Maximum City (45 page)

Mustafa worked in the stock market in the fat times. In the mid-nineties, subbrokers could make two lakhs a day from cheating a client, telling him his shares were sold at a few paise lower than they really were, pocketing the difference—and then blowing it away that night, as easily as it came, in the beer bars. The boom went bust, but Mustafa is still here, drinking his rum with soda and Coke.

The customers literally blow money away on the dancers: paise udana, send money into flight. They will walk up to the dance floor and stand with a stack of notes over the head of the favored dancer. The notes, in an expert hand, traverse the distance between customer and dancer on air and fluff out, forming a halo or fan around the girl, enveloping her in the supreme grace of currency, its wealth adding immeasurably to the radiance of her face, exalting her in this most commercial of cities, till the floor is littered with rupee notes and the male attendants scurry around to collect them and deposit them in the dancer’s account.

The more timid admirers will give their money to a waiter, who will shuffle it out over the dancer like a deck of cards downward from the palm, a more precisely targeted stream of paper, easier to collect and allot to the particular girl. Other customers like to play games. A dancer named Kajal plays the lottery with one of her customers. He sits at the bar with ten slips of paper, on each of which is written an amount of money. She dances and then picks one of the slips, and the customer gives her that amount; it could be anywhere from a few thousand up to 100,000 rupees. Another man is at a table, singing dreamily along with the songs. There is a pile of tens in front of him, which he holds up in the air two at a time, singing all the while and not even looking at the girls, who dance over, pick them up quickly, and dart away, like goldfish nibbling in quick jerks at pieces of bread you throw into a pool.

You can also “garland” the girl of your choice, with a ring of plastic-encased 50-, 100-, or 500-rupee notes that is draped around the dancer’s neck and stays on her through the entire duration of the song you have requested. If you are annoyed at her, if you have figured out that money is all she wants, you can fling a huge stack of money at her face or, most carefree or contemptuous of all, not even look at her while throwing hundreds of notes back over your shoulder in her general direction, while smiling at the audience. Then you throw your empty hands into the air: This is how little the money and the girl mean to me.

“Why are they doing this? What do these men get in return?” I ask Mustafa.

“Five minutes’ attention. Even a garage mechanic can come here and get attention from these girls.” This is one place where the classes meet, where the only thing important is the color of your money. Because it’s not just the mechanics and the taporis; it’s also the rich traders and merchants of South Bombay, who are surrounded by men during the day and by their fat wives in the evening. This might be the only place in their lives where they can look directly at beautiful young girls, young enough to be their daughters. The moment the customer walks in, he’s the star in his own custom-made Hindi movie song. No matter how old or ugly or fat he is, for the two hours he’s in the bar he’s a movie star, he’s Shahrukh Khan. The customer inhabits the song being sung; he will sing along to the music, throwing back his head, moving his arms, singing to his girl, who has assumed the female role in the duet. Moving her body in the dance motions of the original video, she is lip-synching along with the song. It is an easy deception; the movie songs are all playback anyway. So the customer, in the midst of a hundred other men just like him, can sustain an illusion of individuality.

V
INOD
C
HOPRA
, the movie director, says he wants to go to the beer bars to research a film on the city. He has never been, so I arrange, one night, to take him. Paresh, the guide Mustafa has arranged, is waiting for us around nine. He is a bar-code printer, a fat man with tobacco-stained teeth. The bar Paresh takes us to, Dilbar, is a low small room on the second floor of a building, in a lane off Grant Road. Among the dancers, there is one who
has a heavier tread than the others. She is taller, thicker built, and fairer, has a pleasant face, and hardly dances. “That’s Honey,” Paresh says.

I first heard about Honey, the most famous dancer in all of Bombay, from Naeem Husain, the crime reporter. Husain knew Honey’s great secret: “She is actually a he.” Vinod and I are introduced to her, and I give her 100 rupees and tell her we are writing a movie: Could I talk to her? She is very polite, but when I say I would like to meet her outside the bar she adopts the classic Bombay strategy of the No. She says it will only be possible “next week.” She doesn’t want to meet now because her relatives are visiting her.

