Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  The biggest whorehouse in Bombay is called Congress House. It is named for the headquarters of the Congress Party across the street. The eighty-six-year old watchman will tell you that Mahatma Gandhi set up camp here during the freedom struggle. The chaste leader, whose most epic battle in his life was not against the British Empire but against his own sexuality, would not be gratified at what independence has brought, because directly across the street is a music academy, as the signboard above it tells you; inside, it is a fortress of whores. Hundreds of whores, bar dancers, and their inebriated customers, young men in well-tailored clothes and good shoes, are standing, cooking, flirting, spitting tobacco in the midst of the most incredible filth: open gutters, moisture everywhere, spoiling food, organic matter. On Holi the girls of Congress House go wild. They get drunk and mix gutter water and mud with used menstrual pads, catch other girls and throw them into the mixture, or fling the bloody pads at each other.

  All around us are open windows and doorways through which we can see the women washing clothes, washing themselves, stirring pots over stoves, and generally going about their domestic chores. This is where they live; their customers, if they are regulars, come here to pick them up and then take them to the hotels and guesthouses to do their business. I have to step carefully around the garbage, but it doesn’t bother Srinivas. “The garbage is more than covered up by the beautiful sights,” he says, looking around appreciatively at the galaxy of choices, from every corner of India and Nepal. The rates of the prostitutes begin at 50 rupees in the nearby Pila House, he says, to 1,000 rupees for the ones he is partial to, to 50,000 for a Bollywood starlet.

  Monalisa’s friend Ranjita lives in Congress House, as do many of the other bar dancers. Ranjita moved from a lavish flat in Lokhandwala to a filthy room in Congress House—which rents for 15,000 rupees a month plus a deposit of several lakhs—even though she owns a nicer flat in Jogeshwari. “There is security in Congress House,” Monalisa explained. Everybody knows what most of the tenants do, and it is all right. No housing society will raise objections, as they are starting to with Monalisa in Juhu.

  Pila House is where the Nepali whores live. It is the area around a nineteenth-century theater, a playhouse. Around Pila House are buildings with hundreds of whores lining the stairs, and as you walk up, “they grab you by your luggage and take you inside the room,” explains the cabbie who is escorting us. I ask how long 30 rupees would buy you. “Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. It depends on you.” I can see men walking back from Pila House in lungis, looking relaxed, smoking cigarettes. The men that go there are laborers, cart pullers, coolies: men who work with their bodies all day long and, in the night, buy another working body.

  Bachu-ni-wadi, where we go to next, is a series of streets behind a small doorway. The first few shops sell seekh kababs, and at all hours of the night there are men eating kababs with onions. Slabs of ice in front are adorned with fresh green mint to be sprinkled on the meat. Inside, the impression is that of an open dollhouse; inside each of the hundred-odd rooms are male musicians and female singers and dancers performing the mujra, a North Indian courtesan’s dance. The sounds of different mujrawalis, of tabla and harmonium, float out into the alley. I send the cabbie to negotiate in one house that sports an air conditioner. He comes back with a price: 300 rupees for three songs, and we take off our shoes at the door and sit inside on mattresses on the floor. The room has a fridge where liquor is kept, a TV above it, a small stereo player, and a paper Indian flag protruding from a showcase above. The singer, unnaturally fair, asks us in Urdu-accented Hindi what we would like to hear, ghazals or songs, old songs or new songs? She begins with a ghazal, accompanied by another female singer in chorus, and a tabla player and a harmonium player behind her. The singing is unremarkable. What is distinctive is when she brings her hands together to clap out the beat; it is the loudest sound I have ever heard a pair of human hands make. It has a metallic quality to it, but there are no rings or instruments hidden between her fingers. She has crooked a finger of one hand in a particular way, cupped her palms just so, and the sound is a thunderclap in the small room. Presently a dancer is summoned, a very pretty girl in an expensive silk dress; but when she dances it is so bad we have to laugh. She throws her arms about and twirls in a bad imitation of the countless mujra scenes in Hindi films. Most of these dancers work in the bar line until closing time, 12:30 a.m., and then they finish out the night dancing in Bachu-ni-wadi. Here, in this alley, there are no closing hours; it seems to exist in a jurisdiction all its own.

