Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Monalisa doesn’t consider herself beautiful. She thinks of herself as attractive, sexy. She volunteers her measurements: 32-28-36. She was at 1900’s once, the disco in the Taj, and even the film idol Shahrukh Khan stopped and stared at her for a minute when he saw her.

  I point to her neck. There is a simple black thread around it, with the knot in front. “What’s that?”

  “That’s my mala. From Goddess Meldima of Surendranagar Temple. I believe in her very much.” She keeps vows for her.

  I ask her how far she’s studied. She says to the tenth standard, in a Gujarati school.

  “You’re Gujarati?” I’m astonished.

  She nods and smiles, showing uneven teeth. Her people are from Amreli, in Saurashtra. Her real name is Rupa Patel. I look at her in a whole new way. She is closer to me now. Very few of the dancing girls, but many of the customers, are Gujarati. Sometimes, one of her customers who is aware of her origins will put on the song “Dil Lagi Kudi Gujarat Di,” which is a paean to a Gujarati girl, for her to dance to. Monalisa and I have another thing in common: Both of us come from families who’ve made their living through glittery stones. Her father and brother are diamond cutters. Monalisa herself, for a few months, worked at a diamond factory in the suburbs, cutting rough diamonds “with oiled hair and dressed in a salwaar kameez.” It was not her style. She got bored.

  She went back to Amreli once. I asked her what happened. “Dogs started barking,” she said.

  She grew up in Bombay, in a slum in Kalina. “The one who gave birth to me put me in this line,” Monalisa tells me. She doesn’t say “mother,” which is a term she reserves for the goddess. Her parents divorced, and her mother, a waitress in a beer bar, brought her to the bar line at the age of seventeen. She hates her mother now, moved out of her house and spent six months living on her own, and has hardly seen her for three years. But she still sends her money, sometimes. She will not talk to her father, who is in Gujarat.

  Monalisa has thought about doing something other than dancing in bars: modeling, for example, but she’s heard that you need someone to support you, otherwise you get exploited; they take you up to a certain point and then say, You have to sleep with me; otherwise it will all stop. “Your world is like that,” she tells me.

  “It’s not my world!” I protest.

  I take out my mobile phone and dial the number of Rustom, the fashion photographer. I first met Rustom when I was considering renting a room in his apartment for use as a study; I didn’t rent the room, but I became fast friends with him, drawn by his cockeyed Parsi take on Bombay. He says he will come to watch her at the bar; then, if he likes what he sees, he’ll do a shoot.

  I am finished with our talk. Then I notice the marks.

  She has turned over a hand to get something on the table and I notice a row of slashes going all the way up from the heel of the palm, all across her wrist and to the crook of her arm. It’s the same on her other arm. I take a chance. “What are those marks?” I ask her.

  “Those are cuts.” She looks at the marks. “Here I had eight stitches.” Then she points to a series of raised dots on her skin. “Those are cigarette burns.”

  I trace the cuts and the welts with my finger. “Who did this to you?”

  “I did it myself.”

  “Why?”

  “One was after I left home. The other was after my love broke.” She has done this about four times, with a razor blade. Her last attempt was three months ago.

  “Why?”

  “I was alone. I was bored.” Her veins don’t supply enough blood to her palms now, because they’ve been cut so often. Her wrist is scarred and pitted like a dirt road. She can’t lift anything heavy. One of her attempts was so serious that her hand all but fell off and had to be surgically reattached. She is twenty years old.

  As we’re leaving, she says she lives a five-minute walk away. “So come home sometime?” I think about what this means. Is she inviting me home for sex? No, because then she wouldn’t ask me to come to her room. She would ask me to go upstairs, in the hotel we’re in. This is “come home sometime” in the best Indian sense: Come home for a meal, come home as a guest.

  I tell her, “You come to my home sometime too.”

  We walk out of the five-star hotel, and again all eyes are on her, and on me by association. She has a way of moving her head—I’ve seen it before, in New York, among the young girls there—a smile and a slight forward and backward nudge of the head, African in origin. She likes being looked at, likes being noticed.

