Maximum City (52 page)

Then the mother and the brother describe Monalisa’s impressive appetite to me. The mother enumerates all the things she needs to eat
throughout the day: so many parathas for breakfast, so much for lunch, and two dinners. “Two pav bhajis and twelve to sixteen pav,” says Viju.

Monalisa laughs along. “In the children’s home I would be weeping, but I would still be eating. I would weep and eat, weep and eat.”

Something hidden and savage is being played out in this family for me, the lone member of the audience. I say I will be going, but the mother is adamant that Monalisa leave with me, even though Monalisa is stretching out for a nap. The beer-bar waitress is all smiles and laughter with me and asks me to visit them again. I am from America; I am probably rich; Monalisa must go home with me.

O
N THE TRAIN GOING BACK
she is quiet. We stand near the open door to catch the breeze. She tells me that when she went into the bedroom, her father had put both of his hands up to the face of his lost daughter and burst into tears. He said he missed her. “Did he say he was sorry for having left you?” I ask.

She shakes her head no.

He left her because she had asked him, he had told her. When she was ten, she saw that her mother had kept another man, and her father was having an affair with another woman, so she told him to go away from there. “And he always obeyed whatever I said, even as a child,” she explains to me and to herself.

He had asked her to keep just one secret: not to tell her mother that he has three cars in the village. It would not go over well that his second wife was having a better life than his first. “Even now, my father loves my mother,” Monalisa tells me, and smiles. “Otherwise why would he talk to her? It feels good to me for some time when I see them together.”

She had put her head in his lap and talked to him. She told him everything about her line of work. He had asked her to get married. “Girls in this line can never get married,” she had replied. She asked him to come to her house when he came back to Bombay, and she would cook him a meal with her own hands. I ask her if she had cried. “I didn’t cry.”

“Why not?”

“Tears didn’t come. They’ll come when I’m alone. I cry when I’m alone and I’m listening to songs. As soon as the song begins, I start to cry.”

I realize why there are so few tears in that family. If Monalisa—if her mother, if her brother—were to allow herself to cry every time she felt the weight of pain or heightened emotion, she would be all dried out from the crying. She would be weeping her blood out. So when she met the father who had abandoned her half a lifetime ago, she could watch him cry and yet hold herself in check. No, that’s not right; she was not holding herself in check. It was nothing so willed as all that. By the age of twenty, it just came naturally to Miss Monalisa Patel, when she encountered a situation of great pain. She stayed strong. She did it like a pro.

O
VER TIME
, I started liking Sapphire. I liked the happiness there. Here were people who came after a hard day in a brutal city, and there was music they liked, and booze, and lights, and pretty girls dancing. The girls were enjoying themselves too, making money, being fawned over. There was a kind of beery fraternity among the spectators. Men came with their friends, and, their commercial instincts deadened or diminished by happiness, threw on the girls the contents of their wallets that they worked so hard to accumulate: Look, this is how little they mean to me, these brightly colored pieces of paper. Men came here to debase money.

Whenever Monalisa sees me coming in with my friends, her face lights up. We walk easily past the guards and doors into the VIP room, armed with the magic key of her name. She speaks to the waiter, and seats are cleared for us while everyone else is kept standing. Monalisa has the songs

I like played for me, and she dances to them in front of me, forgoing many thousands of rupees that other men are offering her to dance for them. And all the assembled gangsters, policemen, businessmen, sheiks, and tourists crane their necks to see who this dignitary is for whom the
RESERVED
signs are taken off the best tables. And what does she get for doing this for me, keeping my izzat?

In love, as Monalisa knows so well, the most potent weapon you have is your ear.

Monalisa had been explaining the difference between sex, love, and friendship to Dayanita, when they were alone. “What is sex? Sex is nothing. What you need is someone who will be there all night, whose breathing you can hear all night, who you can still see in your bed in the morning
after you’ve had sex with him. A person with whom you have relations lasts for six months or a year; a friend you can have for life. Among guys I have only one friend, Suketu. It’s pure friendship. There is no love in it.” “What about Minesh?”

