Authors: Suketu Mehta
In the middle of her sexy dances, Monalisa pauses to pray, and the men at the tables watch her avidly. She interrupts the gyrating of her legs, the thrusting of her buttocks, the collecting of lucre, to turn her back on us all and commune with her goddess. It is a shockingly intimate activity, prayer.
Rustom looks around. “It’s like a sweet version of a striptease joint.” All around him are men desperate for women. The fashion photographer reflects on his profession. “I thank God I’m in this line. God is good to me.” He looks upward, nods.
When Rustom drops me back in front of my building, I see a man that I’m pretty sure was in the bar this evening. He’s waiting alone for the lift downstairs, clutching his mobile phone. He’s middle-aged and wearing an office shirt and pants. “Now he’s going to go wake up his wife and really do his duty by her, after what he’s seen in Sapphire,” I say.
“I’m never going to get married in my whole life,” responds Rustom.
I
TAKE
M
ONALISA
to Rustom’s studio, so she can look at his work and be reassured that he’s not a pornographer. Marika, who is at this moment the hottest model in the country, is hanging out at the studio, looking just like a regular girl in a salwaar kameez. “You were in the Bhatti video,” Monalisa says in a small voice, in Hindi.
After we’ve looked at the photographs, as we’re walking out, Monalisa says to me about the model, “She’s also cut.”
“What?”
“I saw, on her arms.”
Rustom later confirms this. I’ve met Marika at least a half-dozen times, but I’ve never noticed the cuts. Monalisa knew within five minutes of meeting her. The bar girl noticed some tension on the model’s face, noticed she was talking a little too much, laughing a little too much. So she looked at her wrists. Later I find out the model’s story. She is the mistress of a married man with three children. For a year she disappeared; no one knew where she’d gone or with whom. Then she came back and retook the modeling world by storm: Her face, her light eyes, are used to move all manner of products. She is more than a mistress; she has married her lover in a secret temple ceremony. He is connected with the underworld and threatens to kill anyone who gets too close. So Marika stays true to him, out of fear or love. She will call a bunch of completely unrelated people to dinner
at her place, suggest they all go to someone else’s place, then get a phone call on her mobile and suddenly disappear for the rest of the night, leaving her guests shifting on their feet in a stranger’s house.
Her lover will never leave his wife, so Marika marks time on her wrists. There must be a citywide sorority of these women who’ve slit their wrists and survived, who recognize one another automatically. A sisterhood of the slashed. The top model in India and the top bar dancer in Bombay have this in common: Their arms are marked with their anguish, like gang tattoos.
O
NE AFTERNOON
, Monalisa comes to the apartment in Bandra, above Elco Arcade, that I’m using as an office. She is dressed very simply, not provocatively, in a striped T-shirt and black jeans. We were going to have lunch in a restaurant but she says she’s not hungry, and I’d had a sandwich earlier. We need a place to talk, so we go up to the apartment. I have to make a conscious effort to keep my hand from trembling as I put the key in the lock.
Inside, I offer to make her iced coffee, and she comes into the kitchen with me. As I put the milk in the glasses, she perches on the kitchen counter, her long legs dangling over the edge. I’ve had guests in the apartment before, but nobody has done that. It is an informal, spontaneous gesture, and I realize it has been a long time since I’ve been alone with anybody of this age. She watches me make the coffee with amusement. “You forgot the sugar,” she points out, laughing. By the end of the afternoon, the sugar bowl is nearly empty; Monalisa likes her coffee sweet. The next day I notice that Monalisa washed the coffee things and put them neatly on the counter. She would not let me wash dishes or serve food; it is not something a man does.
She has brought a gift for me from a recent trip to Ahmadabad. It is a cloth file for my papers, handmade in Gujarat, where she was born. Her mother welcomed her into the world by picking her up and throwing her onto the veranda.
The One Who Gave Birth to Monalisa was raised in an orphanage. Men would come to the orphanage to select girls to marry. Monalisa’s father came on such an errand, saw a pretty girl, and married her against his family’s wishes. They lived in his village, with his six brothers and their
wives and children. He soon started beating her, and his family beat her as well.
