Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (18 page)

Having gathered her information, Leela had come to this conclusion: to leave Lata would make Shetty a pariah in the Shetty business community. To leave her for a barwali would be interpreted as a sign of perversity. His parents would threaten a double suicide in a public place—a publicly holy place.

Although Leela dreamt of marrying in a temple, in silk, in gold, her palms embroidered with mehendi, a brilliant line of vermilion parting her hair, the tragic irony was that she had never herself attended such a wedding and drew her references from films (
Chandni,
starring Sridevi, was a favourite). And so she didn’t fool herself and desire too greatly this one, possibly impossible dream that had so far eluded her and women like her. Instead, she hoped for the next best thing. A ‘love marriage’ in which she would be Shetty’s sole dance bar ‘wife’—not like she was now, but formally, with a party, for hosting a party signified enthusiasm and commitment on Shetty’s part. To celebrate, they would kill chickens and goats and any altu-faltu type who raised timepass objections. They would invite everyone in the line and take lots of photographs, which she would make many copies of, preserving one set in her
Hanuman Chalisa
and carrying the other, at all times, in her handbag.

Shetty would continue supporting her financially, obvious.

Most importantly, she would retire from the line and visit Night Lovers only on special occasions—when a puja was to be conducted, for example. Then she would tuck a Rotomac behind her ear, so no one would mistake her for one of the girls, and wear shiny new sandals under her Kala Niketan chiffon, so it would appear as though she had stepped from her flat into Shetty’s Sumo and from Shetty’s Sumo into the dance bar, condescending for barely a moment to tread on dirt. She would complain to those left behind: what a bore life is now that PS insists she enjoy, that she put her feet up in front of the TV and let the bai do all the
jhadu
-
pocha
-cooking—what else was she paid for, and how could the wife of a Shetty be poking under beds with a broom?

She would familiarize herself with this kitty party bijniss and, yes, send Apsara packing. (To secure good karma, she would book her a berth on an AC two-tier train and fill her fatty hands with mithai and some jewellery—‘one piece gold, five piece silver’.)

Shetty could still sleep with whomever he wanted. He was, after all, still a young man, as healthy as a Punjabi farm boy, Leela said with pride. Leela knew the new girl Twinkle currently held him in thrall and she didn’t care. She had it from a good source that Twinkle was carrying a particularly dire
gupt rog
and she planned to mention it to Shetty. ‘It’s the kind you get up here,’ she’d say casually, pointing to her mouth, ‘
and
,’ wincing, ‘down there!’

Leela’s campaign involved getting herself tested for peeli bimari and other STDs, including HIV. Good health, she believed, was like pure gold—an obvious status symbol. Impure blood, Leela had seen with her own eyes, manifested itself in festering sores in visible places and in violent rashes that colonized the body like an army of ants. Some barwalis, she said, had reached such
a crisis point, they had to slap dead people’s hair across their bald heads.

Leela didn’t believe she had peeli bimari, but HIV . . . This is how it is, she explained to me. When Manohar pimped her out, it was
pehle ki
baat, arre who knew of HIV? Then she was raped, remember, when she first arrived in Bombay? Do you think even one of those cockroaches wore a chocolate? From there she went to Night Lovers and back then too few customers had culture. The things she heard! ‘I’m allergic to latex!’ ‘I deserve full pleasure!’ ‘Am I paying or not?’ Of course, to be franks, in the minds of some girls there was no question of a chocolate, because they were on the pill and needn’t worry about growing a baby.

Although Leela had been fairly careful since, it would do no harm to get tested. But yes, why hadn’t anyone told her HIV could be transmitted through unprotected oral sex?

Since the previous year Leela had learnt more about HIV from an NGO that parked its mobile clinic down the road from Night Lovers. The first few times one of the
didis
, as the women who worked there were known, approached Leela with the suggestion of a check-up, Leela batted her away: ‘I’m not those types,’ she said, loudly bustling off.

‘I was “proudy” with her,’ Leela admitted. ‘As though it made a difference! Sister’s name was Baby, and Baby knew what I was. She would roam outside Night Lovers and every week she would walk up to me all smiling-like and say, “What’s the harm, come meet our doctor. If you don’t have time for a check-up, at least take some chocolates. They are free! And paan flavoured! Please?”’

The word ‘free’ did the trick.

‘I liked the idea,’ Leela admitted. ‘So I went in. The doctor was nosy-like. “How many kustomers do you take? Do you have a husband? Is he your regular or does he go with his other wives?” But he wasn’t writing this info down for the police. Only to understand how many chocolates I needed.’

Leela got checked for gonorrhoea. She was clean. Then Baby suggested a blood test for HIV. Leela agreed and went ahead. But in the weeks that followed, she avoided Baby.

‘Your results are ready,’ Baby would say, hurrying alongside Leela as Leela scooted into Night Lovers. ‘Keep them!’ Leela would hiss. ‘Throw them away!’ she said, another time.

‘She became my shadow,’ Leela recalled, resentful. ‘Arre, if I didn’t want the results I didn’t want the results! What went of her father’s?’

Why didn’t you want to know? I asked.

‘Some things are best kept secret,’ Leela said. ‘Some knowledge isn’t worth the price you pay for having it.’

