Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars Read Online Free PDF Page A

chaand and Inhi logon ne ; songs whose lyrics they knew by heart, lyrics that would make them sigh—Anita and her friends would sit on the floor, each with a quarter of RC whisky by her side, and talk of things they could not to those outside their line. They would share old stories like they were sharing food; of how they had been forced into the line, of how the line had saved them from marriage to a friend their father owed money to; and they would share news, of a child who loved school, or a lover whose illness had spread to the mouth causing his gums to splinter and bleed—‘punishment perhaps for loving a barwali’.
    But Anita always took it too far, they said. She never could draw the line between sharing and simply ‘being bore’. For no sooner had the quarter gone to her head, brightening her eyes and reddening her face, she would start to recite that old psalm, and with tears, lament as though she hadn’t so many timesbefore: ‘The evening of the rains God cried. And with him, I cried too.’
    Her tears were forced, dismissed her friends. ‘Tears,’ they would sneer, ‘are the indulgences of those who haven’t suffered enough.’
    To avoid experiences like Anita’s, the bar dancers in Leela’s building refused to allow men to live with them. One might come across a child too young to understand what his mother did—who believed his mother and all of her friends worked in an ‘oh fice’, or that she taught ‘two-plus-two’ in a school far away. I might pass a man on the stairs, pressing his finger down hard on a doorbell, pressing his forehead against a door, but he would be a hotil boy delivering dinner or a manager desperate to cajole the shaan , the glory of his dance bar, to please return to work, he was sorry he’d called her a chalu chamak challo , a rapchak , a fast one, behind her back. ‘Arre, he was only kidding, no?’
    Men were chutiyas, Leela dismissed, making a fucking sign with her fist. They lived to profit from the women in their lives. Anita was no exception. I could do a survey with that little notebook-pencil of mine if I didn’t believe her. It would reveal that every one of the bar dancers in Leela’s building had either been sold by a blood relative or raped by one.
    She knew one girl forced to take the virginity of all three of her first cousins. The other cousins had videotaped her.
    These demons weren’t prologue.

    In the world of the dance bar, a mother could be convinced to rent her daughter out for twenty-five hundred rupees and something irresponsibly enticing—a TV perhaps, the first six months of cable paid for. She was petty and tight-fisted and had she any teeth they were orange—she was addicted to gutka and her favourite brand was the pungent Goa 1000, which she carried compulsively in her bra, in the waistband of her sari petticoat,or held in her hand, handkerchief-style. Mother drank on the sly and given half a chance would poach her daughter’s customers. Not for sex, for conversation. She was that ‘krack’ from loneliness.
    If mother wanted better for her daughter, and if she couldn’t save her from the dance bar, she would find ways to compensate: she would cook hotil-style khana for her—mutton swimming in ghee, Chicken Chinese Punjabi style, buttery aloo-parathas dripping with fresh malai . She would order Guru Beer or a bottle of Old Monk rum, and she would ready all of this food and drink stylishly on a tray, intending to hover eagerly over her daughter when her daughter returned home from work, cajoling her to eat, drink, fatten up. But if her daughter returned with the dawn, then mother would put aside the tray, turn the cooler up high and, heating almond oil in a miniature kadai , massage the bruised soles of her little girl’s feet. She would kiss her toes, calloused and hard with stamping thud-thud to draw from the ghungroos knotted around her ankles a sound sweet and inviting, and sing softly to her baby girl her favourite