Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (24 page)

‘It’s no breaking news.’

I don’t mind.

‘What’s to tell?’ Priya shrugged. ‘Poonam said she would accompany me until I got confident. But I told her, “What to worry? I’m not attending a surprise birthday party.” And I was all right the first day and the second. Then on the third day around 8 p.m. a taxi pulled up and in the back seat was a man, young and well spoken—so don’t blame me Aunty! He said to me, “
Jaane ka
?” Naturally I replied, “That’s why I’m standing here.” We decided on Guru Lodge in Khar. Poonam said, “I’ll come with you!” But I was feeling confident-like, so I said, “Why bother?” I thought she wanted a cut because she had helped me out and
because the man looked like he was from a good family. He was in a taxi. He seemed educated. You’ll laugh now, but my first thought was: “How to get this shiny mister to fall in love with me?” Ha. Anyway, Poonam insisted and she got in. Barely fifty feet down the road, the man asked the driver to stop and four more men jumped into the taxi. The man stuck a knife into my side and warned me not to shout. The taxi driver pretended he was blind. Poonam said straight off, “I have a son. Rape me, ten times rape me, but don’t snatch my life.” As if they were after her life. Never mind Khar, they drove for two hours, all the way to a lodge in Aksa Beach. The entire night they drank and raped us. We didn’t get a minute’s rest. I managed to call the reception, but the person who answered said to me, “You came from the road, no? Why don’t you take your problems back there?”’

‘What had she done to deserve this?’ Apsara said, scanning the cards in her hand. ‘Nothing?’ she asked, picking one.

Priya ignored her. ‘Do you know what I call that night? Bhagwan
ki dua
. I know of a dhandewali who was picked up like this by ten men. Ten! Ten men cannot rent one room. They went to the closest jungle. They raped her. After they finished, they raped her with beer bottles. Then they left her to die.’

Apsara looked up. ‘Don’t talk of unholy things.’

‘It’s not unholy if it’s true.’

‘Girls are dying,’ Apsara said to me, lowering her voice like she was sharing a confidence.

I nodded. In recent, unrelated incidents two bar dancers had died in a single week. Meena Ramu T. had been twenty-two when she hung herself. Bilkish Sahu had been twenty-four and pregnant with her second child. The press speculated that both deaths were connected to the women’s recent unemployment due to the ban.

‘Why are you scared of death?’ Leela said to her mother, curiously.

‘Talk of death like you’re talking about lunch, why don’t you?’ Apsara hissed.

‘You are scared of everything,’ Leela concluded. ‘
Darpok
,’ she whispered behind her cards.

‘Anyway,’ said Priya. ‘That’s when I decided I wouldn’t work alone. Better to work with a boy, a Tinkoo-type boy, than to work as an alone girl in this city.’

I asked Priya if she would talk to someone about what had happened. I had a rape counsellor in mind, a doctor. She dismissed me. Apsara and Leela continued with their card game as though they hadn’t heard.

But even I knew better than to suggest a visit to the police. Priya and Leela had always feared them, but since she had begun working with Tinkoo, Priya paid the police hafta without them having to ask for it. She was now a sex worker and sex work was technically illegal. ‘They told me to buy a notebook,’ she said to me, ‘and every time I submit hafta to make sure they sign in it, so they cannot force me to pay them more than once a week. They’re fair-minded, they said. No exploitation.’

The payment was to avoid arrest and that was all Priya could buy, for no policeman would let pass an opportunity to ask in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘
Baigan lo aur ghusa dena
!’ Shove a brinjal inside!

‘The other girls laugh when one of their own gets beaten,’ said Priya. ‘“Give her a few more!” they call out. “She’s stealing our livelihood!”’

Although Priya bristled at having to dispense hafta, she never dwelt on it. It was preferable to the alternative.

