Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (8 page)

Of course, a true Bada Don like Dawood wouldn’t visit a Bombay dance bar, or a dance bar in public. But a Bombay don was no Dawood and neither was the average Bombay man. And of all the customers from all over India Leela would perform for at Night Lovers, no one was more vulnerable, or to use her word, ‘pathetic’, than the middle-aged Bombay man.

‘Give him a chance to say two words,’ grumbled Leela. ‘Two! He’ll say two hundred.’ As evening’s shadows lengthened, so would the stories—the unhappy marriage, the wife who might
as well have padlocked her knicker-bra, the children who flippantly nicknamed him Mr ATM.

Leela may have found her customers pathetic, but they made me sad. For a few, visiting a dance bar was no more than a boys’ night out. But others were clear, even humble, in their loneliness. I knew this not because these men hit on Leela—not all of them did and many took their time doing so—but because of their consistent, often futile attempts to get her to talk to them, to listen to them and to remember them when they returned.

Bombay has a torrential number of people. There are people everywhere, and they are confined not just to public spaces and the interactions of push, shove and pull but to what should be personal spaces. For want of space children sleep with parents, for greater want parents sleep in the doorway of their homes. Husbands and sons heft their bedding down the street, unfurling it on the floor of their local temple or mosque.

In its death, privacy takes with it intimacy. And so when men in situations like these seek intimacy elsewhere, one of the first places they go to, because it is socially and economically accessible to them, is the dance bar.

But Leela didn’t see nuance. She didn’t have to.

What are they like? I asked of her customers.

She shrugged.

What do you know of them?

‘My head,’ she said, tapping her temple, ‘is not a computer. I have no place for
altu-faltu
info.’

Perhaps because Leela enjoyed B-grade horror flicks, she remembered the ones with the terrible features. Those she hoped wouldn’t return. The gangster with the cauliflower ear, the construction worker with the forest of hennaed knuckle hair. That Parsi fellow with a hole in his tooth so large Leela swore she’d once seen him pour a quarter into his mouth only to have it come tumbling out.

To Leela a customer was a ‘Ramzan goat’. Destined for
slaughter. And she, Leela said to me, must wield the knife that would slit his throat, cut his head off and hang his carcass to drip, drip, drip. Never forget, she instructed, a bar dancer’s game is ‘
lootna
’, ‘kustomer
ko bewakuf banana
’. To rob, to fool a customer. And every bar dancer prayed for the sort of client whose indulgence would make newspaper headlines. A scamster like Abdul Karim Telgi, who was rumoured to have lavished around ninety lakh rupees on a bar dancer. Or Aman Mishra, a young man who became famous for spending over twenty lakh rupees on a bar dancer he was infatuated with. (Two years later, after he was revealed to be a conman, Mishra kidnapped the bar dancer for ransom.)

Although Leela had yet to be discovered by an Abdul or an Aman, she was undeterred, rarely allowing her distaste for her current (what she considered lowly) crop of customers to show. She was professional and she knew that sort of behaviour would get her fired, wife or no wife.

But of course, if Leela didn’t know her customers, fewer knew Leela. They didn’t even know what to call her, she was always calling herself something different. One night she was Kareena, having just watched the actress Kareena Kapoor in
Dev
. On another night, she would introduce herself as Rani, for Rani Mukherjee in
Yuva
.

When she was done with work, Leela would clean up in the make-up room, say her goodbyes and stop by Shetty’s office for her money. All the money thrown at her was picked up by a steward and placed in a
dabba
with a single key Shetty kept in his wallet, which was, in turn, chained to the pocket of his front shirt. Shetty would open the box in front of Leela, note the amount in a dense, cloth-bound register and pay her cut accordingly. Leela could never be sure that everything she earned went into her dabba and not into that of another girl’s by mistake or into Shetty’s wallet on purpose. But she had no choice but to
believe him, just like every bar dancer in Bombay believed her manager.

Tucking her money away in her bra, Leela would head to the back door to avoid bumping into customers. She’d pass through the kitchen, inevitably filthy at this time of night, through the alcohol-storage area with its imported whiskies and country liquors, even with packets of
haath bhatti
—home brew sold in plastic bags for a few rupees, and slip into the auto-rickshaw that had brought her to the dance bar.

Leela had known her auto driver Badal for several months; he was her protégé. They had met in Kamatipura when he was fifteen and his mother Bani’s pimp. Leela saw her childhood self in Badal. She could see his adolescence was as much a zone of desperation as hers had been. When she wasn’t engaged with customers Bani lavished her energies on Tommy, a pet goat with a rosy red collar she hoped to train for the circus. How quickly money ran out! Sometimes there was so much of it, Bani would order beer and biryani and suddenly all the building’s ‘whores’, rendered shameless by hunger, would decide she was their best friend. They would eat until they burped and then Bani would order Badal out to buy paan so sweet it made the teeth squeak, and the women would chew and gossip and gamble away whatever little money they had left.

When the take was low, Bani encouraged her three-year-old daughter Baby to stick her head out of the window and help her and Badal outsell the competition.

