“Why are they doing this? What do these men get in return?” I ask Mustafa.
“Five minutes’ attention. Even a garage mechanic can come here and get attention from these girls.” This is one place where the classes meet, where the only thing important is the color of your money. Because it’s not just the mechanics and the taporis; it’s also the rich traders and merchants of South Bombay, who are surrounded by men during the day and by their fat wives in the evening. This might be the only place in their lives where they can look directly at beautiful young girls, young enough to be their daughters. The moment the customer walks in, he’s the star in his own custom-made Hindi movie song. No matter how old or ugly or fat he is, for the two hours he’s in the bar he’s a movie star, he’s Shahrukh Khan. The customer inhabits the song being sung; he will sing along to the music, throwing back his head, moving his arms, singing to his girl, who has assumed the female role in the duet. Moving her body in the dance motions of the original video, she is lip-synching along with the song. It is an easy deception; the movie songs are all playback anyway. So the customer, in the midst of a hundred other men just like him, can sustain an illusion of individuality.
VINOD CHOPRA, the movie director, says he wants to go to the beer bars to research a film on the city. He has never been, so I arrange, one night, to take him. Paresh, the guide Mustafa has arranged, is waiting for us around nine. He is a bar-code printer, a fat man with tobacco-stained teeth. The bar Paresh takes us to, Dilbar, is a low small room on the second floor of a building, in a lane off Grant Road. Among the dancers, there is one who has a heavier tread than the others. She is taller, thicker built, and fairer, has a pleasant face, and hardly dances. “That’s Honey,” Paresh says.
I first heard about Honey, the most famous dancer in all of Bombay, from Naeem Husain, the crime reporter. Husain knew Honey’s great secret: “She is actually a he.” Vinod and I are introduced to her, and I give her 100 rupees and tell her we are writing a movie: Could I talk to her? She is very polite, but when I say I would like to meet her outside the bar she adopts the classic Bombay strategy of the No. She says it will only be possible “next week.” She doesn’t want to meet now because her relatives are visiting her.
We move on to the second bar, only a couple of blocks away. “In previous days people used to come to Bombay to see the Gateway of India,” says Paresh, as a door is thrown open for us by a uniformed guard. “Now they come to see Sapphire.”
Sapphire! It was another world in my childhood. As I step in through the door, I am hungry, salivating for food I no longer eat: tandoori chicken. This was where my father would take us on Sundays, all through my boyhood, to feast on that most delicious red-pink flesh, so fresh I fancied I heard the clucking of the birds being slaughtered in the kitchen. GRADE I EATING HOUSE the sign at the entrance read, in the middle of the shopping district of Grant Road. Afterward, walking along Marine Drive, I felt free to ask my father all the questions in the world—how planes fly and why Indira Gandhi imposed the emergency—and he answered them at leisure, with patience. Sapphire was the central event of those Sunday nights.
“It’s like a Hindi movie,” observes Vinod. We have walked into a Bollywood song sequence. There are two rooms in the front, each with a slightly raised stage, on which colored spotlights illuminate the girls dancing to movie songs. The chiffon saris the girls are wearing could have come from a Yash Chopra film, and the backless cholis from one by Sooraj Barjatya. The dancers are all doing movements they have seen on the big screen. Then there are three more rooms in the back: the theater hall, the VIP hall, and the large mujra hall. The theater hall sports sofas, with stadium seating, so the girls don’t have to bend down to talk to the customers and everybody has a clear line of sight. The VIP room is small and exclusive, and the sofas are arranged around the dance floor in a manner that permits maximum closeness to the dancers. It looks like my Dariya Mahal flat, all mirrors and gilt and European classical sculptures and frescoes. The mirrors are etched with drawings of maharajas being fed wine by nautch girls. When you sit in the mujra hall you might relax and stretch out your feet before you realize that your boots are resting on female breasts. Each table in front of you is supported by a sculpture of a woman with bare breasts holding up the glass table with her hands and knees. The clay breasts are large and pointed, like a minor range of hills. In between the halls is a makeup room for the dancers. Its mirror is lined with a row of stickers of various gods and goddesses—mainly goddesses—that the bar girls pray to.
