The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  ‘That said, India is in a transition phase,’ he continues. ‘These attitudes have receded from the Westernised upper-middle classes. The same, I hope, will happen in other areas.’

  For now, Reddy focuses on talking therapies, he tells us, gingerly navigating his way through the quagmire of societal pressures. ‘So the men come to me concerned about whether they can rise to the occasion, or not,’ he explains. ‘That is all that they worry about. They don’t look at emotion, though they should. Women come to me worried about the fact men cannot understand their feelings. I have what I call a Shakti Clinic for women’s marital issues.’

  It’s a funny setting in which to hear the word Shakti, or primordial female creative power, once again. In this usage it corroborates what Chullikkad told us: that India’s will be a sexual revolution with spiritual characteristics. Or perhaps, in another interpretation, that old Hindu ideas are being deployed for a new purpose: to sweeten, or ‘Indianise’, the nation’s breakneck pace of change.

  I ask Reddy about ayurvedic sexology. Since my arrival in India I’d seen numerous advertisements offering sexual satisfaction via ayurveda. I’d even received text messages to my mobile phone offering ‘erections guaranteed. Phone this number, expert in Ayurveda’.

  Reddy rolls his eyes at this. ‘These people have the best intentions; and the better clinics can certainly help with the Western problem of mind and body separation, and perhaps sexual dysfunctions.

  ‘The problem is that ayurveda in the field of sexology is largely quackery in India today. There are many people who trade on fear and ignorance. There are quack ayurveda practioners who advertise on Hindi music channels after 11.30 with some second-grade Bollywood actor endorsing their products.’

  ‘What do they sell?’ I ask him.

  ‘Well, I certainly would not consume it,’ he replies. ‘They mix all sorts of powders into their ayurvedic cures, including heavy metal compounds such as mercury. If you’re lucky you’ll get a small amount of a generic Viagra; and they give Viagra and mercury mixes to women for fertility too, of course. Viagra is the great cure-all. I wish people would take these ayurvedic sexologists with a bag of salt. But this is incredible, credulous India. And they don’t.’

  Such quakery and obfuscation are in marked contrast to the sex education regimen proposed by the Kama Sutra. Young men and woman alike, contends Vatsyayana:

  should study the Kama Sutra and the arts and sciences subordinate thereto, in addition to the study of the arts and sciences contained in the Dharma and Artha. Even young maids should study the Kama Sutra with its arts and sciences before marriage.

  There’s a tap on the door, which creaks open to display the head and shoulders of a middle-aged woman. She’s wearing a classy silk saree and neat spectacles, above which her forehead tilak is smudged. It makes her look, endearingly, like a librarian who’s mistakenly classified herself for the bookshelf.

  ‘Madams, I have a client waiting,’ says Reddy, addressing us. ‘So! What do I tell you before you leave?’

  I’m unsure whether or not this is intended as a rhetorical question. Dimple and I glance at one another.

  ‘I will tell you,’ Reddy says, rubbing his hands together, and speaking rather grandly, ‘my predictions for what comes next…

  ‘There is a lot of change in India…. a lot of change. You see it in Bollywood. There’s no strings-attached-sex in romantic comedy, a new romantic narrative of the love union: big hits like Hum Tum Bihag Bhatt [My Brother’s Fiancée] and Rockstar, where premarital sex is shown. Of course, at the end of movies they’ll live together like goody-goody people. Still, the message is revolutionary. The message is this: we’re doing it, and we’re not feeling bad about it.

  ‘I see the same in the letters I receive, too. These days the women say: “Yes, I am doing it.” Don’t mistake that this is a huge change. The problem is,’ Reddy says, pointing at each of us in turn. ‘You two …’

  ‘Is it?’ says Dimple.

  ‘Yes,’ he asserts, ‘you two; or, rather, the fact that the Indian man cannot reconcile the two of you. He cannot cope with the Westernised Indian woman.

  ‘Naturally he likes the idea, with his hands between his legs, in bed at night. But at the end of the day, he wants to marry his mother; he wants a Good Indian Girl. The Indian male is 10, maybe 15 years behind the Indian woman.’

