Beautiful Thing

by Sonia Faleiro

  But despite the woman’s familiar appearance—her coin-sized gold hoops, the umbrella sticking out of her shiny pleather bag—she was, Leela would soon discover, a brothel madam who pumped her business with runaways from the ‘chiller room’—children’s homes run by the government’s child welfare wing.

  She took Leela to her brothel. It was a kholi, crowded, filthy and shrill with the sounds of a baby’s cries. Under threat of scarring Leela’s face with acid that she stored in a baby feeder, the madam forced Leela to have sex with several customers. Four days later, striped with bruises, Leela jumped out of a window and escaped. She eventually found her way to Night Lovers.

  Leela was not surprised by what had happened to her. She was relieved.

  ‘Had that bitch not caught me, a policeman would have,’ she said. ‘And he would have stuck me in the chiller room in Mankhurd. Do you know what they say about that place? That it’s a brothel for Bombay’s mantri log, politicians. The police act as pimps. Why? Kyunki police ko sirf paisa chahiye. The police only want money. They round up orphans and runaway girls and then call the mantri log, “Please sirji, sahibji, come na, pick and choose.” The mantri log fuck the little girls and afterwards tip the manageress, “Thank you so much madam.” They are men, and that’s what men do. But she’s a harami danger-log! A bitch, a dangerous one. She’s supposed to be a mother to the girls, but during the day she makes them weave baskets and at night she cracks apart their thighs with a lathi!

  ‘What luck I got saved!’

  It wasn’t mere luck, it was written, and that’s why Leela was unperturbed by the startling welcome Bombay had given her. It was the start of a new life as jyotishji had described it when he read her palm just before she fled Meerut. Even though it was understood he was meant to lie and prophesy only a peaceful marriage and a fertile womb, he couldn’t help himself. ‘Kathin,’ he had mumbled through a mouthful of paan, juice slip-sliding out as he spoke. ‘It will always be kathin.’ Difficult.

  Leela had smiled at jyotishji, even tipped him an ek sau, a one hundred. At thirteen she had the self-awareness to see and to accept the truth.

  And the truth was this—she was no virgin, not even in the way some girls had sex with their first couple of boyfriends and when dissatisfied with the results, shrugged the young men off as mistakes and pronounced themselves pure. She didn’t come from a good family: her father didn’t have the upbringing to beat her mother behind closed doors and then, too, only after he’d gagged her mouth with his hand. Even his daughter’s bijniss he couldn’t keep quiet about, gaandu-maderchod. Wasn’t it true everyone in the cantonment knew how Singh had upgraded to a twenty-six-inch TV? Fucking chutmaar!

  And the truth was that although she wanted to better herself she wouldn’t always be up to the task.

  She was just a girl. No match for destiny.

  In any case, she knew this too—you didn’t fight destiny like destiny was your mother and you could win. Destiny, Leela knew, like she thought she knew who she was, was an unbreakable promise. An infallible prayer.

  She embraced it.

  Leela had worked at Night Lovers ever since and she never did return to Meerut. She warned Apsara: ‘If you give Manohar a paisa of the money I have earned, I will come to Meerut and pry out every one of your teeth.’ Even Apsara, who many in the cantonment believed was mentally challenged, could understand that her daughter might harbour ill feelings towards Manohar. She took Leela’s threat seriously and until the time she could cash them in hid her daughter’s money orders in her underwear.

  Manohar believed Leela’s whereabouts were unknown to his family. He tried to file a Missing Persons report with the police, but they were after all the same men he had rented Leela out to. Believing he was temporarily hiding his daughter, as a way to increase their lust and extract more money, they paid him no heed.

  ‘Your little whore did not go to school alone,’ one of them informed him.

  { 3 }

  ‘A bar dancer’s game is to rob, to fool a kustomer’

  I met Leela six years after she had left home, those six years later she was only nineteen. Unlike many of the nineteen-year-olds in Mira Road—still studying and still living with their parents—Leela had a job, had bills, had sex. Her confidence in the sexually charged environment of the dance bar confused me. She was surrounded by men night after night and these weren’t just any men, they were often drunk and aggressively lustful. I asked Leela how she did it and shrugging she said, ‘Otherwise?’ She meant she had no option.

  But she thought about my question and she answered, not that night, or the night after, but later. ‘When you look at my life,’ she taught me, ‘don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road. If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin, she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face, feel his fists against her breasts. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, “Get lost oye!” And they do. And if I want a gift or feel like “non wedge” I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. They thank me. Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my mother never had. Azaadi. Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.’

  And so Leela chose azaadi, and she chose also to curtail it, by defining the parameters of her life as the area from her flat to Night Lovers, a place whose rhythm and cadences she lived by. Anything outside these self-imposed boundaries, even if it was an adjoining suburb, she firmly referred to as ‘Bombay’, as though Bombay was elsewhere and distantly so. Bombay was also bahar gaon, out of the village, abroad. ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would tell me and I would gently rib her saying, would you like a lift to the airport? ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would say to me, and in her wistfulness she revealed her hidden yearning. Leela knew what it meant to go abroad, and for all her talk of freedom, she didn’t always believe she enjoyed it.

  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 ha
ve 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 subver
siveness 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.