  There is a picture of the singer, much younger, hanging in the room; it is a concert she has given in some hall. She and the rest of the musicians are from Benares. She tells us about the nawabs of old who sent their sons to be sexually educated by the tawaifs, the courtesans; it is not like that anymore, and the true mujras are not like the filmi ones. “Dawood used to come here and stay all night. He would take any girl he pleased, and he gave any amount that was asked.” It is a matter of great pride that the don frequented these houses; a film star or politician could not do them greater honor by coming here.

  We walk back out through the lane, which is stunningly filthy. While sitting down on a cot outside the room to tie my shoes, my left hand has touched something; I bring it up to my nose and it smells of vomit. Inside the rooms there is light and music and Urdu poetry; outside is a dumping area for the wastes of the body.

  The cabbie tells me about a club where the women take off all their clothes but it is forbidden to drink alcohol; and another that is popular among foreigners and Arabs, where four hundred girls dance in front of you and you can select one and take her to the adjoining hotel right away. In the city of night, there are all kinds of girls in all kinds of price brackets; no one need be lonely or frustrated. One group of men rents a flat and brings in lactating women, blindfolded. Then the men take turns suckling at the women’s breasts.

  Toward morning, I am in a solitary taxi speeding from the city toward the suburbs; not even airport traffic is coming the other way. It is the suspended time before the first train comes in from Virar with the fisher-women. All cities are alike in their stillness, after the bars have closed. All those who have been loved during the night must go home now.

  Two Lives: Honey/Manoj

  I had mentioned Honey, the man who dances dressed as a woman, to Monalisa. “Honey is a woman who was born as a man by mistake,” Monalisa promptly volunteered. “She’s a very good friend of mine.” One night, I make plans to meet Monalisa after work in the all-night coffee shop at the Marine Plaza. Presently she appears and whispers in my ear, “There was a party at Dilbar. Honey still has her work clothes on, and a robe over them. Is it okay?” Monalisa has told Honey how much she trusts me and has convinced her to join us. She brings her friend to the plush, quiet coffee shop on the first floor of the hotel. For the first time I see Honey in proper lighting. She is very fair and has no hair on her face whatsoever. She is Sindhi, born in Bombay, and is now twenty-five. Her name—his name—is Manoj. Over iced coffee and French fries, she tells us about her life in the bars.

  Manoj was first drawn into the bar line through a neighbor, Sarita Royce, a dancer who has traveled all over the world. “Honey was my protégé,” Sarita told me later. Her mother used to mind Manoj and his brother Dinesh during their parents’ frequent absences. “You know about them, don’t you? Their background is not too rosy.” Manoj’s mother made a living smuggling appliances from Singapore. Manoj made thirty-four round trips to Singapore with his mother on these smuggling expeditions, starting at the age of nine.

  Sarita used to ask the boy, whose gestures were feminine, to dance for her to movie songs. She also organized private parties. Some of the parties were in her home, and the young Manoj used to go there and watch everyone dance. He thought to himself, I could do better. One day, Sarita had organized a private show in a hotel, and one of the girls who was supposed to dance called and said she couldn’t come. Sarita looked ar
ound, and her gaze settled on the young boy. She asked his mother to send him to the hotel. There, Sarita took a plait and attached it to the boy’s head with scores of pins. As soon as Manoj went onto the stage, the plait fell off. The audience responded favorably: “What a girl! Sweet as honey!” Sarita’s mother started calling Manoj “Honey.” Some of the men in the audience asked Honey if she would be willing to dance in a bar for money. Thus began Honey’s career in the dance bars and the bifurcation of Manoj/ Honey. “First there was the feeling that people were waiting for me,” says Honey. “People were waiting for a heroine.”

  Manoj was attending an English-language boarding school in Khandala, from which he was thrown out in the eighth standard. He was caught in a toilet with another student, who was about to rape him. When Honey first started dancing, her contract was for 100 rupees a day. This was good money for her mother, who had been caught and fined for smuggling ball bearings on one of her trips back from Singapore. In one day she lost what she had earned in three years and was left with 50,000 rupees in debts. She tore up her wedding saris to make women’s clothes for her thirteen-year-old son and sent him out to dance.