“That began in friendship, but then love came in. It’s strange.” She was talking about love as if it were a pollutant.

I am explaining all this to a friend, a poet. “Monalisa is a specialist in making men fall in love with her. I’m following her life. Since January I’ve been meeting her or speaking to her on the phone almost every single day.”

“Oh, so she’s succeeded.”

“In what?” I ask, before I realize.

“Every person want me,” Monalisa had said. People in Bombay think I want her too, and when they see how I am received at the bar, they infer that she has given in to my want. I know what color and type of underwear she wears. I know how she likes to make love. I know when she is sad, when she is suicidal, when she is exuberant. What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?

“There is one person who knows my entire life,” Monalisa tells Dayanita. “I’ve told Suketu every little detail.” She reveals it to me, in large and small chunks, till her life is transferred from Monalisa to me. What will the consequences of this transfer be, on her and on me?

At some point the Monalisa that I’m writing in these pages will become more real, more alluring, than the Monalisa that is flesh and blood. One more ulloo, Monalisa will think. But imagine her surprise when she sees that what I am adoring, what I am obsessed with, is a girl beyond herself, larger than herself in the mirror beyond her, and it is her that I’m blowing all my money on, it is her that I’m getting to spin and twirl under the confetti of my words. The more I write, the faster my Monalisa dances.

Madan, a street photographer, asks me to walk with him through Golpitha, the collective name for the red-light district. So much of Bombay is a red-light district that the Dalit poets call the entire city Golpitha. At the end of our walk, Madan and I are sitting in a bar full of men, open to the street. It is the bowels of the earth. The whole area has an unclean aura to it. The rooms are advertised on first-floor windows:
WELCOME
55.
AC”
Men, singly
or in twos and threes, walk past the women standing outside the bar in the yellow light of the streetlamp, mustering up the courage to talk to them, sizing them up: age, complexion, and breast size. The older women sit down on the nearest stoop, tired, as the night wears on.

Madan is making sport of a boy of around twenty who has come into the bar and is sitting across the table from us. Shezan is a bright-eyed Mallu on his way to work in a hotel in Dubai; this is the suspended time for him, a night in Bombay, in transit. “I think we should get a babe and all three of us should screw her,” Madan suggests. He points to me. “This guy is so horny. He just wants to screw.”

Shezan Babu has just “had a shag from an Andhra babe” for 150 rupees. He likes it when the babes give him some caring. In Dubai there will be Russian babes for a thousand a night, and he’s heard they’re very caring. There are also Tajik babes and—what’s that short race?—Filipinas. Filipina babes are very good. It’s not like Saudi, where there’s nothing. In Mangalore he has been having a fine time with African students who come for the universities there. “The Negro babes were very caring. With them, you have to be really decent. Maximum decent. You have to be decent for three—four months and then they’ll let you do anything.” And then you can have one, and then you can have so many.

A short pimp had taken him to a room where there were five—six babes, and he chose the Andhra one. They went into the room and she said I’ll take off all my clothes and he said no (he was afraid of the diseases he could get, VD is all right but this AIDS is really bad), and he took off all his clothes and just lay down in the dark and she shagged him. She had offered him a condom; he always wears double condoms when fucking. Madan is aghast. “I hate condoms. Your dick becomes an alien object.”

Madan is having him on, telling him to go to the whores outside and ask them if they’ll have all three of us. Three hundred rupees for the three of us, one says, and then brings it down to eighty each. The room is extra. Drinks are extra. In his last encounter Shezan was given a pellet of some drug, he thinks it was grass but Madan says it was hashish, for 20 rupees. “When you have grass and screw it’ll never come out,” Shezan observes.

In the middle of his whoring, he takes time out to phone his mother in Mangalore. “Where are you?” she asks, anxious. “I’m in the hotel. I haven’t gone out.” “Have you eaten?” she asks. “No, I haven’t gone out of the hotel.”

