Maximum City (57 page)

She dreams about her kid brother’s wedding. “I’ll give him a great wedding. I’ll dance a lot. Really, I’ll dance so much.”

“What about your own wedding? When will you get married?”

“I’ll never get married.”

Minesh is fading as a romantic possibility. He was not present at the bar on New Year’s. His business partner ratted on him; he told Minesh’s father that his son was seriously involved with a bar-line dancer. The father promptly demanded that he move back home, put the Juhu flat off limits to him, imposed a curfew, and monitored his mobile phone bills. Now he can’t even call Monalisa except from a public phone. She hardly ever sees him.

The last year has been bad for Minesh. He lost a huge amount in his software business. He has pledged 25,000 rupees for Monalisa’s account at Sapphire but hasn’t paid the money yet. He has begged her to wait for him.
He has two unmarried sisters, one older, one younger, and their chances of finding a suitable match would be blighted if the world knew their brother was associated with a bar dancer. As soon as his sisters get married he will rebel against his family and come out with her in the open. But his older sister is in her thirties. If she hasn’t found a man in all this time, she is unlikely to find anyone soon. Monalisa is bored, sitting at home waiting for Minesh to give her time. So she has resumed going out with her clients, “for coffee”—young Gujarati and Marwari boys.

Monalisa has not seen her father again. He keeps planning trips to Bombay but doesn’t come. “He has his own family. I don’t want to disturb him.” She has accepted the distance, internalized it. Monalisa now has no friends. She has only her clients; Minesh, sometimes; her mother and brother; and me. She makes plans with me: to go to the new restaurants, to go dancing at Fire & Ice, the new disco. One rainy day after my wife and children have left for America, she comes to my apartment at one in the afternoon and stays till eight in the evening, eating, sleeping, watching a movie on TV, talking. She calls Minesh from my place and tells him she is relaxed here. In this friendless time of her life, I am someone who is neither customer nor lover.

I finally tell Monalisa about my family. I show her pictures of Sunita and the children, and I explain to her why I kept my family isolated from most of the people in the book, and how I regret now that she wasn’t able to meet my children, at least. But it is fine. She’s used to deceit; to the “jooth ki duniya.” She is not angry with me, nor does she say “I wish I had met them.” All the people she has ever known have had a hidden life, a locked room that is off limits to her, like her father’s second wife and Minesh’s family. The twenty-one-year-old girl gives me advice about marriage: “It’s like a rubber band,” she says, pulling the two ends in the air and letting them pull back. “You’re not one of those boys who eat, drink, and wash your hands. If you take such good care of me, I can imagine how much care you must take of someone that you have chosen.”

M
ANOJ IS VERY EXCITED
. He has just seen the sonograph of his child. “I could make out a little face and two little dots that were the hands.” But the pregnancy brings with it a host of problems. Through the night, he has to keep waking up to satisfy Jyoti’s cravings for food and drink. She is
getting irritable in her first trimester, and Manoj is thinking of dropping her off at her mother’s place in Pune for a month. Honey’s collection has diminished at Sapphire, which keeps going back and forth between a 12:30 a.m. closing and a later one, depending on the whims of the police. Honey has just had a gallbladder operation. It is becoming increasingly difficult for her to dance.

The bar line, in its current form, is ending. “It’s like what it was when it started,” reflects Honey. “People are throwing five-rupee notes.” The stock market boom is over. No longer are men content to see girls dancing in full saris and for the wilder ones to gyrate erotically; they are not satisfied with a smile or a quick caress on the face. “Pressing and kissing goes on nowadays!” she exclaims in disgust. “The bar line has become nightlife, it’s all sex.” And this is one area where Honey can’t compete with the girls.

Honey has one great wish in her life. “My heart wants one thing so much: that once in my life I should come in front of people as Manoj. Hide nothing.” Make Manoj an important name too, maybe as a makeup man, maybe as a wardrobe supplier to the fashion or movie industries. He might save Honey’s earnings and open a transport agency like his brother’s, with a few cars and trucks he can rent out. Or he might go to America with me, where Manoj can work in his aunt’s store or Honey can dance in a gay bar. After the child is a year old, he says, Honey will leave the bar line. One way or another, Honey will die in a year or two. In the end Manoj will win; it was decided from the beginning. But it was beautiful to watch her while she was alive.

