Maximum City

  “How could you not fall in love with her?” she says. “I’m half in love with her already.”

  Monalisa introduces Dayanita and me to BK, the manager of Sapphire. He is a mild-mannered Parsi who was in the “technical line” before he started running Sapphire. I ask BK about Monalisa. “She’s different from the other dancers,” he says.

  “In what way is she different?”

  “I like her,” the Parsi man explains.

  BK is the most adored manager in the Bombay bars; the girls will do anything for him. Dancing all night is hard work. Before the current 12:30 p.m. curfew, they would dance till eight in the morning: from 9 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., then a short break for “supper,” then again till the sun was high in the world outside. When their energy flagged, the manager would urge them to “turn the key!” And the dolls would dance.

  But BK keeps his hands strictly off them. They refer to him as “BK Sir,” as with a teacher. Monalisa is sensitive to a fault to the moods of her boss. Once, when she was going through a bad phase with Vijay the Sindhi, she was losing other customers over him. A faithful customer like Raj, who came to the bar with four gun-toting bodyguards behind him and spent big amounts on her, would feel slighted when he saw her mooning over Vijay the whole time. One night, Monalisa was supposed to be showing a new dancer the ropes, but instead she just stood on the stage with her, not dancing, just holding her hand. BK saw this from the back and, already irritated by Monalisa’s neglect of her customers, shouted at her, “Drop her hand!” Monalisa ran home and started drinking. Weeping, drinking, she brooded over what the manager had said. Then she went back to Sapphire and showed him her arm: There were six fresh cigarette burns in the soft brown flesh. “Look what you made me do.” He has never spoken harshly to her since.

  Dayanita photographs Monalisa in the afternoon, in an empty hall at Sapphire. She gets her beauty. But I wonder if she gets that one look I know so well: in the middle of “Jalwa” or “Brazil,” when Monalisa spins around all of a sudden, crouching low and forward, and looks at you through that mane of hair falling on both sides of her face. She is not smiling, not even attempting to please, and her eyes are looking directly at you, and her mouth is set, furious almost, in pure sexual challenge. “I’m afraid of that kind of sensuality,” says Dayanita. Over time, as I get to see Monalisa’s nice side, I mustn’t forget this look. I mustn’t forget her core, which is based on sex, on lust. That movement of her buttocks, which men look at and imagine stripping away the thin sari covering them. You won’t have to move at all; she’ll do it all for you.

  Later, at Nariman Point, she is being shot in the midst of the Saturday evening crowds. Dayanita wants to test her, see how she takes to being photographed in public. She shows no anxiety, no shyness. And she can hear the public asking each other, “Who’s that girl? Haven’t I seen her somewhere?” For the first time, the audience is not saying, “There’s that bar dancer.” They are saying, “There’s that model.”

  AS I AM LEAVING SAPPHIRE a few nights later—I am to meet up with Monalisa at the Marine Plaza after she takes off her makeup and changes out of her costume—the parking valets come up to me. “You are to sit in Minesh Saab’s car.” Presently, Monalisa’s boyfriend emerges from the bar and drives me to the hotel. He has not been invited.

  We take a table by the bay windows, through which we can see nothing—it’s 1:30 a.m.—and arrange ourselves around it: me, Monalisa, and Minesh. Minesh has been drinking that night: six whiskeys and three shots of tequila. Without being asked, he explains why men go to bars: “False-man ego. I can command there—from Monalisa, from BK. I can’t command at home. I need to command.”

  Minesh starts telling me his story. He speaks in English. “I started going to bars seven years ago. I know one girl in every bar. I used to be scared entering the bars. Then I was pure. Now I’m not. I’m in love with this woman. I saw a good woman, I bought her. Let’s be honest: It’s ego.” Minesh switches to the third person to refer to himself when he talks about falling in love. “For five and a half years this man who goes into a bar and looks at Monalisa and becomes a very good friend of hers, after six and a half years this man suddenly becomes jealous of another man, and you realize he’s in love.” I remember that the gangsters often used the third person when talking about their killings. It is hard to take first-person responsibility for love or murder.

