was to remain faithful and if only one could watch serials, in particular the ones starring Tulsi, Prerna and Ba—‘they were family!’—how quickly time would pass, and how quickly too might pass the temptation to stray.

Such words, if repeated often enough, might result in the gift of a TV, perhaps even a mini fridge stocked with silver-foil
mithai
rich with ghee and thick with nuts, or of a new wardrobe, everything within ‘matching-matching’ and sequinned one hundred per cent, so at night in the light of the creamy street bulbs, the bar dancer walking from her flat to an auto-rickshaw would cause strolling couples and children playing cricket between cars to stare, for she would appear like she was draped in diamonds sparkling so bright they could only be living, breathing things.

But Leela had no interest in merely big gestures.

Her motto was ‘“Kustomer” is Cunt.’

She didn’t often have sex with a customer and when she did, perhaps once every few months, it was for money. Leela required payment upfront (five thousand rupees for ‘one time’ of intercourse)—and this was non-refundable if she developed cramps and had to excuse herself.

But even when Leela knew she would be paid, her customer was expected to suffer a trial period of humiliation before she would accede to him. He had to plead for her attention by phoning her dozens of times, by throwing money at her as she danced. He had to offer daily tokens—lipstick, earrings and perfume—through the security guard who stood outside Night Lovers, a giant of a man whose fiery red turban matched his temper.

And he had to run her errands. A customer entering Leela’s flat, twenty litres of Bisleri water hoisted on his back, could be mistaken for a delivery boy.

Leela had so little faith in the ability of men to remain loyal and persevere that even ‘husband’ wasn’t absolved from her itch to take advantage of the immediate. She would phone Shetty as he was driving over: ‘“Durrling”, stop by Apna Bazaar
na
?’ She would coo for rice and lentils, spinach and potatoes, for brinjals and beans that more often than not rotted in her Kelvinator in the same flimsy pink and white plastic bags in which they had entered her home. They rotted because they were never used: Leela refused to cook.

Like the models in the L’Oréal hoardings, Leela wanted men to know she was ‘worth it’. But at nineteen, she was also aware that with girls like her opportunity didn’t always knock twice. So she squeezed the men in her life like they were lemons and once she was through, she discarded them like rinds.

But every privilege has a price tag, and sometimes for money, and at other times because she had taken so much even she could not say ‘no’, Leela had to perform
galat kaam
, have sex
with strangers in exchange for what she had convinced herself she had got for free.

Although they all did it, no bar dancer ever admitted to galat kaam. The only answer to a question around it was, ‘
Main mar jaongi magar
galat kaam
nahin karungi
.’ I’ll die before I perform galat kaam. The brazen one who admitted to it, it was said of her, was a
randi
, whore, and you could openly say to her in a voice as loud as you pleased—even though you were as guilty as she—‘then you’re a shameless liar you are, saying you’re a bar dancer. You’re no
barwali
! You’re a waiter! A waiter in a Silent Bar and if you deny it your mother will rise from her grave and steal your booty from you. What’s left of it, that is!’