  RUSTOM HAS A REPUTATION in the industry. The girls love him. They sleep with him. Then they become his friends, and it shows in the pictures they allow him to take of them. He is at the age where the current generation of the models “is the last batch I can sleep with without feeling like a pedophile.”

  I take Rustom to Sapphire to see Monalisa. In between the other dancers, Monalisa is a lotus among lilies. In the song sequence that’s being enacted here, she’s the heroine and they are the chorus line. She’s dressed tonight all in black: a black skirt and a black choli that covers her breasts but shows off her entire back. She dances hard, it’s hard work—swooping all the way down to the ground, the two halves of her body churning at different speeds, her navel the center of gravity, her long hair flying around her. This young Gujarati girl becomes, on the dance floor, an animal with not enough space to move, and every part of her body strains against, is energized by, the restraint: her legs, her buttocks, her chest, her arms, her lips, her hair, her eyes.

  Rustom watches her and the others with the eye of an experienced ad photographer. “The shampoo guys would go mad over that hair,” he says about Monalisa. “She’s a young Protima Bedi.” But his gaze is straying to a girl in pink, behind her, who’s not really dancing. She’s more petite, and her chin has a dimple in it. “I could get her work tomorrow,” says the photographer. She’s what the ad guys look for, to sell to the great Indian middle class. “Sweet. Moon-faced, filmi-looking, nonthreatening. That’s what works with consumer products and Hindi films. Pleasant. It’s reflecting the times. Everything should be sweet and nice and happy.”

  Monalisa, Rustom thinks, is the more attractive of the two. But that much energy is disturbing in an advertisement intended to hawk face cream or saris. Women would not react well to someone with Monalisa’s raw sexual power. “She’d be better in moving pictures,” says Rustom. “How’s her bod?” he asks me.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t find out.”

  In the middle of her sexy dances, Monalisa pauses to pray, and the men at the tables watch her avidly. She interrupts the gyrating of her legs, the thrusting of her buttocks, the collecting of lucre, to turn her back on us all and commune with her goddess. It is a shockingly intimate activity, prayer.

  Rustom looks around. “It’s like a sweet version of a striptease joint.” All around him are men desperate for women. The fashion photographer reflects on his profession. “I thank God I’m in this line. God is good to me.” He looks upward, nods.

  When Rustom drops me back in front of my building, I see a man that I’m pretty sure was in the bar this evening. He’s waiting alone for the lift downstairs, clutching his mobile phone. He’s middle-aged and wearing an office shirt and pants. “Now he’s going to go wake up his wife and really do his duty by her, after what he’s seen in Sapphire,” I say.

  “I’m never going to get married in my whole life,” responds Rustom.

  I TAKE MONALISA to Rustom’s studio, so she can look at his work and be reassured that he’s not a pornographer. Marika, who is at this moment the hottest model in the country, is hanging out at the studio, looking just like a regular girl in a salwaar kameez. “You were in the Bhatti video,” Monalisa says in a small voice, in Hindi.

  After we’ve looked at the photographs, as we’re walking out, Monalisa says to me about the model, “She’s also cut.”

  “What?”

  “I saw, on her arms.”

  Rusto
m later confirms this. I’ve met Marika at least a half-dozen times, but I’ve never noticed the cuts. Monalisa knew within five minutes of meeting her. The bar girl noticed some tension on the model’s face, noticed she was talking a little too much, laughing a little too much. So she looked at her wrists. Later I find out the model’s story. She is the mistress of a married man with three children. For a year she disappeared; no one knew where she’d gone or with whom. Then she came back and retook the modeling world by storm: Her face, her light eyes, are used to move all manner of products. She is more than a mistress; she has married her lover in a secret temple ceremony. He is connected with the underworld and threatens to kill anyone who gets too close. So Marika stays true to him, out of fear or love. She will call a bunch of completely unrelated people to dinner at her place, suggest they all go to someone else’s place, then get a phone call on her mobile and suddenly disappear for the rest of the night, leaving her guests shifting on their feet in a stranger’s house.

