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

lullaby:
    Go to sleep, princess, go to sleep.
    Go to sleep, my precious one.
    Sleep and see sweet dreams, in the dream see your beloved
    fly to Roopnagar and be surrounded by the maidens.
    The king will garland you and—
    Here she would kiss her daughter—
    Kiss you on the forehead.
    She would whisper: ‘With a daughter like you only a fool would regret not having borne a son.’
    If opportunity soured and galat kaam was inevitable, mother would spare her daughter the shame of being a raste -side dhandewali forced to round up her own customers. She would have a quiet chat with the local paanwala and with the auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers who never said no to a money deal, especially on peak summer days when work was slow and hot winds struck a driver’s face like a million slaps.
    Some of these men were, in fact, pimps with a taxi or an auto-rickshaw at their service. They would listen for coded phrases like ‘college girl’ or ‘back drive’ or try to elicit interest in these matters by murmuring ‘full service?’ Some of them had been brought into the business as children—their mothers were sex workers for whom they pimped once they came of age. But they were not the only ones benefiting from the want of others. In Bombay city, it was whispered, for a certain kind of man born into a certain kind of life, only two things guaranteed money. Sex. And supari.
    Mother would promise men such as these a fifty-rupee commission on every customer. ‘Tell your catch I offer a discount on festivals,’ she’d encourage. ‘And 25 per cent off the hour if he breaks night with my child. I’ll throw in dinner. Tell him that.’
    ‘Dinner!’ the men would snigger amongst themselves. ‘Why dinner? Isn’t your girl a feast in herself?’
    But whatever mother did, and by God she did some shameless things, it was, I knew, almost always because she wasn’t permitted, by virtue of her sex and class or her status as a financial dependant, to have a say in the things that mattered.
    Fathers on the other hand had no excuse.
    And yet, they were always Manohars—variations of the man Leela had been born to.

    Manohar worked odd jobs in the military cantonment in Meerut, in Uttar Pradesh. He and Apsara, who had worked as a housemaid until recently, had Leela in 1986. She was their youngest and followed three boys. Apsara and her children were united in their fear of Manohar, who was an alcoholic and, from what I gathered, schizophrenic. For a time, Apsara suffered the most. There was the forced sex in front of the children. The stripping. One night Manohar tore off Apsara’s Patiala suit—a voluminous item of clothing that covered herarms, stomach and legs—and kicked her out of the house. She crouched in the darkness until Leela was able to sneak out with a towel.
    ‘We’d hear our mother being beaten and wouldn’t know what to do,’ Leela said. ‘We had one of those old-fashioned irons; do you know the kind you heat with hot coals? I would heat it and start ironing all the clothes in our house. I didn’t care whether they were dirty or clean, ironed or creased. Until the screaming stopped, until mother stopped sounding like a goat under the butcher’s knife, I ironed.’
    The cantonment was familiar with Manohar’s temper. Apsara cleaned an officer’s house. He pitied her, of course he did. But it was none of his bijniss.
    ‘We had a lot of family around. My uncle, a cook, lived next door; my father’s sisters lived close by. But there was no unity in our family. No response.’
    For Apsara’s suffering to end, Leela’s had to begin.
    And it did, when her daughter entered puberty.
    ‘Manohar wanted me to start modelling, because he thought I was bootiful. So one day he brought home a video camera to make videos, for big-big Bollywood directors, he said. He asked me to take off my clothes. I was a child, remember, but I was smart. Not like my mother, dense as seviyan ! I thought, “These are for bad films,