IT WAS JAIMAN who had first pointed her out to me.
Jaiman, the first Marwari editor of Russian Playboy and a friend of mine from New York, had half a mind to take a girl from India back to Moscow for his magazine. He had been traveling around the country: Delhi, Rajasthan, and now Bombay. He wanted one girl, an exemplar of the sultry beauties of India, for the delectation of his Slavic readership. I had heard about Sapphire from Mustafa, and a couple of months before I went there with Vinod I had gone into the bar for the first time with Jaiman.
We had first noticed her when she danced to the Vengaboys’ remake of the song “Brazil.” In the middle of the more or less demure girls on the stage, there she was, the tallest, the one with the longest hair, the most dazzling smile. All the other girls blurred and faded, as in a movie when the heroine suddenly comes into sharp focus as she’s walking in a crowd of people in the street.
Jaiman was totally taken with her. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had seen in India and the only openly sexual one. “Fuck those rich Bombay girls, who needs them!” he had declared, after several nights of unsuccessful flirtation with rich Bombay girls. This girl had a way of turning her back to the audience, bending forward, and slowly rotating her buttocks that was a clear mime of sex, doggy-style. She was . . . presenting. Then she turned back to face the audience and flashed a smile, a teenager’s smile. She had big bee-stung lips, a high neck, large eyes, and a snub nose. Jaiman gave her 100-rupee notes and tried to tell her above the music that he was a Playboy editor and could he meet her after the place closed? She asked him to come back the next day; he explained that he was leaving for Moscow the next morning. In that case, she replied, they would not be able to meet.
But she was kind enough to give him her name. I will call her Monalisa.
SAPPHIRE, THIS EVENING, is standing room only. But seats are cleared right up front for us; some customers are told to move. This time around, Monalisa is dressed in a yellow sari and choli. She comes behind where we are sitting to talk to Minesh, another friend of Mustapha’s. He is a short, balding man in his early thirties, wearing glasses and a yellow shirt. She recognizes me from the last time, or pretends to, smiles, and says, “Hi!” Minesh introduces her to me, then points at my companion and asks Monalisa if she recognizes him. “Have you heard the name Vidhu Vinod Chopra?” Her mouth and her eyes open wide, as if a long-lost friend or sibling has just walked in. She changed her name so it could be the same as that of the hero in one of Vinod’s films, Minesh informs us. She rushes back to the stage. During the next song, she is not dancing, she is auditioning. All the other dancers are acting out an imitation of some actress’s moves. One is trying to be Madhuri, another Manisha. But Monalisa’s dancing rises out of the heat of her own body; she learnt dancing by watching herself in the mirror. Vinod’s eyes are on her. “If she were from Malabar Hill she’d be on top of the film world,” he says, appraising her professionally.
Next to her a young girl—but they are all young—in a blue sari and blouse stands staring back at the audience, not dancing, her mouth working at something; finally, a little pink bubble appears out of it, inflates, and pops. An old white man is making a lot of noise. He holds out a 10-rupee note that the girls are reluctant to touch, but finally one ends up taking it, more out of politeness than anything else. Adrift in his former empire, he is the cheapest man in the joint.
Monalisa comes back to our table. I lean forward, 100-rupee note in my
hand, and tell her I am writing a script with Vinod and would like to talk to her. She pushes away the money—the first time a bar girl has ever refused my money—writes down her number on a piece of paper, and gives it to me. Such is the magic of the movies.
MONALISA WALKS into the coffee shop of the Sea Princess in Juhu a few days later, and as she comes toward me every head turns to look at her, the men with lust, the women with hate. She is wearing a red Ralph Lauren tank top, jeans, and platform shoes; a lacy black bra peeps out from the straps of the top. Her chest looks tanned; actually, it has been reddened from playing Holi the previous day. Her hair is up and in a ponytail behind her head; she apologizes for it. “I’ve just oiled it.” She has woken up only fifteen minutes ago.
