Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (6 page)

Leela reached Night Lovers before the other dancers because she wanted to help Shetty. But she was also determined to make her presence felt.
Maar-peet
or
nakabandi
, gangvar or encounters—he would always be around. ‘God willing,’ so would she. To show she wasn’t one of them she referred to Shetty not as seth, boss, as they did, but PS. She snitched on those who poked fun of his ‘pregnant’ belly or his ‘outing problem’.

Leela explained this ‘outing problem’ to me: ‘He pushes and pushes and pushes,’ she whispered, concern writhing on her face. ‘But nothing comes out! So what can he do poor durrling? Of course he has to put his fingers in! Take it out himself! But it’s so stubborn, it takes so long, once he’s done he just runs out, no flush, nothing. I’ve told him a hundred times, “How can you greet kustomers with that hand? Run it over my face even? And don’t you slap my buttocks!”’

‘I want to take him to medical,’ said Leela. ‘But if his outing problem stops, his wife will wonder how and then she will find out about me.’

How would she know? I asked curiously.

‘Sometimes,’ Leela reddened, ‘he soils his pants. If we fix him, he says, his Mrs won’t have any pants to clean.’

About an hour after Leela arrived, around 3 p.m. that is, Shetty would send off a fleet of auto-rickshaws to pick up his
heere moti
, jewels—the bar dancers so skilled their dancing paid for his ‘electric-paani’.

If one of them phoned to whine about her bruised knee or aching back, he would cajole and calm her and immediately send her the spotless white van he kept on standby. Inside, the dancer would find a box of her favourite mithai, a bouquet of flowers and more often than not, attached to a stem with the tender fragility of a love letter, a rolled up five hundred rupee note.

‘My
chokris
are high maintenance,’ boasted Shetty.

‘Some are quite fair-skinned,’ he added, as though in explanation. ‘Not fair like a heroine! But more fair than kustomers. And they have to be kept happy. If I don’t treat them well, they will run off. And if I lose my best girls, I’ll lose my biggest collections. So any time one of them does
nautanki
, I throw notes at her. No worries then! Why no worries then? Because money is music. Yes or no? Yes! One note, two note, three note, four note . . . and they dance like it’s a
sone ki barsaat
!’ A shower of gold.

The bar dancers arrived in groups of three, even five, for they shared auto-rickshaws and taxis and with them came the fragrance of Jovan Musk and Revlon Charlie, and if they’d recently been sent to Dubai or had lovers who’d been there, of Armani and Versace. Because they were freshly bathed their hair was wet, combed through and tightly pulled back, and perhaps their skin glowed beneath all that make-up. The chiffon of their saris and the sequins of their lehenga-cholis created a dazzling, blinding effect and when they stood before the altar it appeared as though they had gathered not in prayer, but in celebration.

The altar wasn’t easy to spot, but it was there, above the cash register. It held a gold-plated statue of Lakshmi, a string of chillies and lemons to protect against evil and a diamond-studded statue of Ganesh. As the bar dancers prayed, Shetty sang a short hymn. Then sniffing hungrily at the incense he said, ‘
Bhagwan
ka
naam
lo aur
kaam
shuru karo
!’ Take God’s name and start work.

Once in a while Shetty would clap his hands and in loud imitation of the ringmaster of Gemini circus—which he visited every time it came to town—command, ‘Now, brothers and sisters,
kahin mat jaiye
, seat
pe rahiye, kyunki aap dekhnewale hain
—’ Don’t go anywhere, stay in your seats, because you are about to see . . . in the time I knew him, he never once completed this sentence.

I asked if it was because he’d forgotten what came next.

‘Of course not!’ exclaimed Shetty, taken aback. ‘But suspense is good, yes or no? These girls of mine never go anywhere. What Gemini-shemini, most of them don’t know what a joker is! So the suspense factor, it is important. It can be useful. Say one night one of my girls decides she wants to leave for another dance bar, say the manager there has promised her a bigger cut of her collection. But as she’s leaving she may think, “Arre, but what were we going to see?” Who knows, maybe this curiosity, the superstition that she doesn’t know what she was meant to see, will encourage her to apply the brakes. Maybe it will keep her close to me.’

‘Do you watch thriller films?’ Shetty asked, noticing I was unimpressed. ‘You never know the truth until the end, am I right? Right! And a gambler? Does he know whether he’s going to win or lose? Does he? But still he picks up the cards! My girls are gamblers, it’s the nature of their job, understand that. They gamble with their health, their safety, their good name. All I’m doing, really, is offering them something worth gambling for.’

Shetty treated his bar dancers like children. He teased, humoured and manipulated them. If he yelled at them one day, he would bestow great affection on them the next. And although he had a fierce temper, they rarely saw it. He had beaten one of his dancers in public, only once. He conveyed disapproval with a smile, so they were never sure whether he was being
serious or silly. To be safe, they assumed muscle in his voice and almost always did as told.

Of course, Shetty’s successful management of Night Lovers hinged on more than his relationship with his bar dancers. They were, in fact, the least of his concerns. How he dealt with the police, the local bureaucracy—the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)—and with the criminals who came calling for their cut of his profits was crucial to his survival.

Shetty didn’t just pay hafta, he ran favours, wrote off tabs, even offered women if the women consented and they always did because it was expected of them.

Shetty used the term ‘politics’ to explain why he paid hafta. It connoted a sly corruption, but one he was compelled to feed for his survival. ‘It’s police-
log ka
politics,’ he said to me, ‘“bureaucracy”
ka
politics.’