A sex worker who couldn’t afford hafta would be asked to pay the twelve hundred rupee fine for solicitation, even if she hadn’t been soliciting at the time. If she argued that she hadn’t fifty rupees, how could she possibly have twelve hundred, she would be told, ‘Then suck it.’ If she refused, she would be arrested. In jail, if she asked for a drink of water, she would be told, ‘drink your urine.’ If she started her menstrual cycle, she
would have to tear a piece of her dupatta and place it in her underwear. The next day she would replace it with another piece of her dupatta.

Some of Priya’s experiences were common enough in the line; she could trace them to the time she had moved to Bombay, half a dozen years earlier. But that summer, a new swagger and toughness was visible in the demeanour of even the ordinary constable on the street. That year, the excesses of the city police would include illegal detentions, extortion and torture, and the number of complaints registered against them, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, would be a staggering 26.6 for every 100 policemen. I assumed this number represented a fraction of complaints, since many victims would have been too afraid to file complaints against the police
to
the police, while others would have attempted to and met with resistance.

In their own way, though, even the police were victims of the new law. They were overworked—in the latter half of August alone they conducted raids in hundreds of dance bars and arrested two hundred people. This ratcheted up the work stress they already suffered which, according to documents obtained under the Right to Information Act, caused the death of one policeperson every forty-eight hours. And in their new role as aggressors, the police lost plenty of goodwill, and therefore informers, which affected the quality and speed of their work.

But all of this was fine print, of course, of use only to people like me. For Leela and Priya this information, even if they had access to it, meant nothing.

With these thoughts in mind, I got up to leave. And although I knew well I would be rebuffed, I couldn’t help myself. If there’s anything I can do, I said to Priya. Priya nodded briskly. ‘Move out of the way,’ she said, gesturing at the unfinished card game.

{ 3 }

‘If anything happens, run like Sita should have run from Ravan!’

A
psara wanted to seek the advice of a tantric.‘When will Goddess Lakshmi visit?’ she moaned. ‘

When you start earning your own money,’ snapped Leela. ‘Go to a tantric, go to many, many tantrics. But fuck fortune; ask the tantric when you’ll return to Meerut.’

‘You don’t want me to be happy.’

‘Manohar didn’t want you to be happy. I just want you to shut up.’

‘Shettyji was such a good man. What were you drinking you let him go?’

‘He let me go mummy, you know that. There’s no one behind me now; no fighter. I’m alone. So let it be.’

‘You’re playing double games with me.’

‘Please keep quiet.’

‘Quiet! If I stay quiet a minute longer my head will burst into flames!’

‘Then go for a walk.’

‘Go for a walk, hahn Leela? No atta, no oil, fridge empty, stomach empty,
tijori
so empty a bird could lay eggs in it for sure—what for will I go for a walk? To walk under a car?’

This was a new era. Only a month earlier, before the loss of their livelihood, Apsara’s only response to Leela’s jibes would have been tears and an invocation to God to rescue her from this life.

But Apsara was no longer beholden to Leela—Leela barely paid her own way.

Their unresolved anger and distrust of each other peaked into paranoia. Each was convinced the other was hiding money from her.

‘I came here for you,’ Apsara screamed at Leela one morning.

‘Why?’ responded Leela calmly. ‘All you do is eat.’

‘Why? You’re asking why! My daughter-in-law bought for me a car, a cooler, a washing machine,’ ranted Apsara. ‘You hear that, Leela madam? And she doesn’t step out of the house without my permission, not even to take water from the well, even then she covers her face so well brought-up she is and so careful we are to protect our good name. But you, you have failed us! You are nothing but a tablawali! A mujrawali! A Bombay girl! You are a daring Bombay girl!’

Priya needed money too. The auto-rickshaw bijniss with Tinkoo was not working out for her. Dhanda is for other people, she explained to Leela, not for me, not for you. ‘Right or wrong?’

