Maximum City (51 page)

I ask Minesh what the future of his relationship with Monalisa might be, and if he sees her future in the movies or as a model.

“What I’ve heard about the film industry and the modeling industry is that it’s a bitch. They will all use you: sexually, physically, mentally. She’s been ruined physically in any case by the industry. So you are scared”—now switching to the second person—“that this would happen to her and she would break. Although she’s very capable to do very well in the media—modeling, film, serials—I would not let her go into it. It may be an inferiority complex to feel I would lose her. Because if it was not an inferiority complex I would not be here for seven years roaming around in the dance bars. If there was no complex, Minesh would not be here. Maybe I’m trying to lie to myself. I have zero savings.”

He has just got to the core of his life, and maybe what he found there has surprised him as well. “How much money have you spent in the bars altogether?” I ask him.

“Let me not count, but huge money.”

I ask for an estimate, a ballpark figure.

“Let me not count.” He is pleading. He cannot face it, cannot even face the process of calculating how foolish or obsessed he’s been. “Let me get on to another topic.”

Monalisa takes a hairband, gathers up her hair with both hands from the back of her head, and puts it up so that it piles up high and comes down on both sides of her face. She is looking extraordinarily, heartbreakingly lovely. Fifty thousand rupees, for a glimpse of this face.

In the car, as we say good-bye, I notice Minesh’s left arm. There are two deep gashes on it. “A glass window broke. It bled for three days,” he says. Monalisa tells me later how it happened. He had gone to Sapphire, and she told him she would meet him later at Juhu. He went to her house; she wasn’t there, so he knew she had lied. She had gone to meet another customer. He was drunk and had smoked a lot of grass, and he slashed his arm there. It bled heavily, and he wiped it with a napkin and left. When Monalisa finally got home she found the bloody napkin. The doorbell rang; Minesh said he had come back to get his napkin. She bandaged him and he slept in her bed. In the morning he went to the doctor and got eleven stitches. The top customer of the top bar dancer had joined the sorority of the slashed.

E
VERYBODY IN
M
ONALISA’S FAMILY
has tried to kill themselves at least once. Her brother, just the previous month, took an overdose of sleeping pills because his mother was mean to him. Her father once tried to give her mother poison and then took poison himself, so that the ten-year-old Monalisa had to rush him to the doctor in the middle of the night. Her mother tried to poison herself over a lover who was bad to her. And, of course, Monalisa herself—even before her love affairs—while she was living with her mother, took medicine used to kill fleas. “Children will learn what they see their parents doing,” she explains.

And now, after twelve years, Monalisa is going to meet the father who abandoned her.

She has been meeting her mother lately. They went to the Essel World theme park together and she allowed herself to call her “Mummy.” Her father had phoned her mother recently, and her mother told him about their daughter. On hearing that she’d been in contact, he decided to come up to Bombay. Her mother asked Monalisa if she would see him, and Monalisa agreed. All day he’d been asking his ex-wife, using his daughter’s real name, “Did Rupa call? Did Rupa call?” He hasn’t even seen pictures of her.

I ask Monalisa if she’s nervous. “I’m very nervous. I won’t be able to say anything to him.”

“You want me to come with you?”

She thinks for a quick moment and then says, “Yes. Come.”

I
PICK HER UP
the next morning outside Minesh’s building in Juhu, which is in front of an enormous red Ganesh, sprouting seven heads of the main gods—Shiva, Rama, Hanuman—and fourteen arms, all protected by the spread hood of a cobra. Monalisa walks out and turns around to say good-bye to Minesh, who is leaning out of his second-floor window, bare-chested. We take an air-conditioned taxi to Mira Road. She has just woken up and is still very sleepy; she leans her head on my shoulder and shuts her eyes. I remember, and then forget, that she has just gotten out of another man’s bed without a bath; he is probably still in her.