The police said that not all of them took hafta, and they were right. They argued that only those who broke the law felt compelled to pay hafta. They were wrong. Hafta was like salary. You forked over a mutually acceptable amount every month, negotiated a raise every year and in return received a service. It was a culture upheld in the police station itself, where some senior inspectors demanded hafta from their subordinates. This in turn led their subordinates to demand hafta from the people who lived on and off the street.

Bar owners who resisted payment, which could vary from five thousand rupees to a crore of rupees every month, depending on their income, suffered immediate consequences. Laws like the Bombay Police Act and the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, which clamped down on sex work, were most often used against dance bars. They were nebulous because they dealt with the arguably indefinable subject of morality. They could be applied to whomever the police saw fit. If they chose to, the police could arrest Shetty for obscenity—by deeming even a fully
clothed girl obscene—and have his licences revoked. He would then, once more, have to pay a string of BMC officials large bribes. Back in business, if he still refused to pay the police, the situation would merely repeat itself.

So Shetty paid hafta and he also paid a builder to construct a concealed room at the back of Night Lovers. This was how he received the service he paid for: when the police were compelled to conduct a raid, which could end in the arrest of members of Shetty’s staff, who would then be liable for release only after posting bail, one of them would forewarn Shetty via code—often a predetermined, humorous text message about wives and girlfriends. When Shetty received the text he would either send his bar dancers home, or hustle all but a couple of them into the secret room thirty minutes before the time designated for the raid. When the police arrived they would find the lights on, the music low and a few waiters serving snacks. They would find it hard to concoct charges for arrest.

‘See how I protect my kustomers,’ said Shetty self-righteously. ‘If I didn’t pay the police they would snatch up not only my girls, but my kustomers. Give them slappings; threaten to tell their wives, shove them in lock-up.’

Sometimes the police
were
customers. When a policeman entered a dance bar, he might declare, ‘This is my area.’ This was how he would tell a man like Shetty, as if Shetty didn’t already know, that he was from the local police station and could make a nuisance of himself. So there was no question of giving him a bill. He was offered cigarettes and whisky, kebabs and paan, even stacks of ten rupee notes to throw on the bar dancers.

Or, if the local police station required a new set of furniture—chairs, tables, lights, you name it—the senior inspector might send his men over to Shetty’s to ‘borrow’ whatever it was they wanted. It went without saying that the borrowed items were never returned.

Shetty preferred the police to the BMC—less red tape. But
he had a soft spot for another band of extortionists—the criminal gangs of the underworld he had to pay to leave him alone.

The relationship between dance bars and gangs went a long way back. It is generally accepted that organized crime in Bombay developed from the needs of Prohibition. When Prohibition was relaxed in the 1960s and ‘permit rooms’, as they were called, for a permit was required to buy and drink liquor, became popular, the owners of these permit rooms began to face demands from the gangs that had prospered and grown powerful from bootlegging. If they didn’t pay up they were physically attacked; their customers were harassed. When permit rooms converted into dance bars and proved a success, the demands of the gangs grew. They wanted not only more money, but to own the dance bars either in part or full. Their involvement, as with all businesses they were connected with, brought greater political scrutiny to the dance bars, leading to higher licensing fees, and from the police and BMC, created demands for more hafta.

Shetty, who had inherited his father’s Udupi restaurant, described himself as a self-made man. He had, after all, turned the restaurant into a profitable and very popular dance bar. He was impressed by gangsters, he said, because they too were self-made. Their bold subversiveness was so extremely masculine, it represented to him the freedom ideal. Even small-time gangsters, the only kind of gangsters Shetty would ever meet, carried arms and delivered threats. When they came by Night Lovers to pick up their fee he treated them like favoured customers. Although he paid them twenty thousand rupees a month, and much more on Diwali and the New Year, he liked to add a tip to the envelope he handed over. He gave them drinks on the house. He took them to the make-up room to meet his prettiest bar dancers. He’d hang around them like an enthusiastic teenager hoping to pick up gossip about celebrity gangsters—Dawood, Abu Salem and Chhota Shakeel.

You should ask Dawood for a job, I once joked, having just
watched him escort a couple of thuggish-looking, gold-wearing, poorly-concealed-pistol-toting men to the door.

Shetty’s eyes lit up and then, just as quickly, dimmed. ‘But I’m a family man,’ he sighed.

Night Lovers began to fill up at about 7 p.m., when most customers made their way from their place of work to the dance bar. Although their persuasions varied, the clerks and career alcoholics, tradesmen and twenty somethings who walked in were of modest status, expectations and income. They knew to go only where they were welcome. In a dance bar, their money could buy the attention of a beautiful woman. And unlike a high-end South Bombay nightclub, it was democratic. There was no entry fee, no sartorial standard, no pressure.

I guess it had what some might call glamour. The women were responsible for this, of course, but so too was the decor, which brought to mind a set from a 1970s item number, resplendent with kitsch and glitz. Night Lovers had golden pillars and out of each pillar jutted a Medusian head. One wall was of glass, the table legs were disco balls and opposite the altar hung a full-length painting of a naked woman, her modesty protected only by the length and lushness of her blue-and-pink hair. Although Shetty’s style was to me unique, in the context of the dance bar it fulfilled expectations. Night Lovers was designed to enhance its disconnect with the world outside its doors—the real world, that is.