Leela wanted to help, of course she did, but all the money she thought she had, ‘
gayab ho gaya
’, vanished. Leela checked everywhere. The
Hanuman Chalisa
and all her handbags; over and over again, as though they contained hidden spaces that would with patience and in time reveal themselves to her. Then under the mattress, inside every shoe, between the pages of a
Femina
magazine she had ‘borrowed’ from Welcome, Good Looks. But luck had parted ways with Leela and her persistence was in vain. She had to refuse Priya and Priya sulked. ‘
Kya
yaar!’ she grumbled, monopolizing the bed, drinking rum straight from the bottle. Apsara drank endless cups of tea. Rum, tea, rum, tea, tea, rum. Characteristically brushing aside Leela’s feelings like her distress was less than theirs, Apsara and Priya bonded over their misfortune.

Tinkoo hadn’t grown up in Bombay to let an opportunity, even one imagined, slip by. ‘Accha, if you find your thousands,’ he said to Leela with a confidential smile, ‘why not throw a few notes my way? Priya and I want to start a bijniss in Surat. You know Surat, my hometown. There’s huge demand for
chhoti-chhoti
sis
among those dhokla-theplawalas.’ He paused for effect. ‘And don’t we want Priya to retire from bijniss full-time?’

Leela walked away. ‘Three hundred,’ Tinkoo called out after her. ‘That’s our dream. Three hundred of the best little girls.’

He grinned, ‘Three is my lucky number. I put the two zeroes in for my hero, James Bond.’

Leela’s economic deterioration was immediate and clear. The cooler had been switched off; the television was now a foot stool. Apsara roasted chapattis for every meal, she was careful rolling the dough, maintaining uniformity of size—anything could set Leela off, she cursed. She dispensed each meal grimly.

Oh, those days of hotil-style khana and chilled beer, of endless boxes of cigarettes and bottomless cups of chai. Some days Leela had only to think of the food she had once ordered, of the frivolities she had enjoyed, to savour them once more, ‘free
mein’
.

Despite her reduced circumstances, circumstances she had done nothing to bring upon herself, Leela reacted to my offerings of food the way she reacted to my offers of help.

I wanted to lend her money to tide her over until she found a job; she refused. I slipped some into her wallet when she wasn’t looking; she clucked a reprimand and slipped it right back in my bag. I said I would introduce her to an NGO that might employ her as a peer educator. The money wouldn’t be much, I warned, around three thousand rupees a month, but it was something.

‘Three thousand!’ cried Leela. ‘What will I do with three thousand? Better I save my energy.’ She recalled the bar girls’ union—its founder would soon be charged with misappropriation of funds—‘These NGOs are all the same I tell you. They fire over the shoulders of girls like us!’

When I asked Leela what she thought her alternatives were she answered, ‘Don’t worry
na
, things will work out.’

Leela was weeks away from returning to the start position on the game board of her life in Bombay. How could she stay so calm?

And yet, why was I surprised? Leela was unflappable. She behaved no differently when she learnt the results of her HIV test. Despite her promise to me, a promise I hadn’t prompted, she refused to reveal what the doctor had said to her.

What did he say? Are you okay? I asked.

The first time Leela smiled as though to say, ‘Of course, why wouldn’t I be?’

Another time she said, ‘Life is no game, just you remember that.’

Leela said no more, not to me, not even to Priya.

So I stopped asking and instead sought answers in how she coped.

Leela slept a great deal.

She listened to a borrowed radio.

She dreamt of gaon. ‘I returned to my village last night,’ she said. ‘Everyone was there. My family, the friends I wished I had. Even the police, those ghoda maderchods, were standing around. But they didn’t welcome me, they didn’t celebrate my success. They did nothing, because they didn’t see me. I walked through my house, they walked past me, I walked through the cantonment, they walked through me. I sat under a neem tree and cried and cried, and with my tears fell the leaves of all the trees around me. But no one consoled me. When I woke up I was crying, but then I stopped. What to cry for? I am invisible.’

She told jokes. ‘Have you heard the one about Amitabh Bachchan and his answering machine?’ No, I replied. ‘What about the one in which the husband says to his wife, “You’ve become very fat”, and she replies, “But I’m pregnant!”?’ I shook my head. Leela sighed. Pity. It was zabardast, the funniest joke she had ever heard. If only I knew it, how much I would laugh, how we would laugh together.