  One of the customers in Honey’s first bar left a note for her, saying she was being cheated and her mother should call him. He was Punjabi and had a hotel in Vashi, the Maya Bar. Honey became so popular there that the owner offered to pay her one lakh if he would undergo a sex change operation. There was one caveat: After the operation, she would have to have sex with him. Honey left that bar for another, the Indraprashta in Saki Naka. There she started making a name, working there for three years. The owner of the bar fell in love and cut his wrists for her. The bar staff would refer to Honey as “sister-in-law.”

  Honey’s father collected receipts from theaters for a producer, G. P. Sippy, but would not take any of his wife’s illegal earnings. He must have been uneasy watching his son put on a dress and dance in front of strangers, and he grew estranged from Honey, but his wife kept driving the child on, glad of the extra income. The first time a customer took Honey shopping, she asked the customer to buy some gifts for her father: Bermuda shorts, shirts, and two-liter bottles of Fanta. Then Honey went home and deposited the gifts in front of her father. It was the son’s first earning. Honey’s father accepted the gifts, and they shared a glass of Fanta. The mother came in and was pleasantly surprised: “What is this, father and son are drinking together?” And the father replied, “If my son earns, I have to drink with her.” Then he blessed his son. Honey remembers his words: “He put his hand on my head and said, ‘You will earn such a name in your life!’” In Honey’s recounting of those words, her father uses the feminine pronoun to refer to Honey. He had accepted his son’s strange manner of earning a living. That night, as he stepped off a bus in Dadar, a truck speeding in the opposite direction struck him and flung him in front of another bus, which finished him.

  One day, a dancer who lived in Congress House asked Honey to go with her to a new bar named Sapphire. Honey was hesitant; she had heard that pimps from Congress House went to Sapphire looking for girls for their stable. But her doubts disappeared as soon as she made her entry. Honey started dancing on the Sapphire stage and the place went wild. “Once more, once more!” the customers yelled. She was supposed to do only one dance, but neither the customers nor Pervez, the owner, were willing to let her go. Pervez had no idea about Honey’s identity. By the time Sarita enlightened him, he didn’t care. “Honey made Sapphire,” BK told me.

  When she first came in, Honey was, at sixteen, the youngest of the dancers and the most inventive. When planning a dance, she would think to herself, How is it in films? And she would wear different costumes for each number, changing from Indian to western clothes as the song demanded. For a song with an Arabic theme she would wear gauzy Arab-style dresses; for a song with a folk beat, she would wear ghungroos, little bells, on her ankles; in the song about a hatted hero, “Tirchi Topiwale,” she would come to the stage with a bunch of hats and throw them on her favored customers’ heads. It was Honey who started the call-and-response game in the dance bars. “Oye, oye!” she would shout, and the customers would shout back, “Oye-o-oooaah!” She jumped up on the tables and danced; she thought of herself as a second Helen, the incomparable cabaret vamp of Hindi films during the sixties and seventies. Her oriental-style dresses left her waxed legs bare; she would dance up to a customer and lift her whole leg and put it on his shoulder, as he sat below her, “and they went mad.”

  Then she started another trend. “I shot an arrow in the dark and it hit the target.” She started picking up the customers and making them dance: “I’m requesting you. Just for a second, please.” Then she would blow her money over their heads. They were delighted; the whole bar was witnessing their stardom. If Honey threw 50 rupees at them, they would throw 500 back at her. Honey was inverting the whole equation of performer and audience in the bar line. “I don’t want that the girls dance and the men just sit there.” On one of the girls’ birthdays her main customer decorated the entire hall with fruit—hanging pineapples, mangoes, apples, and oranges all around the hall on strings—while the birthday girl danced in the orchard. Honey started taking the fruits off the walls and sticking them on the older customers, gluing bananas on their pants, oranges on their chests, so the old men walked around festooned with fruit and dancers and customers were united in uproarious laughter. The fivers changed into 100-rupee notes, till 5-rupee notes were banned altogether from the bar. She would throw some money at a customer; he would respond by hitting her with entire bundles of 100-rupee notes. She got so many currency notes pelted at her that she couldn’t hold all of them. There were people waiting in line to give her money. “I used to throw and run, throw and run.” BK scolded her. “Don’t leave your money lying around.” So important was Honey to Sapphire that the bar gave her the greatest honor available in a city that has among the world’s most expensive commercial real estate: her own makeup room.