The women are like any others in central Bombay, except there are more of them with East Asian features, the Nepalis. The others are Maharashtrians or Andhras, dark hued. They are not dressed provocatively. They just have flowers in their hair and might be dressed for going out to a movie or to a hotel for dinner. There are children all around them. The streetwalkers tell us to buzz off when Shezan inquires if they’ll give him anal sex. “Then what
will
you do?” he asks. One of them points to her groin. “Put the dick in the cunt, that’s all.” Another makes him an offer: If he gives her 100 rupees, she’ll lubricate a piece of wood and put it up
his
ass. The streetwalkers seem very much in control, both of the kinds of men they’ll take on and what they will or won’t do with them. But then a pimp comes up to two women standing by the streetlamp. He pulls out an account book, makes notations in it. The women give him some bills; he takes them, notes them down, and walks on. I start walking away too. Shezan is puzzled; the night is still young, the endless Bombay night. There are 8 million stories in the naked girl.

Bombay is a city humming, throbbing, with sexual energy. A city of migrant men without women; a city in heat. The womanless rickshaw wallahs, the Bollywood wannabes, the fashion models, and the sailors from many countries—all in search of some heat, a hurried furtive fuck in whatever hidden corner the world will permit them. They do it in trains, railway stations, the backs of taxis, parks, urinals. The rocks by the sea are a favorite. Along Carter Road in Bandra, at Scandal Point in Malabar Hill, rows of couples are wrapped in each other on the rocks, all facing the sea. It is no matter that the thousands of people walking by can see them, because they can see only their backs, not their faces, and the lovers to the left and the right of them are all busy with each other, kissing, feeling. Anonymity is erotic. That woman hanging out clothes on her balcony, with the hair long and wet around her shoulders from her bath. The crowds of girls in short skirts outside the Catholic colleges. “The whole city is a bedroom,” says my maid. She knows about the memsahibs who come to meet their drivers at Haji Ali. The man who comes to fix the cable approaches her when she is alone in the house. “Is there anything to eat?” he asks. “There are some chapatis,” she replies. “Can I get something to eat?” he repeats.

But the sexual hunger isn’t confined to the lower classes. In the China Garden, at the Oberoi, groups of society women discuss their lovers over lunch. The young blades of Walkeshwar watch the painted women of the
West gyrate on the music videos and download hard-core pornography on the Internet and can’t get a peck on the cheek from the good girls of their social circle. In the five-star hotels, young male models pray to their gods before beauty contests, while aging Parsi queens cruise them in the toilets, trying to look at their dicks. An industrialist’s wife, the organizer of one of those male pageants, is caught on tape with one of her contestants. The pornographic cassette ends up in the hands of a rival business family, and they convene an emergency family meeting. What are they to do with this material? It could be a gold mine or it could be disaster. They decide to hold it for a rainy day. Women are held and held back: in the streets, in the skyscrapers, in the beer bars, in the chawls. It is the sexual frenzy of a closed society, and the women of Golpitha are the gutters for these men’s emissions.

G
IRISH
,
THE PROGRAMMER
, takes me one evening to meet one such man, a college friend of his named Srinivas. We descend to a basement, where Srinivas works in a brokerage firm. A bespectacled, cheerful young man, he is a dedicated downloader of pornography on his computer, right next to the Reuters wire. Srinivas grew up in Kamathipura, where sixth-standard schoolboys take money given to them by their parents for toffee, pool it together, and buy blow jobs. Until a year ago, he would get together with his friends and buy 500-rupee whores, take them to empty apartments or hotel rooms, and share them. He tells us what passes for postcoital conversation with the prostitutes. Nine out of ten of the girls under Srinivas will tell him, You’re from a good family. You shouldn’t be doing all these things. But Srinivas likes to have sex. “It’s the simplest thing you can do, as a human being.”

A few months ago, he got ill with jaundice and lost twenty-two pounds, so he gave up whoring and drinking. But he’s all right now, so he’s planning to start again in a month or so. Until then, he gets his pleasure from the computer. He has acquired a new CD, which features a woman on the screen. The viewer can do things to her via the mouse, and she responds appropriately; moving the arrow into her vagina elicits tinny moans of programmed pleasure from the computer speaker. He walks me over to where he will go once he gets better.