Authors: Suketu Mehta
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 Monalisa. 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.”
Monalisa doesn’t consider herself beautiful. She thinks of herself as attractive, sexy. She volunteers her measurements: 32-28-36. She was at 1900’s once, the disco in the Taj, and even the film idol Shahrukh Khan stopped and stared at her for a minute when he saw her.
I point to her neck. There is a simple black thread around it, with the knot in front. “What’s that?”
“That’s my mala. From Goddess Meldima of Surendranagar Temple. I believe in her very much.” She keeps vows for her.
I ask her how far she’s studied. She says to the tenth standard, in a Gujarati school.
“You’re Gujarati?” I’m astonished.
She nods and smiles, showing uneven teeth. Her people are from Amreli, in Saurashtra. Her real name is Rupa Patel. I look at her in a whole new way. She is closer to me now. Very few of the dancing girls, but many of the customers, are Gujarati. Sometimes, one of her customers who is aware of her origins will put on the song “Dil Lagi Kudi Gujarat Di,” which is a paean to a Gujarati girl, for her to dance to. Monalisa and I have another thing in common: Both of us come from families who’ve made their living through glittery stones. Her father and brother are diamond cutters. Monalisa herself, for a few months, worked at a diamond factory in the suburbs, cutting rough diamonds “with oiled hair and dressed in a salwaar kameez.” It was not her style. She got bored.
She went back to Amreli once. I asked her what happened. “Dogs started barking,” she said.
She grew up in Bombay, in a slum in Kalina. “The one who gave birth to me put me in this line,” Monalisa tells me. She doesn’t say “mother,” which is a term she reserves for the goddess. Her parents divorced, and her mother, a waitress in a beer bar, brought her to the bar line at the age of seventeen. She hates her mother now, moved out of her house and spent six months living on her own, and has hardly seen her for three years. But she still sends her money, sometimes. She will not talk to her father, who is in Gujarat.
Monalisa has thought about doing something other than dancing in bars: modeling, for example, but she’s heard that you need someone to support you, otherwise you get exploited; they take you up to a certain
point and then say, You have to sleep with me; otherwise it will all stop. “Your world is like that,” she tells me.
“It’s not my world!” I protest.
I take out my mobile phone and dial the number of Rustom, the fashion photographer. I first met Rustom when I was considering renting a room in his apartment for use as a study; I didn’t rent the room, but I became fast friends with him, drawn by his cockeyed Parsi take on Bombay. He says he will come to watch her at the bar; then, if he likes what he sees, he’ll do a shoot.
I am finished with our talk. Then I notice the marks.
She has turned over a hand to get something on the table and I notice a row of slashes going all the way up from the heel of the palm, all across her wrist and to the crook of her arm. It’s the same on her other arm. I take a chance. “What are those marks?” I ask her.
“Those are cuts.” She looks at the marks. “Here I had eight stitches.” Then she points to a series of raised dots on her skin. “Those are cigarette burns.”
I trace the cuts and the welts with my finger. “Who did this to you?”
“I did it myself.”
“Why?”
“One was after I left home. The other was after my love broke.” She has done this about four times, with a razor blade. Her last attempt was three months ago.
“Why?”
“I was alone. I was bored.” Her veins don’t supply enough blood to her palms now, because they’ve been cut so often. Her wrist is scarred and pitted like a dirt road. She can’t lift anything heavy. One of her attempts was so serious that her hand all but fell off and had to be surgically reattached. She is twenty years old.
As we’re leaving, she says she lives a five-minute walk away. “So come home sometime?” I think about what this means. Is she inviting me home for sex? No, because then she wouldn’t ask me to come to her room. She would ask me to go upstairs, in the hotel we’re in. This is “come home sometime” in the best Indian sense: Come home for a meal, come home as a guest.
I tell her, “You come to my home sometime too.”
We walk out of the five-star hotel, and again all eyes are on her, and on
me by association. She has a way of moving her head—I’ve seen it before, in New York, among the young girls there—a smile and a slight forward and backward nudge of the head, African in origin. She likes being looked at, likes being noticed.
R
USTOM HAS A REPUTATION
in the industry. The girls love him. They sleep with him. Then they become his friends, and it shows in the pictures they allow him to take of them. He is at the age where the current generation of the models “is the last batch I can sleep with without feeling like a pedophile.”
I take Rustom to Sapphire to see Monalisa. In between the other dancers, Monalisa is a lotus among lilies. In the song sequence that’s being enacted here, she’s the heroine and they are the chorus line. She’s dressed tonight all in black: a black skirt and a black choli that covers her breasts but shows off her entire back. She dances hard, it’s hard work—swooping all the way down to the ground, the two halves of her body churning at different speeds, her navel the center of gravity, her long hair flying around her. This young Gujarati girl becomes, on the dance floor, an animal with not enough space to move, and every part of her body strains against, is energized by, the restraint: her legs, her buttocks, her chest, her arms, her lips, her hair, her eyes.
Rustom watches her and the others with the eye of an experienced ad photographer. “The shampoo guys would go mad over that hair,” he says about Monalisa. “She’s a young Protima Bedi.” But his gaze is straying to a girl in pink, behind her, who’s not really dancing. She’s more petite, and her chin has a dimple in it. “I could get
her
work tomorrow,” says the photographer. She’s what the ad guys look for, to sell to the great Indian middle class. “Sweet. Moon-faced, filmi-looking, nonthreatening. That’s what works with consumer products and Hindi films. Pleasant. It’s reflecting the times. Everything should be sweet and nice and happy.”
Monalisa, Rustom thinks, is the more attractive of the two. But that much energy is disturbing in an advertisement intended to hawk face cream or saris. Women would not react well to someone with Monalisa’s raw sexual power. “She’d be better in moving pictures,” says Rustom. “How’s her bod?” he asks me.
“I don’t know. I didn’t find out.”