  Dimple and I walk through the dark reception past a group of adults. Three middle-aged women talk gregariously, sharing a paper bag of green sweets. At their centre, side by side, sit a young man and woman, in silence.

  As we pass them, I wonder if they know there’s a revolution afoot.

  14 | BOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL, Bombay

  I now commenced a regular course of fucking with native women. They understand in perfection all the arts and wiles of love, are capable of gratifying any tastes, and in face and figure they are unsurpassed by any women in the world …It is impossible to describe the enjoyment I experienced in the arms of these syrens. I have had English, French, German and Polish women of all grades of society since, but never, never did they bear a comparison with those salacious, succulent houris of the East.

  —Captain Edward Sellon (1818–66)

  We’ve crossed the tip of India to the other, western coast, to the state of Maharastra, home to India’s rich agricultural hinterland of Pune, where Osho’s lavish commune lives on, and to India’s most vibrant city and commercial capital, Bombay.

  Dimple and I arrive in the city one impossibly hot late spring morning, in a vile mood, having been held captive on searing hot tarmac for two hours by the faulty electrics of our Kingfisher Airlines aircraft. Early during this ordeal, an elderly Gujarati woman had hyperventilated, and the air hostesses and pilot had screamed at mutinying passengers to sit down. Ninety minutes into the ordeal piped background music, the only electrical function still apparently operating on our ailing Airbus, struck up with Phil Collins’ ‘Another Day in Paradise’. With unhinged hilarity, the cabin had erupted into laughter.

  A few days later, we’d learn that the airline’s staff hadn’t been paid for a month, and the airline itself, run by notorious Indian beer magnate and playboy Vijay Mallya, had pulled half its routes and was on the brink of receivership.

  Eventually we decant onto blistering tarmac and make it through an arrivals hall thronged with extended families awaiting relatives in festive mood, and cab drivers touting for trade. Presently, an airport porter demands 50 rupees to carry our suitcases three metres to the taxi stand. We get in the taxi, an AC-fitted Kool Cab we’ve paid over the odds for but whose aircon unit is kaput, and a young man on a motorbike hands me a note of his phone number through the open window. He makes the international hand sign for ‘give me a call’, winks at Dimple, then weaves off into the traffic.

  ‘Welcome to Bombay,’ Dimple smiles.

  Landing in Bombay – or Mumbai as its official name became in 1995, but which only journalists and careful foreigners call it – always feels a little like arriving in New York: an onslaught of antagonistic taxi drivers, and people screaming at each other in the streets in tones reserved in Britain for begging for a near-relative’s life. Or perhaps how it might have been to arrive in Victorian London, as breathlessly vital and as vile as anything Charles Dickens could imagine.

  From its Bollywood strugglers to its Indian Premier League cricket wannabes (drawn by the promise of IPL’s mega pay packets), this is the city where everyone, in the words of an Indian billboard ad, wants to go ‘from zero to hero’. Bombay is modern India’s great shopfront. Whether it’s power, prostitution or dinner you’re after, this is where it’s at.

  It’s also, with stiff competition, my favourite Indian city. I love the fact that it’s a place taking flight, throbbing with the energy and ambition of its 14 million inhabitants and the tens of thousands of souls who arrive here each month hoping to make good their dreams. Many of these new arrivals end up in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, where one million poor squ
at some of the world’s most sought-after real estate, sharing one toilet to 1440 digestive tracts.

  Dimple and I are the lucky ones. We’re bound not for the slums or the tourist-clogged south of Bombay, but for the very heights of ‘hi-fi’ Bombay: Juhu, our base for a month, and the city’s most affluent suburb.

  Our home is a three-bedroom duplex, where we eventually arrive after tortuously charting every back street of the western suburbs. Our taxi driver had employed the navigation tactic of all Bombay cab drivers, always infuriating, of stopping at every intersection to ask directions of the nearest person, only to hare off every five minutes or so in contrary directions.

  Our apartment features all the staples demanded of a Bombay des-res: uniformed and armed security guards; morning delivery of everything from newspapers to tender green drinking coconuts; small child servants sleeping in the stairwell among the rats churned up by the unceasing construction work. It also features our roommate, Sanvi. At 1 p.m. we find her lounging on her apartment sofa in a silk dressing gown in front of a cable television series based in an American high school.