The highway marks the progress of her life. At one end are the slums she grew up in, and she points them out along the side of the road. There in the giant Gujarati complexes in Bhayander are the places her aunt hid her when she ran away from home, hundreds of multistory buildings sprouting all over the weedy ground. There are the suburban bars she danced in, in Goregaon and Borivali, patronized by the crass Maharashtrian builders and the diffident bhaiyyas who kept cattle in pens in the middle of the city. At the other end is the flat she had once bought in Mira Road, just across from her mother’s, a one-bedroom with a terrace. She sold the flat in Mira Road for four lakhs. She put one lakh into a fixed deposit account at the bank. “Then I roamed around for two—three months. I drank. It went.” Her eyes roll heavenward and close.

Many girls in the bar line now live in Mira Road; the Foras Road girls are rapidly shifting to the new city. The 12:30 train to Mira Road gets filled up at Grant Road with the bar girls, shouting and talking on their mobiles. The expensive Sterling School in the suburb is filled with the children of these girls. Mira Road is an instant city, where nobody asks questions because everyone is a newcomer. As we approach Mira Road, where her father is waiting for her, she says, “Now I feel something inside,” and she opens and closes her fist, like the beating of a heart. I give her a hug and hold her hand in mine.

We walk to her mother’s apartment, and Monalisa sees her father sitting in an armchair in the living room, legs up, a balding man with gentle eyes, dressed in an undershirt and lungi. “Hullo, Pappa,” she says, as if she’s been out for a morning walk.

“Touch his feet, touch his feet!” shouts her mother from the kitchen. “It’s been so long since you’ve met him.”

She goes over to him and doesn’t touch his feet. She shakes his hand. She is afraid that he might be angry; she thinks she sees anger on his face.

I come in and sit on the sofa; she sits next to me, away from her father.

“How long has it been?” asks the mother.

“Ten years,” says Monalisa.

“Not that long. I used to come to your school, remember?” says the father. But she wouldn’t agree to see him there.

“You’ve lost hair. And your stomach has grown,” observes Monalisa.

He smiles. He makes no remarks about his daughter’s appearance.

The mother goes into the kitchen. She is still dressed in a cotton nightie, a woman in her mid-forties proud of her former good looks. The brother, Viju, enters the room, a fresh-faced, tall young man, true to his picture. He smiles often; one of his front teeth is a deep yellow and broken in half.

The father stares intently at me, without speaking, for several minutes after I sit down. The television is switched on and never shut off thereafter. We all stare at it in relief: the long-lost father, the daughter who dances in front of strangers for money, the mother who sold her daughter, the brother who recently tried to kill himself, and me. When they ask me, “What is your business?” I reply, “I’m a writer.” It is an effective conversation-stopper.

The flat consists of a living room and two bedrooms, all freshly painted in pink. Like most of the flats in Mira Road, it is a flat of the striving middle class, the first step up from the slums. It is clean, and the open window brings in lots of light and air but also swarms of mosquitoes. There is a battery-powered cuckoo clock on one wall and copies of two big pictures of Viju, which I’d seen in Monalisa’s house, up on the showcase. “I’m going to put up two pictures, one on this wall and one on this one,” says Viju.

“Whose pictures?” asks Monalisa.

“Mine.”

Monalisa quickly turns her face away.

She ignores her father and asks her brother to bring the album of her baby pictures. There she is, just any Gujarati girl in Bombay, holding her brother’s hand and smiling for the camera; she could be my sister. There is not a single picture of her father. Then there are the pictures taken a couple of weeks ago when Monalisa went with Muskan and her brother and mother to Essel World and to Water Kingdom. The two bar girls are vamping outrageously for Viju’s camera, undulating in matching red tank tops and tight black pants. In some of the pictures they are kissing each other; in one, the younger girl has her mouth on Monalisa’s bared belly, kissing it. In others they are in swimsuits. Monalisa asks her father if he’s seen these pictures; they would have been the first sight of his grown daughter. He nods yes, silently.

After a while the father goes into the bedroom. Monalisa follows him. The mother comes out and tells me, smiling, “He’s crying.” They are in there by themselves for about fifteen minutes. I watch the soap opera on
the screen in the living room. An extended family is experiencing heated conflict.