Monalisa, too, is thinking of getting out of the bar line in two or three years. Maybe she’ll do a course in fashion design or work in a beauty parlor. If she saves fifty lakhs she can open a clothes boutique. The problem with the bar line, she says, is that “it’s all going western.” It is becoming just like the discos, just like the colleges. Soon, the bar-line girls won’t be wearing these full saris and dresses; “it will be short short.” The customers know what they want. In the early days, they used to come to the bar for fifteen days before asking for a girl’s name; now they ask point-blank: “Are you coming or not?”

So Monalisa tells me her dream. It is to make a speech when she wins the Miss India title.

She speculates about what a sensation it would cause, the country discovering that the newly appointed paragon of Indian womanhood is a
dancer in a bar; that this representative of the demimonde has bested all the convent-educated girls from Malabar Hill and Friends Colony. “What a headline it would make! It would be like a bomb falling.” She is serious about making this speech. She has started working out, taking speech lessons, and going to the dentist to get her teeth fixed. But, almost twenty-two, she is getting old for the pageant.

Her dream is not to win the title; it is to make the speech, with millions of people watching. “I’ll tell everyone that I am a girl from the bar line. Now you can take back all your prizes, all your money, but I wanted to prove that I could get to this point. That we in the bar line are also part of society. I went into the bar line because of need. I’m not being forced to do anything.” Monalisa tells me the rest of the speech in English, the English she has been learning all these months so that when the time comes she can get onto the glittering stage in the vast auditorium and tell the whole country, “I’m in the bar line, but I am not doing anything wrong. I’m just dancing here.”

A
LL
M
ADANPURA IS AGOG.
The movies have come home. The stars have stepped off the big screen and here they are, so close you can almost touch them. Which star is it? Karishma Kapoor or Shahrukh Khan, depending on which rumor you believe.

The film is called
Sangharsh
, and it is directed by a slight, confident young woman named Tanuja Chandra. Her last movie did not do well but this one will be different, because, she explains to me, “In this story the hero is integrated into the plot.” It is a Hindi version of
Silence of the Lambs
—with songs. Preity Zinta is the Jodie Foster character, a trainee CID inspector who falls in love with a gangster. And I have introduced Tanuja and her famous producer, Mahesh Bhatt, to Madanpura in darkest Bombay and found real gangsters to protect the making of this gangster movie.

Anees has rounded up forty of his boys for crowd control. They are controlling the crowd by thrashing it. In front of me, a tall man named Farid slaps a gawking bhaiyya back and forth across his face, four times. The small bhaiyya looks up at him, wondering if his rage and his pain will give him the strength to say something to Farid. A policeman has seen what’s happening, witnessed the assault. He rushes in and drives his iron-tipped bamboo stick at the bhaiyya—and at everybody else. The lathi makes contact on soft bodies, and the whole crowd flees helter-skelter down the lane, screaming. There are small children inside that crowd, fleeing before the swinging stick.

It’s a great day for Madanpura.

“In five minutes they’ll all be back,” says Anees.

In five minutes they’re all back.

The karkhanas, the workshops, of Madanpura are shut; the meat shops and tailors aren’t doing much business; the man making rotis directly in front of the house we are shooting in has never kneaded his dough with such energy. People linger in front of the pan shop and, when challenged by the cops or by Anees’s boys, say they’re waiting for their pan to be made. They’re given a shove to go on. Over us there is a tin roof, which must be sizzling in the sun. On it are dozens of people, almost on the edge of the overhang, many with bare feet frying on the roof. Through a crack in the karkhana next to the house I spot three faces, like cherubs glimpsed in the woodland. Small boys have clambered onto the roofs overlooking the small courtyard of the house and have to be shooed out of the frame. A jocular policeman is sitting on a motorcycle in front of the house’s entrance, dispensing witticisms. “There’s nothing to see. Go, go and feed your mothers and fathers. Go, Shilpa Shetty and Amitabh Bacchan are coming at four o’clock. Line up now!”

Tanuja, the only woman to have made it in the commercial film industry as a director, is thrilled to have begun her film in Madanpura. All the men in the unit are scared of the mob; only Tanuja, Preity, and her female assistant brave the crowd. When Preity gets out of her van, her mobile phone at her ear, and moves fast within a cordon of locked hands through the roaring crowd, I understand for the first time what the word “mobbed” means. The assistant, a diminutive figure, pushes back at people with vigor. The mob retreats in front of this sprite as they had not in front of the police or Anees’s thugs. “Woman power,” the assistant observes.