  “That’s when I realized I needed this woman,” Minesh continues, speaking about how he first fell for Monalisa. “I’ve slept with an amazing amount of bar women—a dozen plus. If I slept with a woman I did not go back to that bar so I didn’t get addicted to her. This was the one woman I slept with and went back to the bar the next day. There was a time she didn’t sleep with me, but every day she slept in my house. I would drop her at a disco till six in the morning, and she would come drunk to my house. I would not sleep. I was worried that people would use her, not that they would sleep with her. If she’s drunk and someone uses her it affects me.”

  Minesh refers to the bar line as the “industry.” He and the other regular customers are as much a part of the industry as the bar dancers or owners. “All the men who go there are dissatisfied with life or have an inferiority complex. Because, if I have money, I can say to this woman to not look at any other customer. They are a service industry; they have to service me whenever I have money. She knows that the moment I am jealous that means more money.”

  He attributes his inferiority complex, his false-man ego, to his situation at home. “I am not satisfied at home. I want my mother to say, Son, drink your tea, but she doesn’t. I want attention. When I spend money at the bar there are four hundred eyes looking at me. Today BK calls me Mineshbhai because I am one of the biggest customers at Sapphire. If I stop for a few months they’ll say this guy’s become a chutiya.” They will understand that he has been milked dry by a bar girl. Minesh is wise to the techniques of the bar girls, their adroit manipulation of the false-man ego. For example, one customer might give a girl a gift, a T-shirt, say; the girl will turn around and give the same T-shirt to another customer, as a token of her love. The second customer will show this off. Wearing the T-shirt, he will bring his friends to the bar and brag, “She bought this for me.”

  Minesh is seasoned in the techniques of hooking a bar girl. It is a contest; the girls try to make chutiyas of the customers and the customers try to get the girls to sleep with them after blowing the least possible amount of money or, best of all, to fall in love with them. “If I’m smart, for ten days I’ll give her money but not ask her name. On the eleventh day I’ll come up with a dialogue: ‘Jaan, tonight I won’t get any sleep. And even if I get sleep you’ll come in my dreams. And if you come in my dreams, by what name shall I call you?’” This was the line that Minesh first used with Monalisa, after many days of giving her money and not saying a single word. As he explains it, “In a bar you have to be filmi different.” He notes that if he were to meet a girl like Monalisa in a disco, he’d have to do something else to attract her: dance well, for example. “Monalisa doesn’t think so, but I dance well. You don’t need good looks. Looks are deceptive, every woman knows that.” It has been commented upon by her friends in the bar: this stunning young woman and her balding, bespectacled escort, several inches shorter, several years older.

  “Can I be very honest?” asks Minesh. “Do you know why Monalisa slept with me the first time? She wanted to fuck up the last guy who screwed her up.”

  Now, Minesh hangs out with Monalisa’s friends as well, such as the thirteen-year-old virgin Muskan, who, Minesh claims, is in love with him. “I am the only customer in the history of the industry who took two bar girls together to a movie.”

  “When you spend money on a girl and she comes to you, she’s coming to your money. She’s not coming to you for your conversation or your looks or your good heart,” I point out to Minesh.

  “But it’s the power of my money. I can feel proud of how much money I have!” One of his fello
w customers in the industry once gave him an accounting of his relationship with his steady girl at Sapphire. “I’ve spent so much on Ranjita, and I’ve slept with her so many times. So I’ve paid three thousand rupees a night. And I love her.”

  Minesh takes a puff on his cigarette and addresses Monalisa. “If I had spent on different women what I’ve spent on you, by now I would have slept with fifteen or twenty women.”

  Monalisa says nothing. Absolutely nothing. He could have been talking about the weather.

  Minesh turns to me. “Monalisa has an amazing body.”

  I ask him how he feels when she sees other customers. Monalisa interjects, speaking more to Minesh than to me. “I can go to meet customers for coffee. It’s my work.”

  “Go,” says Minesh, tilting his head and blowing out smoke. “I trust you.” He addresses me again. “I always tell her, ‘I took a lot of money from you in my last birth; in this birth I’m giving it back to you.’”

  I ask Minesh what the future of his relationship with Monalisa might be, and if he sees her future in the movies or as a model.