Shortly after the Lonavla trip, Leela was forced to reconsider her decision. It happened after one of the dancers at Night Lovers, a teenager called Ameena, fell mysteriously ill. Ameena was famous for her ability to dance with a pyramid of three tumblers balanced on her head. ‘You could switch on any song,’ raved Shetty, ‘classical, disco,
Jana gana mana
! She wouldn’t break one tumbler. She couldn’t if she tried! Three years that girl was with me and not one crash, imagine it! She was a jewel, an angel. That first time I saw her dance I said to myself, “Purshottam Shetty, ready to be
crorepati
?”’

About six months prior to the incident Ameena started skipping work. When she did show up she was skinny, skittish and always coughing into the crook of her arm. Leela wondered if Ameena had tuberculosis. If that was the case, she hoped Ameena would have the decency not to dance next to her.

While performing one night, Ameena became visibly disoriented. She fell on to a table. It was embarrassing; she looked a fool. Shetty didn’t make trouble. It was a one-time slip and he personally apologized to the customer into whose lap Ameena had spilt a quarter and several chicken legs. The incident would have been forgotten after a few nights of make-up room taunts, had it not been for the fact that, citing exhaustion, Ameena stayed home the next evening. And the evening after that, and
then for a week until Shetty, who had a soft spot for his jewels, phoned her personally.

‘Her husband picked up, of course,’ Shetty said to me. ‘“Where’s Ameena?” I asked. “Unwell,” snorted that scoundrel. “But don’t you worry Shetty sahib, I’ll send her to you soon. This is just
natak
, you know. Sometimes my wife likes to do drama.” This is how these men talk! And what does he do for a job, you may ask. Answer? Nothing! I bet you five hundred rupees had I visited their chawl that evening I would have found Ameena sweating from her tips to her toes, washing the floor, cooking food, feeding the baby while that useless nothing fellow would have been sprawled in front of their Sony TV yelling, “Ameena chai
la
!
Ek
peg
de
! Khana
khila
!”
Kameena
rascal! Idiot maderchod!’

One of the responsibilities Leela had taken upon herself as Shetty’s ‘wife’—unasked by Shetty—was to keep a tab on the other bar dancers. She would phone when they skipped a night of work. If they failed to answer she would ‘take insult’. She would send off furious text messages, lashing out at their caste, character, the colour of their skin. When she needed a boost of confidence or wished to remind herself that she was better than her job, Leela would stand with a fierce face and folded arms by the back door from which the girls came in to work and rifle through their handbags for what she claimed was contraband.

‘No drinks!’ she would snipe, confiscating bottles of cola spiked with rum.

So when Ameena ‘took off’ once again, and four weeks later still hadn’t returned Shetty or Leela’s calls, Leela decided to do her duty.

Ameena lived in Malvani, a cramped, congested suburb a local doctor once described to me as a ‘dumping zone of people’. Malvani is overrun with chawls, prayer halls and dhabas you can smell from up the road. And its residents had demarcated
its numerous enclaves as strictly as national borders, each with its own customs and characters. There were streets of working-class families and streets populated by hijras. In some streets lived bar dancers. In others immigrants operated brothels out of the tin-roof constructions they called home.

Malvani’s most arresting visual, however, was not its colourful and varied communities of human beings. It was its population of goats. On entering the neighbourhood you might see just one and wonder what the big deal was, but before long you would know, because another goat would saunter into your path, and then another, and then you would, most likely, see a family—babies and parents dozing in the sun amidst a confetti of fresh green leaves, and then without warning it would appear as though you had stumbled into an enchanted city whose only residents were goats. There were dozens of them and they were of all heights and girths, and shades of chocolate, white and grey; they had silky, wispy hair and grand-daddy beards and collars they wore like necklaces as they promenaded unattended, knobbly kneed and elegant as can be past the very butchers at whose hands their lives would come to an end.

The chawl Ameena lived in was packed with people and goats and smelt of cleaning fluid and freshly cut grass.

‘I couldn’t see very well,’ Leela recounted. ‘Someone had strung clothes across Ameena’s door and they blocked out the light. Pushing the clothes to a side I peered through and to the little girl sitting on the floor I said, “Baby, where’s mummy?”’

‘What mummy?’ giggled Ameena.

‘I jumped!’ said Leela. ‘That little girl, who I mistook for Ameena’s child, was Ameena herself! How can I describe to you what she looked like? I saw death.’

Ameena confided she had HIV.

A few weeks previously, Baby had chased her down and because mild-tempered Ameena never could articulate a negative, even to a stranger, she had agreed to an HIV test.

Now she was grumbling at the inconvenience her charity had caused her.

‘It’s bad enough that they admit us through a separate line, like we’re of a different caste,’ she said, of South Bombay’s Jamshedji Jijibhoy (JJ) Hospital, where she had gone to receive treatment. ‘Or that the ward for HIV patients is infested with mosquitoes. On one hand they say this is a disease of the blood and on the other, just imagine this, Leela, the place is full of mosquitoes sucking our blood and doing delivery service from one patient to the other! Accha, the last time I was there I saw policewomen in the ward, three of them. “What are they doing here?” I wondered. “Do they have HIV?” But no, they were with a prisoner and to make sure she wouldn’t escape they had handcuffed her to the bed and were sitting on the floor beside her, holding on to her chains. They were police, what can you expect? They couldn’t take the heat even for a few minutes! By the time I was ready to leave all three were snoring, loud as trains! I knew exactly what that woman was thinking—given half a chance she would have scrambled out of there, patli gali
se
!’

‘Chalo,’ Ameena smiled, ‘at least I’m having new experiences!’