  Sanvi is representative of a new Bombay breed: a young NRI returnee. She’s undertaken the journey her parents took in reverse: born in New York, but returned to a ‘homeland’ she’s never known, betting it all on her relevance to rising India’s economic dream and her career as a student-cum-model and socialite.

  Sanvi has one key bugbear about her adopted home, however, and it’s one of the features Dimple and I are here to explore: Bombay’s India-wide reputation for the flesh trade.

  ‘Why did he do it? They are like soooo gross,’ Sanvi asks a few days later, between mouthfuls of pakora and Coca-Cola and over the cheery refrain of the kids from Glee on Star World.

  I blink. I’m coming round from the shock of waking to the sight of a huge black raven flying off with a pair of handwashed knickers I’d strung to dry on the balcony outside my room; I’d wondered where the other two pairs had disappeared to. As I listen to Sanvi, I picture my practical smalls cushioning a raven’s Bombay high rise.

  ‘With their cheap clothes and their cheap conversation and all that disgusting flubber hanging out,’ Sanvi continues. ‘They freak me out. But they don’t freak the NRI guys out. You know what? The guys get titillated. They deserve it when the bitches give them HIV; or they bleed them dry and don’t even sleep with them.’

  Today, it’s this one particular manifestation of sleazy Bombay that’s incensed Sanvi. Her most recent ex, a hi-fi media mogul based between Bombay and London, has just been, as she sees it, ‘hoodwinked’ by an aspirant Bollywood actress he met at a pool party in Juhu. Sanvi has decided that this contender for her ex’s affections is like many of the ambitious girls from India and now, increasingly, the West who spill into Bombay’s western suburbs: a ‘shady person’ willing to sleep her way up the ladder via the casting couch, or, in that Indian term that implies dancing-girl-cum-prostitute, a ‘bar girl’.

  Many of the thousands of new arrivals to Bombay feed the city’s vicious appetite for flesh: for flesh to clean apartments three times a day against the thick film of dust that settles on everything, kicked up by the ever-gridlocked streets; and for flesh to feed New India’s sexual appetite. The city is home to Asia’s most famous red light district, and is where the divide blurs between young boys and girls hoping to make it in Bollywood and those willing to turn tricks for a quick rupee.

  An illustration of the blurred line between Bombay’s bright lights and its insalubrious back alleys came in early 2013, in the case of a female sex racketeer named Tina Umesh Deshpande. The 44-year-old was charged with summoning a string of aspirant models to her Bombay bungalow on the pretext of a modelling shoot. Once there, Kalyani allegedly coerced the girls into having sex with male ‘customers’ whom she had charged 80,000 rupees a head. The game was up for Deshpande when a 23-year-old model reported her for locking her up in a room inside the same bungalow for 48 hours after refusing to have sex with two men.

  In Bombay’s press of human flesh – from prostitutes and pimps to racketeers and gym-addicted muscle boys – the bar girls are one group who are as visible as they are vilified. From the early 2000s, these erotic dancers-lite became synonymous with the sleazier appetites of the city, loudly denounced by a conservative Maharastran state leadership and its police force. Yet compared to the strip clubs in the West, their offering was rather tame.

  Drawing on Middle Eastern belly dance but also on the ancient Indian dance traditions of the tawaifs and mujra dancers, the bar girls titillated by suggestion. They danced with veils and scarves and remained largely clothed throughout the performance, excepting flashes of exposed flesh on their midriff, back and arms. Sometimes there would be a hijra dance for variety. Men would sit at tables drinking whisky, eating and ogling. Intermittently they’d throw rupee notes onto the stage towards girls they fancied; this lucre was collected in boxes by attendants and distributed between the girls and the management at the end of the night.

  But Bombay’s bar girls became the focus of the reactionary politicking of conservative Hindu nationalists. The tipping point came in 2005, when Maharastra brought in a Police Amendment Bill banning ‘dance bars’, the adult entertainment and strip-dance venues out of which most of the bar girls operated. At the point of the ban, over 700 dance bars were in operation in Bombay (305 of them officially registered). These establishments employed 75,000 girls as strip-dancers, with some unlicensed operations also acting as fronts for prostitution, sex trafficking and the drug trade.