We move on to the second bar, only a couple of blocks away. “In previous days people used to come to Bombay to see the Gateway of India,” says Paresh, as a door is thrown open for us by a uniformed guard. “Now they come to see Sapphire.”

Sapphire! It was another world in my childhood. As I step in through the door, I am hungry, salivating for food I no longer eat: tandoori chicken. This was where my father would take us on Sundays, all through my boyhood, to feast on that most delicious red-pink flesh, so fresh I fancied I heard the clucking of the birds being slaughtered in the kitchen.
GRADE
I
EATING HOUSE
the sign at the entrance read, in the middle of the shopping district of Grant Road. Afterward, walking along Marine Drive, I felt free to ask my father all the questions in the world—how planes fly and why Indira Gandhi imposed the emergency—and he answered them at leisure, with patience. Sapphire was the central event of those Sunday nights.

“It’s like a Hindi movie,” observes Vinod. We have walked into a Bollywood song sequence. There are two rooms in the front, each with a slightly raised stage, on which colored spotlights illuminate the girls dancing to movie songs. The chiffon saris the girls are wearing could have come from a Yash Chopra film, and the backless cholis from one by Sooraj Barjatya. The dancers are all doing movements they have seen on the big screen. Then there are three more rooms in the back: the theater hall, the VIP hall, and the large mujra hall. The theater hall sports sofas, with stadium seating, so the girls don’t have to bend down to talk to the customers and everybody has a clear line of sight. The VIP room is small and exclusive, and the sofas are arranged around the dance floor in a manner that permits maximum closeness to the dancers. It looks like my Dariya Mahal flat, all
mirrors and gilt and European classical sculptures and frescoes. The mirrors are etched with drawings of maharajas being fed wine by nautch girls. When you sit in the mujra hall you might relax and stretch out your feet before you realize that your boots are resting on female breasts. Each table in front of you is supported by a sculpture of a woman with bare breasts holding up the glass table with her hands and knees. The clay breasts are large and pointed, like a minor range of hills. In between the halls is a makeup room for the dancers. Its mirror is lined with a row of stickers of various gods and goddesses—mainly goddesses—that the bar girls pray to.

I
T WAS
J
AIMAN
who had first pointed her out to me.

Jaiman, the first Marwari editor of Russian
Playboy
and a friend of mine from New York, had half a mind to take a girl from India back to Moscow for his magazine. He had been traveling around the country: Delhi, Rajasthan, and now Bombay. He wanted one girl, an exemplar of the sultry beauties of India, for the delectation of his Slavic readership. I had heard about Sapphire from Mustafa, and a couple of months before I went there with Vinod I had gone into the bar for the first time with Jaiman.

We had first noticed her when she danced to the Vengaboys’ remake of the song “Brazil.” In the middle of the more or less demure girls on the stage, there she was, the tallest, the one with the longest hair, the most dazzling smile. All the other girls blurred and faded, as in a movie when the heroine suddenly comes into sharp focus as she’s walking in a crowd of people in the street.

Jaiman was totally taken with her. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had seen in India and the only openly sexual one. “Fuck those rich Bombay girls, who needs them!” he had declared, after several nights of unsuccessful flirtation with rich Bombay girls. This girl had a way of turning her back to the audience, bending forward, and slowly rotating her buttocks that was a clear mime of sex, doggy-style. She was . . . presenting. Then she turned back to face the audience and flashed a smile, a teenager’s smile. She had big bee-stung lips, a high neck, large eyes, and a snub nose. Jaiman gave her 100-rupee notes and tried to tell her above the music that he was a
Playboy
editor and could he meet her after the place closed? She asked him to come back the next day; he explained that he was
leaving for Moscow the next morning. In that case, she replied, they would not be able to meet.