  Her lover will never leave his wife, so Marika marks time on her wrists. There must be a citywide sorority of these women who’ve slit their wrists and survived, who recognize one another automatically. A sisterhood of the slashed. The top model in India and the top bar dancer in Bombay have this in common: Their arms are marked with their anguish, like gang tattoos.

  ONE AFTERNOON, Monalisa comes to the apartment in Bandra, above Elco Arcade, that I’m using as an office. She is dressed very simply, not provocatively, in a striped T-shirt and black jeans. We were going to have lunch in a restaurant but she says she’s not hungry, and I’d had a sandwich earlier. We need a place to talk, so we go up to the apartment. I have to make a conscious effort to keep my hand from trembling as I put the key in the lock.

  Inside, I offer to make her iced coffee, and she comes into the kitchen with me. As I put the milk in the glasses, she perches on the kitchen counter, her long legs dangling over the edge. I’ve had guests in the apartment before, but nobody has done that. It is an informal, spontaneous gesture, and I realize it has been a long time since I’ve been alone with anybody of this age. She watches me make the coffee with amusement. “You forgot the sugar,” she points out, laughing. By the end of the afternoon, the sugar bowl is nearly empty; Monalisa likes her coffee sweet. The next day I notice that Monalisa washed the coffee things and put them neatly on the counter. She would not let me wash dishes or serve food; it is not something a man does.

  She has brought a gift for me from a recent trip to Ahmadabad. It is a cloth file for my papers, handmade in Gujarat, where she was born. Her mother welcomed her into the world by picking her up and throwing her onto the veranda.

  The One Who Gave Birth to Monalisa was raised in an orphanage. Men would come to the orphanage to select girls to marry. Monalisa’s father came on such an errand, saw a pretty girl, and married her against his family’s wishes. They lived in his village, with his six brothers and their wives and children. He soon started beating her, and his family beat her as well.

  A year and a half after Monalisa was born, she gave birth to another child, a son. This caused jubilation in the family, since one of the brothers was childless. He spoke to Monalisa’s father, who told his wife to give up her newborn son to his brother. “My mother had no say in the matter,” explains Monalisa. All her life she had to live with the knowledge that her firstborn son was growing up somewhere in the village, and she had no claim on him. Monalisa hasn’t seen her brother since childhood. “I wouldn’t even recognize him now.” But the loss was soon made up. Monalisa’s mother had another boy, Viju, whom she was allowed to keep.

  The family moved to Bombay. They were living in a slum, a zopad-patti. Her mother started having an affair with a man who was giving her money. When her father found out about his wife’s affair, he swallowed poison. His wife took him to the hospital and nursed him. When he got better he divorced her and left for the village, taking the children. Monalisa was five at the time. Her father’s family had a large house in the village, with buffaloes in the yard. She grew up playing marbles. “Even when I was a girl I would only play with the boys.”

  “I loved my father a lot,” says Monalisa, using the past tense. When she was just a baby she had fallen so ill that her family made preparations to take her to the funeral ground. Then she sat up and said loudly, “Pappa!” All the time she was growing up, she was his princess. “If he saw a tear drop from my eyes he would say, This isn’t a tear, it’s a pearl; don’t waste it.” The women of his extended family, however, held it against Monalisa and her father that he was divorced and wouldn’t take care of them. They were stingy with food; the chapatis were counted out for each person before they sat down to eat. When Monalisa was ten, he came back to Bombay, lived with his wife again, and left her again. But this time he left Monalisa and her younger brother with their mother. He then married another woman and had two children by her.

  “I didn’t know that my father would leave,” says Monalisa. He told her he was going to the village and would come back later. “When I found out my father had another marriage, I thought, He forgot me? The one who loved me so much? I will never go to my father.” Monalisa hasn’t spoken to her father in ten years. He phoned Sapphire recently; she refused to come to the phone to speak to him.