  After the ban, a number of Bombay’s bar girls were trafficked to Dubai. Others continued to operate out of clandestine dance bars that sprang up in the outer and northern suburbs, such as the underground club in Juhu that supplied the girls for the pool party recently attended by Sanvi’s ex.

  Today, the Maharastran police crackdowns, which echo those of the Victorian Raj in their moralising vehemence, have a new front of attack: Bombay’s club- and bar-going youth. In 2012, police commissioner Vasant Dhoble ordered a series of raids on the city’s bars and nightclubs, shutting down hundreds of popular establishments for infringements ranging from overcrowding to failing to comply with the many licences needed to run a venue. Dhoble also set about enforcing the archaic Bombay Prohibition Act of 1952, which requires people to be issued with, and display, paper permits should they wish to consume alcohol at home or in a bar.

  To many young Bombayites, Dhoble’s campaign is seen not as a moral crusade, but as an opening salvo in a war between modern attitudes and those of the increasingly ardent Hindu traditionalists. In June 2012, during a break from the monsoon rains, hundreds of young Bombayites took to Juhu beach to protest against Dhoble’s raids. Many wore black, that taboo Hindu colour, to mourn what they claimed to be the death of nightlife in the city. Others held hockey sticks on which were written ‘Dhoble go back’, a reference to the police commissioner’s habit of carrying hockey sticks on his raids. They chanted: ‘We want to be free! We want to be free!’

  Away from likely encounters with former in-laws, Dimple had been looking forward to letting her hair down in India’s buzziest metro. But we were also aware of Bombay’s ‘party pooper’ and had discussed him while sitting on the tarmac of his city’s airport. Dimple had bemoaned the new anti-youth mood that Dhoble’s raids represent.

  ‘The Hindu right and their myth of a gilded Hindu past, it drives me crazy!’ she said. ‘They lay into kids and they lay into women. They peddle all that propaganda about the “traditional woman” as a mother, as a keeper of traditions and the person without whom the family would fall apart.

  ‘My ex father-in-law was full of it. The stereotype is as restrictive as a cheap saree blouse. It’s almost like, if you’re a woman, either you’re that ideal, and you’re approved of, or you do something you like with your life, and you’re responsible for ruining India.’

  ‘The dance bars served an important function in Bombay,’ says Rajendar Menen, a Chennai-bor
n journalist who refers to himself as a ‘professional Bombay street bum’.

  ‘Bombay is a city that’s about business,’ he continues. ‘Most business transactions in India involve payments under the table, and ladies bars are a good way to get rid of the money that can’t be stored in banks: the black money. The money found its way into the pockets of women with no education, and no other way of earning money to live. So, when the bars closed, thousands of women lost their livelihood and slipped into the flesh industry in the furthest corners of the city. Their only currency now is sex …

  ‘And sex workers have a short shelf-life. They have to mint the moment.’

  The son of well-to-do Tamils, but keen to make his own way in life, Menen arrived in Bombay in the late 1980s with a few rupees to his name, slept rough and caught, among other things, a bug for pacing its streets. From the early 1990s, he worked as a reporter for a national newspaper based out of Bombay, with prostitution and the criminal underworld as his beat. Later he worked as a fixer for the international NGOs battling the HIV epidemic that was laying siege to India’s oldest (and Asia’s second largest) red-light district: Kamathipura, in central Bombay.

  Unsurprisingly Menen, now 50, is a hard-bitten, seen-it-all kind of guy. We meet him at nightfall at one of his favourite stamping grounds: Juhu Beach.

  This forms the outer fringe of the fashionable northern suburbs: a crinoline of white-beige sands combed by the turbulence of the commercial airliners taking off from nearby Sahar International airport.

  By night, Juhu is enlivened by chai stalls; hawkers selling giant balloons and candyfloss; and soliciting prostitutes catering to every sexual tastebud: children (sometimes orphans, sometimes youngsters pushed into the trade by their parents), small Bihari women, camp boys and hijras. For decades, Juhu Beach, along with Girgaum chowpatty beach further south, has been a key Bombay tourist destination, a rare chance to take a breather away from the uncompromising inland crush of bodies, buildings and nose-to-tail autos.