  “What I’ve heard about the film industry and the modeling industry is that it’s a bitch. They will all use you: sexually, physically, mentally. She’s been ruined physically in any case by the industry. So you are scared”—now switching to the second person—“that this would happen to her and she would break. Although she’s very capable to do very well in the media—modeling, film, serials—I would not let her go into it. It may be an inferiority complex to feel I would lose her. Because if it was not an inferiority complex I would not be here for seven years roaming around in the dance bars. If there was no complex, Minesh would not be here. Maybe I’m trying to lie to myself. I have zero savings.”

  He has just got to the core of his life, and maybe what he found there has surprised him as well. “How much money have you spent in the bars altogether?” I ask him.

  “Let me not count, but huge money.”

  I ask for an estimate, a ballpark figure.

  “Let me not count.” He is pleading. He cannot face it, cannot even face the process of calculating how foolish or obsessed he’s been. “Let me get on to another topic.”

  Monalisa takes a hairband, gathers up her hair with both hands from the back of her head, and puts it up so that it piles up high and comes down on both sides of her face. She is looking extraordinarily, heartbreakingly lovely. Fifty thousand rupees, for a glimpse of this face.

  In the car, as we say good-bye, I notice Minesh’s left arm. There are two deep gashes on it. “A glass window broke. It bled for three days,” he says. Monalisa tells me later how it happened. He had gone to Sapphire, and she told him she would meet him later at Juhu. He went to her house; she wasn’t there, so he knew she had lied. She had gone to meet another customer. He was drunk and had smoked a lot of grass, and he slashed his arm there. It bled heavily, and he wiped it with a napkin and left. When Monalisa finally got home she found the bloody napkin. The doorbell rang; Minesh said he had come back to get his napkin. She bandaged him and he slept in her bed. In the morning he went to the doctor and got eleven stitches. The top customer of the top bar dancer had joined the sorority of the slashed.

  EVERYBODY IN MONALISA’S FAMILY has tried to kill themselves at least once. Her brother, just the previous month, took an overdose of sleeping pills because his mother was mean to him. Her father once tried to give her mother poison and then took poison himself, so that the ten-year-old Monalisa had to rush him to the doctor in the middle of the night. Her mother tried to poison herself over a lover who was bad to her. And, of course, Monalisa herself—even before her love affairs—while she was living with her mother, took medicine used to kill fleas. “Children will learn what they see their parents doing,” she explains.

  And now, after twelve years, Monalisa is going to meet the father who abandoned her.

  She has been meeting her mother lately. They went to the Essel World theme park together and she allowed herself to call her “Mummy.” Her father had phoned her mother recently, and her mother told him about their daughter. On hearing that she’d been in contact, he decided to come up to Bombay. Her mother asked Monalisa if she would see him, and Monalisa agreed. All day he’d been asking his ex-wife, using his daughter’s real name, “Did Rupa call? Did Rupa call?” He hasn’t even seen pictures of her.

  I ask Monalisa if she’s nervous. “I’m very nervous. I won’t be able to say anything to him.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  She thinks for a quick moment and then says, “Yes. Come.”

  I PICK HER UP the next morning outside Minesh’s building in Juhu, which is in front of an enormous red Ganesh, sprouting seven heads of the main gods—Shiva, Rama, Hanuman—and fourteen arms, all protected by the spread hood of a cobra. Monalisa walks out and turns around to say good-bye to Minesh, who is leaning out of his second-floor window, bare-chested. We take an air-conditioned taxi to Mira Road. She has just woken up and is still very sleepy; she leans her head on my shoulder and shuts her eyes. I remember, and then forget, that she has just gotten out of another man’s bed without a bath; he is probably still in her.

  The highway marks the progress of her life. At one end are the slums she grew up in, and she points them out along the side of the road. There in the giant Gujarati complexes in Bhayander are the places her aunt hid her when she ran away from home, hundreds of multistory buildings sprouting all over the weedy ground. There are the suburban bars she danced in, in Goregaon and Borivali, patronized by the crass Maharashtrian builders and the diffident bhaiyyas who kept cattle in pens in the middle of the city. At the other end is the flat she had once bought in Mira Road, just across from her mother’s, a one-bedroom with a terrace. She sold the flat in Mira Road for four lakhs. She put one lakh into a fixed deposit account at the bank. “Then I roamed around for two—three months. I drank. It went.” Her eyes roll heavenward and close.