The scene being shot is Preity Zinta coming into the inner city to meet the gang lord. She sits down next to me, and I introduce myself. She asks about Anees’s boys. “Have they killed anyone?” I respond that many of them probably have. Her eyes widen. “Can you point out someone who’s killed?” She is as fascinated by the gangsters as they are by her. All the crowd wants is a glimpse of her face or her body, clad in a white Old Navy sweatshirt and white platform sneakers. What she wants is to catch a glimpse of a killer.

Gangsters and whores all over the world have always been fascinated by the movies and vice versa; the movies are fundamentally transgressive. They are our eye into the forbidden. Most people will never see a human
being murder another human being, except on the screen. Most people will never see a human being have sex with another human being, except on the screen. Cinema is an outlaw medium, our flashlight into the darkest part of ourselves. For the criminals and prostitutes who live these outlaw lives, the movies are close to realistic; they are for Monalisa and the hit man Mohsin what a Cheever story might be for a businessman living in Westchester: a sympathetic depiction, only slightly exaggerated, of his work and life.

Anees says, “Look at my feet.” They are unnaturally brown and wrinkled. All day long the public has been trampling on them as he attempts to push it back from the action. Anees’s boys will have lots to answer for after today; they have beaten back the crowd with fists and lathis. But today they are with the unit; they are part of the film world, aiding in its realization of their dreams.

A squad of policemen arrives. The inspector demands that the film crew pack up. They have not obtained the necessary permissions. The unit’s negotiator speaks to him in soft tones. The local member of the legislature, who looks like a powerfully built thug himself, appears, swinging a stick. “Shut all this down! Pack up, pack up! The public is getting inconvenienced.” But Tanuja is not finished with her takes, which involve filming a gangster who is eating biryani. There is an enormous plate of greasy rice in front of him, and we can hear Tanuja screaming at him, “Khate raho! Keep eating!” It is money the inspector really wants, but Tanuja doesn’t realize this. She has to pack up before lunch. She ultimately ends up throwing away the street scenes because there are so many people looking at the camera that she has to constantly keep narrowing the frame. In Bombay, of all places, she’s trying to shut out the crowd.

It barely made it into the movie, but that one morning in Madanpura now has outsize significance: for Anees, for Ishaq the STD shopowner and his cousin Dr. Shahbuddin, and for everybody who helped Tanuja with the shoot. Ishaq is now besieged by people wanting a meeting with the stars or small roles in the movie. The shooting changes the status of Ishaq and Shahbuddin in the community. The doctor’s barber refuses to take money for shaving Shahbuddin every morning. He wants Shahbuddin to do him a favor next time the stars come visiting: He wants a picture of himself with one of them. Shahbuddin’s wife, who is in Malaysia, refuses to believe he met all these stars; she thinks he is lying. It is something they will talk about till they are old, and it is something their children will talk about. “My
father met Preity Zinta. Mahesh Bhatt came to our shop, right here. He sat down and had a Coke.”

Whether they’re making art films or masala films solidly in the mainstream, the people in the movie industry are all the same: big dreamers. In India, their dreams have to be bigger than everybody else’s. In India they’re making collective dreams; when they go to sleep at night they have to dream for a billion people. This distorts their personalities. It also accounts for their egos: the demands of scale. The Bombay moviemakers are afflicted by megalomania. “This is the beginning of a shift in orbit of Planet India, the ultimate revenge where the Indians are going to take over the Western mind. Welcome to the cultural aggression of the 21st century,” writes the producer Amit Khanna in a newspaper column. The Indian entertainment industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century is worth $3.5 billion, a minor part of the global $300-billion entertainment industry. But it is the world’s biggest movie industry when it comes to production and viewership. The 1,000 feature films and 40,000 hours of TV programming and 5,000 music titles that the country produces are exported to seventy countries. Every day, 14 million Indians see a movie in one of 13,000 theaters; worldwide, a billion more people a year buy tickets to Indian movies than to Hollywood ones. Television is galloping in; the country has 60 million homes with TV, of which 28 million are cabled, bringing to city and hamlet alike a choice of around a hundred channels. “There now are more television channels available in Mumbai than in most U.S. cities,” Bill Clinton noted on a trip to the city in 1999.