She says, “There is a girl wearing brown on your right. Look at her.” I casually glance to the right. “Do you see the man with her?” He is much older, plump and dark, with a mustache. They are sitting on the same side of the table, scanning the menus. “She’s one of the girls. We recognized each other as soon as I came in.”
She tells me about the bar she works in and its dancers. Sapphire has the best girls in the city, good sexy dancers, with good figures and height, fair, with long hair. Most of the bar-line girls come from the village; there are very few native Bombayites. They are brought into the bar line when they’re thirteen or fourteen by their parents, an older sister, or an agent; by the time they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re too old for it. They live in the areas around Foras Road or in Congress House, where the rent for a shoddy little room is an exorbitant 10,000 rupees and the deposit seven and a half lakhs, but there is safety in numbers. Three or four girls might share a room, an air-conditioned one. They all have cell phones and some of them drive their own cars. Most of them are saving money to send to their parents in the village, to buy a house with their earnings. “Behind every earner there are fifty eaters,” points out Monalisa.
The customers at Sapphire can be very young, just out of their teenage years, stealing away from home and without much money. Monalisa has no time to waste on such children. The next age group is the boys in their early to mid-twenties, “handsome, young, and good. These are the ones with whom the girls fall in love.” But she can’t be too public about her affection, can’t advertise her fealty. “There it all runs on ego. If a girl talks too much to a client he will think, She is mine only. He will take her for granted.” So when a bar girl’s heart is lost to a man, she had better not, if she is smart, wear it on her sleeve.
The whole idea of the bar line, she explains, is to make the client fall in love with her and to make him think she loves him too. I ask her how she does it, how she can make a man fall so in love with her that he becomes obsessed and spends all his time and money on her.
She tells me her techniques, the courtesan’s secrets. When she sees a man throwing money in the bar the first time, she gives him her full attention and smiles at him. (And there is power in Monalisa’s smile. It makes you feel slightly less shoddy than you have become.) “Everyone wants me as a physical,” she explains. “The first sight goes onto the body. In Sapphire, the customer looks at me physically, then looks at me dancing. They think I am very fast and hi-fi. I don’t mind. What can I do?” On the phone, each day, she will draw out his problems at home. “I throw tantrums, I tell him to get me this and that, just like a spoilt child.” After some connection has been established, “I tell him, ‘You will only talk to me and to no other.’ I take care of my customers like a wife takes care of her husband: I’m only yours. I’m only yours. I’m only yours.”
Somewhere within him the mark knows that in this town nobody belongs to anybody else, but he lets himself be lulled into the pleasant illusion that Monalisa loves him so much that she is jealous when he talks to other women. The bar-line dancers’ livelihoods and their safety depend on a microscopic knowledge of men: what makes them hard, what makes them soft. There is a chance that when a customer gets a girl, gets what he wants, he will stop meeting her afterward. He might then say to his friends, “I’ve had her, you can also have her.” So a girl might sleep readily with a customer who knows what he wants and will not be budged, and each takes what they can get. But she will not sleep with a “decent” customer, one with some scruples or gentleness to him, because she can milk him for a long time. Nice guys pay more.
If Monalisa doesn’t want to go to bed with a customer, she gives him exaggerated respect, becomes his friend, his sister, his daughter, till gradually he stops thinking of her in that way, in that hot way. She strokes him. “You have such a good nature.” He might be hot and heavy, wanting to talk about her body; she brings it around to his heart. “When he starts taking care of me like a little girl, I know he’s in love.” After a while, he realizes that Monalisa cannot reciprocate his love and inevitably breaks it off himself. Or she throws herself at his mercy, a little girl lost in the big city. “However strong a man is outside, with a girl he bows down completely.” This applies especially to businessmen, men who have to go into an office and be in charge of others, and thus become mature. She asks for his protection, and being a big man in Bombay he can’t refuse. He adopts her. You can’t fuck your adopted daughter.