  Her mother found a new man to keep her, to give her a flat. Monalisa remembers him as being good to her and her brother. Then her mother left him or he left her, Monalisa can’t recall. One day in the monsoons Monalisa was walking home from school along the divider on the highway, and she put her face up to the water and got thoroughly soaked, as children all over the city like to do. When her mother found out, she got furious, as parents will, but her fury extended to pulling Monalisa out of school entirely. Periodically, Monalisa’s mother has attempted to finish what she started when her daughter emerged from her womb. She went at her with a wooden ladle used to beat the laundry. There were marks all over her body before she started putting them on herself. For days the girl would not be able to get up from her bed because of the beatings. If her mother thought she was flirting with boys she would beat her. If there wasn’t enough salt in Monalisa’s cooking she would beat her. While her mother pursued her own entertainments, Monalisa was made to do the cooking and the cleaning; she was little better than a servant. By the time she was seventeen, she was so used to her mother’s beatings that she sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, with her arms around her knees, while her mother rained blows on her. At one point she ran away from home, but the police found her and put her in a children’s home. The experience there was scary; it was the only place worse than home. Most of the children came from the slums, and the young girls were supplied to politicians. Some, as young as thirteen, got pregnant.

  So Monalisa, in her teens, stayed home when everybody around her was going to school and watched television when her mother was out of the house. Here she first discovered the world that was outside the slum where she lived, far beyond her savage mother, far from the father who had abandoned her. On the television screen she found a world of young people who lived only to dance. “I would watch MTV, Channel V, and get a strange feeling. All this is happening outside. I thought I should have boyfriends—not sex or anything—but I had a feeling I should be with them. I wanted to wear such clothes, shorts. I was very fond of dance. I wanted to be free.”

  She started sneaking out to the dance competitions in the suburbs. Growing up, Monalisa was called “horsey” or “duck” because of her long legs and her height. But this now worked to her advantage; she came in first in one of the competitions, dancing to an Ila Arun song, “Resham ka Rumaal.” This brought her to the attention of the local lads. “There was a line of boys outside my building waiting to look at me.” There were boys who kissed her, put her on their laps. When her mother found out, she told Monalisa she had fixed her engagement. The man was twenty-eight. Monalisa was sixteen.

  Monalisa was told to go meet her fiancé for the first time at Nariman Point
. She decided to come clean with him. She told the older man she had a boyfriend and begged him to tell her family that he didn’t want to marry Monalisa for his own reasons. But the fiancé did not respect her confidence. He told Monalisa’s mother everything. At this point the mother hit her again, savagely, and this time she was assisted by Monalisa’s younger brother. But during this beating Monalisa rebelled and spoke back. “I got mad and said I’ll never get married.” That was when Monalisa’s mother took her for the first time to the stage at a bar called Deepa. Since Monalisa would never get married, she would be put into the bar line.

  When the first garland of 100-rupee notes was put around her neck, she started sobbing in front of the whole audience. As a Gujarati, she had been brought up to respect money; this was its shaming. But the other girls were nice to her. They showed her how to put on makeup. She soon got used to the bar line. The suburban bars operate according to different routines from the ones in town. There, a good dancer can make a “single entry”—she will be the only one onstage. A typical night for Monalisa would include two singles and six duets. In the suburban bars she had her own makeup room. She would walk into the owner’s office and sit on his chair; the owners smiled, indulged her. She started out in Deepa, then went to Night Lovers, Natraj, Jharna, Ratna Park. Monalisa had a reputation as a sexy dancer from the beginning. “I danced without any fear, bindass.” She also knows how to reveal herself while dancing. “To expose is an art. Open, but try to hide it.” In the bar line, she is thought of as being awara—fallen.

  In Jharna a man in his forties would come daily to watch her. He was experienced in the bar line and a frequent customer of the top bars, looking for very young girls that he could treat like children. Every day he would give Monalisa fifteen, twenty thousand, and then one day she met him outside the bar. She started to like him. “He was decent with me. He took care of me like a little girl.” The man was a film producer named Hari Virani. His wife had jumped out the window of their sixth-floor flat, leaving him two sons, eight and ten. He started giving money to Monalisa’s mother as well.