‘
Baby clap your hands!

‘
Smile!

‘
Happy smile,

‘
Big-big smile,

‘
Actress Kareena Kapoor-like smile!

‘
Now swish your dress to and fro,

‘
And smile, Baby smile!’

Leela brought Badal to Mira Road with the hope that he could build a life for himself outside the brothel. If he drove a
rented auto-rickshaw, in a few years he might earn enough to buy his own. One day perhaps, Leela daydreamed for the boy, he could graduate to chauffeuring a car. So she set him up with a madam down the road from her flat and in exchange for running errands and keeping watch over her girls—making sure they didn’t run away, that is—the madam allowed Badal to live rent-free. To resolve the issue of a driving licence, since Badal was underage and looked it, Leela helped out with a modest loan which would serve as hafta and an introduction to the local constable’s wife, a woman who had impressed Leela with her ‘pull’.

Not only could she get things done through her husband, Leela said, but also through his boss, a senior inspector with whom she was conducting a passionate affair.

{ 4 }

‘My mother is fat. And very, very simple’

A
few weeks after I walked in on Leela’s customer, I walked in on her mother Apsara lounging with Leela on the bed, scratching at her scalp with a toothpick. ‘Mummy, dekho meri friend!’ Leela jumped up. She threw her arms around me and then stepping back pinched my cheeks like I was a little girl. Ouch! I cried. Leela laughed with pleasure. ‘You delicate darling,’ she said in English. ‘You princess!’

Apsara stuck the toothpick down her kurta and beckoned to me. ‘Come here, my daughter,’ she squeaked through a mouthful of gutka. I grinned inwardly. Her voice
did
sound like a tape on fast forward. ‘Let me look at you.’

I joined Apsara on the bed and without preamble she ran her hand over my face. ‘Appearances are so important,’ she said, pulling at my skin. ‘More than the goodness of her nature,’ she jammed a thick finger into my mouth, almost making me gag, ‘it is the appearance of a woman that can decide her destiny.’

Apsara said, ‘Smile!’ and smiled as though to show me how. The few teeth she had were grimy with gutka stains, jagged like miniature peaks. She retrieved her finger and continued trawling the landscape of my face, stroking, pinching, prodding. Any time now I expected her to say I wasn’t worth the price I was demanding.

‘Where do you live, beti?’ she asked.

I started to answer.

‘Do you live alone?’ she interrupted. ‘And what does your
pitaji
do? And your mummy? You a Hindu,
na
? Where is your
native place? You speak Hindi so well beti. And English also Leela was saying!’

Thank you, I replied.

‘Where did you go to school beti, here or in bahar gaon? What is your job? How much do they pay you?’

I told her.

‘So little!’ Apsara gasped. ‘Is it enough for you beti? What are your monthly expenses?’

Leela playfully slapped Apsara’s cheek. Then she smiled at me as though to say, ‘you’re a good sport!’

Satisfied with her quality check—‘Live well! Live long!’—Apsara spat into the palm of her hand and smoothed back my hair. ‘Now beti,’ she said, spraying gutka on my face, ‘I’m going to tell what my favourite TV shows are. You tell if I chose right or if I chose wrong.’

The similarities between Leela and Apsara were so uncanny, I was charmed. Mother and daughter loved to talk, each exclusively about herself. In conversations with Leela if the subject somehow turned to me, Leela would tug at her hangnails in frustration. Was I there to learn about Leela or to be bore? Because if I was going to be bore . . . Leela’s time was money, there were places she could be. PS had, in fact, just called to invite her for a meal at Pure Wedge, she would have me know.

But if I sidestepped the risk of being shown the door by conceding quickly and always, Apsara never did.

A conversation between mother and daughter, as I would soon discover, sounded like a peak-hour fight over a bus seat. Leela would snap, ‘
Saand
!’ Buffalo! Poking a meaty finger into her daughter’s narrow waist Apsara would snort, ‘Huh,
marial
!’ Sickly!

And yet, there was a grace inherent in their behaviour. Their hand gestures were as elegant as mudras—classical dance movements that amplify a point or emotion. It was a trait I had assumed Leela had picked up in the dance bar; but seeing her next to Apsara, their fingers in ballet, I realized that genes had
something to do with it. Leela had Apsara’s nose, she had her mother’s laugh. It was as inviting as the open doors of Night Lovers on New Year’s Eve.

Apsara had moved in with Leela just the day before. She had, without warning her daughter, whom she hadn’t seen in almost a year, taken a fast train from Meerut and walked in on Leela while Leela was asleep.

‘
Mera to
heart attack
ho gaya
!’ said Leela. I had a heart attack!

Apsara had brought with her several cartons of Meerut specialities including
gajak
and
rewri
. She had hoped these gifts, humble though they were and unworthy of her glamorous daughter, would distract Leela’s attention from the two sizeable, rope-tied suitcases they had been crammed into, alongside clothes, utensils, photos in their frames and her favourite vase with its clutch of red plastic roses.