But she was kind enough to give him her name. I will call her Monalisa.

S
APPHIRE
,
THIS EVENING
, is standing room only. But seats are cleared right up front for us; some customers are told to move. This time around, Monalisa is dressed in a yellow sari and choli. She comes behind where we are sitting to talk to Minesh, another friend of Mustapha’s. He is a short, balding man in his early thirties, wearing glasses and a yellow shirt. She recognizes me from the last time, or pretends to, smiles, and says, “Hi!” Minesh introduces her to me, then points at my companion and asks Monalisa if she recognizes him. “Have you heard the name Vidhu Vinod Chopra?” Her mouth and her eyes open wide, as if a long-lost friend or sibling has just walked in. She changed her name so it could be the same as that of the hero in one of Vinod’s films, Minesh informs us. She rushes back to the stage. During the next song, she is not dancing, she is auditioning. All the other dancers are acting out an imitation of some actress’s moves. One is trying to be Madhuri, another Manisha. But Monalisa’s dancing rises out of the heat of her own body; she learnt dancing by watching herself in the mirror. Vinod’s eyes are on her. “If she were from Malabar Hill she’d be on top of the film world,” he says, appraising her professionally.

Next to her a young girl—but they are all young—in a blue sari and blouse stands staring back at the audience, not dancing, her mouth working at something; finally, a little pink bubble appears out of it, inflates, and pops. An old white man is making a lot of noise. He holds out a 10-rupee note that the girls are reluctant to touch, but finally one ends up taking it, more out of politeness than anything else. Adrift in his former empire, he is the cheapest man in the joint.

Monalisa comes back to our table. I lean forward, 100-rupee note in my hand, and tell her I am writing a script with Vinod and would like to talk to her. She pushes away the money—the first time a bar girl has ever refused my money—writes down her number on a piece of paper, and gives it to me. Such is the magic of the movies.

M
ONALISA WALKS
into the coffee shop of the Sea Princess in Juhu a few days later, and as she comes toward me every head turns to look at her, the men with lust, the women with hate. She is wearing a red Ralph Lauren tank top, jeans, and platform shoes; a lacy black bra peeps out from the straps of the top. Her chest looks tanned; actually, it has been reddened from playing Holi the previous day. Her hair is up and in a ponytail behind her head; she apologizes for it. “I’ve just oiled it.” She has woken up only fifteen minutes ago.

She says, “There is a girl wearing brown on your right. Look at her.” I casually glance to the right. “Do you see the man with her?” He is much older, plump and dark, with a mustache. They are sitting on the same side of the table, scanning the menus. “She’s one of the girls. We recognized each other as soon as I came in.”

She tells me about the bar she works in and its dancers. Sapphire has the best girls in the city, good sexy dancers, with good figures and height, fair, with long hair. Most of the bar-line girls come from the village; there are very few native Bombayites. They are brought into the bar line when they’re thirteen or fourteen by their parents, an older sister, or an agent; by the time they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re too old for it. They live in the areas around Foras Road or in Congress House, where the rent for a shoddy little room is an exorbitant 10,000 rupees and the deposit seven and a half lakhs, but there is safety in numbers. Three or four girls might share a room, an air-conditioned one. They all have cell phones and some of them drive their own cars. Most of them are saving money to send to their parents in the village, to buy a house with their earnings. “Behind every earner there are fifty eaters,” points out Monalisa.

The customers at Sapphire can be very young, just out of their teenage years, stealing away from home and without much money. Monalisa has no time to waste on such children. The next age group is the boys in their early to mid-twenties, “handsome, young, and good. These are the ones with whom the girls fall in love.” But she can’t be too public about her affection, can’t advertise her fealty. “There it all runs on ego. If a girl talks too much to a client he will think, She is mine only. He will take her for granted.” So when a bar girl’s heart is lost to a man, she had better not, if she is smart, wear it on her sleeve.