  The other dancers stopped talking to her. They wished upon her the ultimate revenge: that a customer would fall in love with her and stop her from dancing altogether. But Honey wasn’t so much interested in the money as she was in the performance itself, in hearing the customers clap and shout, “Once more, once more!” When she danced a full shift, sweating heavily, “I felt like I’d eaten a full meal.” Honey has since performed for celebrities as diverse as Steven Seagal and Chotta Shakeel. She has been to Nairobi for two months. She has customers from Africa, Jakarta, Mauritius, and Singapore. Honey was profiled in Savvy magazine and featured on the Priya Tendulkar show, but as a woman, a bar dancer. Her secret was safe.

  Honey tells us about her breast operation. At the time, her daily collection was 35,000 rupees. But she thought that if she had breasts, her tips would increase, and she could get a break in the movies. “I wanted cleavage.” She used to tape the skin on her chest with bandages, to simulate breasts, and would get whistles. But when she took off the tape, bits of skin came with it. Manoj would change into Honey in the taxi going to the dance bars. She would put on her bra and stuff the cups with a handkerchief or a sponge. Sometimes she had to fill the bra with scrunched-up balls of newspaper, which scratched like hell. So she sought surgical intervention, going to the best cosmetic surgeon in India for silicone implants. When she woke up after the operation, she started screaming. It felt like there were two great weights on her. Now Honey had what she’d dreamt of: a pair of size 32 breasts. “Take them out!” she shouted. The doctor said she should be patient for a month; she’d get used to them. She left the hospital and got into a taxi.

  Then the cab hit a speed bump.

  “They bounced with such force, I had to grab on to them.” Honey directed the taxi to take her to another hospital right away; she was in pain and wanted her brand-new mammaries removed. When the doctors at the second hospital heard the name of the prestigious doctor who had put them in, they sent Honey packing. That night, the girls at Sapphire clustered around and
poked at the sudden protrusions on her chest. “Honey didi, what is this? Tun, tun.” After weeks of searching, she found a doctor who agreed to remove them. Honey lifts her shirt and shows me the scars on her chest. His chest.

  What Honey did had consequences for her family’s image in the community. At one point early in her career, Honey was dancing in a bar in Ulhasnagar, stronghold of the Sindhis and a suburb where many of Honey’s relatives lived. Her uncle had a shop there. Customers of the bar told her uncle, Your nephew dresses up as a girl and dances in a bar. Her uncle spoke to Honey’s father. “Don’t bring your son by this lane in front of my shop. People will laugh at me.” Honey felt terrible about this, but she respected her uncle’s wishes and avoided that street. When Honey got famous and successful, this same uncle came to her to ask her for a loan of three lakhs, for another shop, and Honey gave him the money. Honey has also bought flats for her family and a phone shop for her brother Dinesh.

  The bodyguard at Dilbar, a rather scrawny fellow, is in love with Honey and gives her 100 rupees a night. He calls her regularly and is very shy and polite. If Honey’s voice is a little deep, he’ll quickly apologize for having disturbed her sleep. “Did you eat?” he says, making conversation. “Did you sleep well?” He knows about her. That’s how Honey puts it: “He knows about me,” as if there is only one thing to know, as if someone who knows that Honey is a man who dresses as a woman has grasped the totality of her existence. That is the thing about secrets, and that is why we are so eager to know them. They give us, once revealed, a false impression of wider knowledge.

  Some of the people who come to the bar think they know what is to be known about Honey: that she is a eunuch. Chotta Shakeel, the man who runs the D-Company, is one of these people. He came twice or thrice to Sapphire. Honey remembers a very short man, very respectful; he would never throw money with his own hands but instructed his boys to, a lot of money, after which Shakeel would ask Honey to pray for his soul. God has a special connection with eunuchs and hears their prayers. “Salaam,” the don would say to Honey. “Please do my dua.” But he would never publicly refer to Honey as a eunuch, because that would be insulting her credentials as a dancing girl.