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

blue-type films.” So I said, “No. No, Manohar, I don’t want to be an actress.” He said nothing. Some days passed. One evening he came home and again he said to me, “Let’s make a film.” Again I said “no”, confident-like. “Okay,” he replied, “but if you don’t act in my film the police will arrest you for being a disobedient daughter and push you into lockup.” I started to cry. “Is he lying?” I asked my mother. What could she say? “Don’t be a stupid girl, stupid girl!” she said. “Do as he says!” That evening a policeman came home just like my father had threatened. He took me to the lock-up. I was terrified. So terrified I started doing su-su in my knicker. But the policeman didn’t put me in jail. He raped me. His friendraped me. When they were done they said, “ Ghar chal.” Next month same thing. Again next month, and then the month after, regular as schoolwork. What did Manohar do? He called me a bad girl. “Bad girl!” he said. “I wanted you to be a model and an actress but look at you bringing shame on us.” But he was smiling a joker smile. Manohar made sure I visited the police regularly and soon they came to know me well. Some of them were good to me—when they were done they would give me chai or a Marie “biscoot”. They would say, “Tata! Bye-bye!” And they would make winking faces at me—as though I was a child!’
    One afternoon when she was thirteen and visiting a friend—‘I had only one friend and she was slow. I guess that’s why she was my friend!’—Leela caught her reflection in a full-length mirror. It was the first full-length mirror she had ever looked into. For the first time in her life Leela saw herself not just in her entirety, but as an individual, an entity. It was a startling feeling and it revealed to her things she had never before seen.
    She was scrawny, yes. But at five feet two she was already taller than her mother. Tougher than her mother. And she was sharper than her brothers, all of whom had played hooky through school. The twenty-year-old used his fingers to count three pigeons nibbling grain. The one in the middle had a leg shorter than the other and used his disability as an excuse for petty perversions: he would take advantage of the rush and confusion of students leaving the local school to feel up girls under the starched chunnis they draped protectively over their indigo kameezes. He would pick the boys’ kurta pockets for coins, sweets, ballpoint pens.
    With the suddenness of a shove, Leela realized she was better than everyone around her. With adult-like clarity, she knew she could do better.
    But if she wanted change, she would have to seek it for herself.
    ‘By then the girls in my school knew what I did and when Ipassed by they would hide behind their hands and whisper, “Leela is dirty, don’t talk to her.”
    ‘So I thought, “Why should I spoil my name? If I’m forced to do ganda kaam, I should do it where no one knows me. Otherwise, what chance will I have in life? And why should I feed my father with my money? I do the kaam and he gets the inam ! Arre wah !”’
    Leela stepped away from the mirror.
    A few days later she stole money from her father’s pants pocket for a train ticket to Bombay. An older woman she knew from around town had moved there and begun working in a dance bar called Night Lovers. She agreed to introduce Leela to the owner.
    He was a God-fearing man, the woman said to Leela on the phone from Bombay. He was the father of two children, so no ladkibaazi for him, don’t take tension. He was a south Indian Shetty, first name Purshottam.

    Someone warned Leela, ‘Mira Road “tation”!’ and so she knew where to get off, even though what she knew she momentarily forgot when she saw before her Bombay.
    ‘So big!’ she gasped with wonder, descending on to the platform with her shabby little suitcase. ‘Too, too big!’
    Unsure of what to do, Leela did nothing, and that was a misstep