If two of her regular customers turn up at Sapphire at the same time, she has to take care of them both. “I smile first at one and then at the other.” Monalisa has customers from all over India and abroad: America, Dubai. She likes the out-of-town customers; they are mostly mature businessmen, and they don’t constantly ask where she was the night before. She has to give them izzat, phone them once in a while, and give them her full attention when they come to Bombay. But she doesn’t have to waste her time on extended phone conversations with them every day, like the Bombay customers.
There are some girls who are popular among Arabs—who pay very well—and others who are popular among Malayalis or Sikhs, whom she hates because they say dirty things to the girls. Monalisa is especially popular with western tourists who come to Sapphire, who tell her, “You are so spicy!” Unfortunately, they don’t know how to spend money. They offer her $1 bills and she laughs at them.
The man most obsessed with her was a Maharashtrian cement contractor from Latur. There had been an earthquake there, and fifteen thousand people had died. He was tied to the government in some way; millions had been siphoned off from the reconstruction funds. Some of that money found its way to Monalisa. He came to Sapphire for six months, each time spending tens of thousands of rupees on her. Once he was in Hyderabad and he missed her sorely. He called her and said he needed to see her face. So he sent her a round-trip ticket to the southern city; she took the plane in the morning, met him at the airport, talked to him for half an hour, and took the same plane back to Bombay. For this one glimpse of her face he paid her 50,000 rupees.
The bar-line girls who want to make more money do private parties, which are generally held at private residences. These can be arranged in two setups: the Congress party, where you can’t touch the girls, only watch them dance; and the Janata party, where the public is free to touch and fondle, a free-for-all. Some of them involve stripping on a stage, with an orchestra, singers, waitresses. One night Monalisa was paid to take part in such a show on a boat sailing from the Gateway of India. She started dancing, and the men got up and started moving with her. They were dancing very close, touching her, putting money in her cleavage, in her waistband, sticking close to her. After one song, she fled from the room to the top of the boat. There were a couple of other dancers still downstairs. She saw that one of the girls was in a separate room, and the customers were all lined up outside. In two hours the girl took on twenty men, “some doing hard, some doing light, some biting.” All Monalisa got was 1,000 rupees for the one song; she is not a call girl.
Earlier, while setting up our meeting on the phone, Monalisa had told me, “I’m having an affair with Minesh. Since one year.” I think of the man I had met in the bar, a dweeb or nerd, and try to picture him with the magnificent M
onalisa. It doesn’t work. I can’t think of them together in the same frame.
“Nobody will marry me,” declares Monalisa.
“Absolutely, someone will marry you,” I respond.
“No, they won’t. Even if love happens, how could I enter his family? What if I went somewhere with them and somebody recognized me, one of the customers from the bar? People come all the way from Rajasthan and Bangalore to see me.” Besides, she says, she has no interest in getting married. “I am standing on my own feet; I am not living on anyone else. I never want to have to stretch out my hand toward my husband for five thousand rupees to go shopping.” Then she reflects, “No girl my age earns this much. I earn enough. I earn with izzat.” It should feel odd, hearing a woman whom most people would consider a prostitute say that she is earning with honor, but it doesn’t. “All the men give me izzat,” she says. Izzat is the most important concept in the bar line, more desirable than sex, more durable than love.
She loves Bombay properly. She flourishes in the city, as she could not in Delhi, as she would not in New York. Unlike the girls of Malabar Hill, where I grew up, Monalisa has no desire to go to America. “Bombay is correct.” In ten years, she says, India will be as free as America. Monalisa likes the freedom money gives her. She bought a Maruti 800, banged it up, and upgraded to a Maruti Esteem. She loves to go shopping. After she finishes work in Sapphire, Monalisa roams the discos of the city, often just by herself. “I do everything. I drink, I go to discos, I play pool. Everything happens in Bombay. I can wear any kind of clothes freely. How free is the life in Bombay!” As Monalisa moves around the city, she travels on her self-confidence. In a disco, if she sees a good-looking boy with a girlfriend jealously guarding him, she’ll make sure to go up to him as she’s leaving the club, grab him by the collar, put her face close to him, and tell him, “You’re so handsome!” She laughs. “The next time he’ll come alone.”