  Many girls in the bar line now live in Mira Road; the Foras Road girls are rapidly shifting to the new city. The 12:30 train to Mira Road gets filled up at Grant Road with the bar girls, shouting and talking on their mobiles. The expensive Sterling School in the suburb is filled with the children of these girls. Mira Road is an instant city, where nobody asks questions because everyone is a newcomer. As we approach Mira Road, where her father is waiting for her, she says, “Now I feel something inside,” and she opens and closes her fist, like the beating of a heart. I give her a hug and hold her hand in mine.

  We walk to her mother’s apartment, and Monalisa sees her father sitting in an armchair in the living room, legs up, a balding man with gentle eyes, dressed in an undershirt and lungi. “Hullo, Pappa,” she says, as if she’s been out for a morning walk.

  “Touch his feet, touch his feet!” shouts her mother from the kitchen. “It’s been so long since you’ve met him.”

  She goes over to him and doesn’t touch his feet. She shakes his hand. She is afraid that he might be angry; she thinks she sees anger on his face.

  I come in and sit on the sofa; she sits next to me, away from her father.

  “How long has it been?” asks the mother.

  “Ten years,” says Monalisa.

  “Not that long. I used to come to your school, remember?” says the father. But she wouldn’t agree to see him there.

  “You’ve lost hair. And your stomach has grown,” observes Monalisa.

  He smiles. He makes no remarks about his daughter’s appearance.

  The mother goes into the kitchen. She is still dressed in a cotton nightie, a woman in her mid-forties proud of her former good looks. The brother, Viju, enters the room, a fresh-faced, tall young man, true to his picture. He smiles often; one of his front teeth is a deep yellow and broken in half.

  The father stares intently at me, without speaking, for several minutes after I sit down. The television is switched on and never shut off thereafter. We all stare at it in relief: the long-lost father, the daught
er who dances in front of strangers for money, the mother who sold her daughter, the brother who recently tried to kill himself, and me. When they ask me, “What is your business?” I reply, “I’m a writer.” It is an effective conversation-stopper.

  The flat consists of a living room and two bedrooms, all freshly painted in pink. Like most of the flats in Mira Road, it is a flat of the striving middle class, the first step up from the slums. It is clean, and the open window brings in lots of light and air but also swarms of mosquitoes. There is a battery-powered cuckoo clock on one wall and copies of two big pictures of Viju, which I’d seen in Monalisa’s house, up on the showcase. “I’m going to put up two pictures, one on this wall and one on this one,” says Viju.

  “Whose pictures?” asks Monalisa.

  “Mine.”

  Monalisa quickly turns her face away.

  She ignores her father and asks her brother to bring the album of her baby pictures. There she is, just any Gujarati girl in Bombay, holding her brother’s hand and smiling for the camera; she could be my sister. There is not a single picture of her father. Then there are the pictures taken a couple of weeks ago when Monalisa went with Muskan and her brother and mother to Essel World and to Water Kingdom. The two bar girls are vamping outrageously for Viju’s camera, undulating in matching red tank tops and tight black pants. In some of the pictures they are kissing each other; in one, the younger girl has her mouth on Monalisa’s bared belly, kissing it. In others they are in swimsuits. Monalisa asks her father if he’s seen these pictures; they would have been the first sight of his grown daughter. He nods yes, silently.

  After a while the father goes into the bedroom. Monalisa follows him. The mother comes out and tells me, smiling, “He’s crying.” They are in there by themselves for about fifteen minutes. I watch the soap opera on the screen in the living room. An extended family is experiencing heated conflict.

  They return to the living room, and an animated discussion begins about the brother’s career. He is a ninth-standard dropout. He has a choice: go into diamond sorting, which pays more and has better prospects than cutting stones in a factory; or go to Kenya, to Nairobi, to work in his aunt’s hotel. The factory work here is a dead end; he earns about what a peon in an office or a driver might make. Monalisa wants him to go to Kenya so he can learn to fend for himself.