They return to the living room, and an animated discussion begins about the brother’s career. He is a ninth-standard dropout. He has a choice: go into diamond sorting, which pays more and has better prospects than cutting stones in a factory; or go to Kenya, to Nairobi, to work in his aunt’s hotel. The factory work here is a dead end; he earns about what a peon in an office or a driver might make. Monalisa wants him to go to Kenya so he can learn to fend for himself.

“But I don’t want to go to Kenya!” Viju protests. He is afraid of the crime there.

Monalisa starts making chapatis in the kitchen. Her fingers knead the long white-brown tube of dough, and it elongates, descends, from her palms. Then she breaks off a disk from the tube, rolls it out on the wooden platform, and throws it first in the pan and then directly on the fire, where it gathers air, swells, becomes a balloon so fluffy it might lift off, and then settles as Monalisa smears ghee over it.

The lunch is full of small courtesies done to me in the Indian way. I am invited to eat by the father, as if it were still his house, and I sit on the floor in front of my plate. The food is less spicy than at Monalisa’s house: chapatis, potato-and-eggplant curry, dal, rice, and long green not-very-hot fried chilies. There is a pile of chapatis in front of me. As I eat, the mother comes out of the kitchen with a hot chapati and directs Monalisa, “Take the cold one from him.” Monalisa reaches over to my plate, takes the one made earlier, and replaces it with the hot chapati. Then she eats the cold one.

The mother apologizes to me that she hasn’t made anything special. “I didn’t know a man was coming. When Monalisa told me she was bringing a friend, I thought it was a girl, or I would have made undhiyu.”

As we eat, the family berates Viju for not going to work that day. “He has no excuse,” says the father. “There’s a toilet next to the factory!”

“But when I’m feeling like that how can I work?”

“He’s having loose motions,” Monalisa explains to me. “But that’s no reason not to go to work.”

The brother appeals to me. “How can you work when you’re like that?”

The mother wants him to eat something. “Eat some rice and yogurt.
Your stomach is empty.” He doesn’t want to, but the mother forces it on him. He sits down and eats with us, with his troubled bowels.

After the meal the father belches and washes his hands in his plate, with water from his water glass, as they do in the village. He tells me to do the same, and I do, running my fingers quickly under the stream of cold water, which falls into my saucer of dal and turns it a murky yellow. “You’re Gujarati,” he says approvingly. “He’s still Gujarati,” agrees Monalisa. She herself washes her hands in the basin in the kitchen. The father takes his seat and reads the Gujarati paper, his lips moving silently as he does so. He is clearly at home; there is absolutely no indication that this is a divorced couple. “We have five houses in the village,” says the mother. “Bungalows. One is of my mister, the others belong to his brothers.”

After lunch, Monalisa and her brother are stretched out on the floor, leaning their heads on bolsters and horsing around. He tickles her; she yanks at his hair. “They’re very close,” the mother says. “They would fight and tell me tales about the other one, and when I would beat him, she would stand in a corner and cry. When I beat her, he would cry. She’s very strong, and he’s not. When Viju would get beaten up by the boys in the building, Rupa would go down and give them two punches, these big strong boys, and they would all run. But Viju’s very delicate. Even if I give him a little pinch on his skin he cries loudly and says I’ve hit him too hard. In the night sometimes I take his hair while he’s sleeping and tie it in two tails on either side of his head.” She puts her hair up over her temples with both hands, like a devil’s horns. “We used to dress him up in frocks like a girl.”

The brother is smiling widely.

“He used to wet his bed till four years ago. We all slept together, and when I woke up my nightie would be soaking wet. And Rupa’s hair would be completely wet. That’s why it’s so long and beautiful. It’s her conditioner. When people ask Rupa, What’s the secret of your hair? she should say, It’s my brother’s piss.” She laughs loudly, while her son desperately tries to shush her. But then he realizes she is not going to stop, and, trying with all his life to catch up in the joke—to demonstrate to me that he too thinks it’s funny—he says, “Maybe I should bottle it and sell it.”