A year and a half after Monalisa was born, she gave birth to another child, a son. This caused jubilation in the family, since one of the brothers was childless. He spoke to Monalisa’s father, who told his wife to give up her newborn son to his brother. “My mother had no say in the matter,” explains Monalisa. All her life she had to live with the knowledge that her firstborn son was growing up somewhere in the village, and she had no claim on him. Monalisa hasn’t seen her brother since childhood. “I wouldn’t even recognize him now.” But the loss was soon made up. Monalisa’s mother had another boy, Viju, whom she was allowed to keep.
The family moved to Bombay. They were living in a slum, a zopad-patti. Her mother started having an affair with a man who was giving her money. When her father found out about his wife’s affair, he swallowed poison. His wife took him to the hospital and nursed him. When he got better he divorced her and left for the village, taking the children. Monalisa was five at the time. Her father’s family had a large house in the village, with buffaloes in the yard. She grew up playing marbles. “Even when I was a girl I would only play with the boys.”
“I loved my father a lot,” says Monalisa, using the past tense. When she was just a baby she had fallen so ill that her family made preparations to take her to the funeral ground. Then she sat up and said loudly, “Pappa!” All the time she was growing up, she was his princess. “If he saw a tear drop from my eyes he would say, This isn’t a tear, it’s a pearl; don’t waste it.” The women of his extended family, however, held it against Monalisa and her father that he was divorced and wouldn’t take care of them. They were stingy with food; the chapatis were counted out for each person before they sat down to eat. When Monalisa was ten, he came back to Bombay, lived with his wife again, and left her again. But this time he left Monalisa and her younger brother with their mother. He then married another woman and had two children by her.
“I didn’t know that my father would leave,” says Monalisa. He told her he was going to the village and would come back later. “When I found out my father had another marriage, I thought, He forgot me? The one who loved me so much? I will never go to my father.” Monalisa hasn’t spoken to her father in ten years. He phoned Sapphire recently; she refused to come to the phone to speak to him.
Her mother found a new man to keep her, to give her a flat. Monalisa remembers him as being good to her and her brother. Then her mother left him or he left her, Monalisa can’t recall. One day in the monsoons Monalisa was walking home from school along the divider on the highway, and she put her face up to the water and got thoroughly soaked, as children all over the city like to do. When her mother found out, she got furious, as parents will, but her fury extended to pulling Monalisa out of school entirely. Periodically, Monalisa’s mother has attempted to finish what she started when her daughter emerged from her womb. She went at her with a wooden ladle used to beat the laundry. There were marks all over her body before she started putting them on herself. For days the girl would not be able to get up from her bed because of the beatings. If her mother thought she was flirting with boys she would beat her. If there wasn’t enough salt in Monalisa’s cooking she would beat her. While her mother pursued her own entertainments, Monalisa was made to do the cooking and the cleaning; she was little better than a servant. By the time she was seventeen, she was so used to her mother’s beatings that she sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, with her arms around her knees, while her mother rained blows on her. At one point she ran away from home, but the police found her and put her in a children’s home. The experience there was scary; it was the only place worse than home. Most of the children came from the slums, and the young girls were supplied to politicians. Some, as young as thirteen, got pregnant.
So Monalisa, in her teens, stayed home when everybody around her was going to school and watched television when her mother was out of the house. Here she first discovered the world that was outside the slum where she lived, far beyond her savage mother, far from the father who had abandoned her. On the television screen she found a world of young people who lived only to dance. “I would watch MTV, Channel V, and get a strange feeling. All this is happening outside. I thought I should have boyfriends—not sex or anything—but I had a feeling I should be with them. I wanted to wear such clothes, shorts. I was very fond of dance. I wanted to be free.”
She started sneaking out to the dance competitions in the suburbs. Growing up, Monalisa was called “horsey” or “duck” because of her long legs and her height. But this now worked to her advantage; she came in first in one of the competitions, dancing to an Ila Arun song, “Resham ka Rumaal.” This brought her to the attention of the local lads. “There was a
line of boys outside my building waiting to look at me.” There were boys who kissed her, put her on their laps. When her mother found out, she told Monalisa she had fixed her engagement. The man was twenty-eight. Monalisa was sixteen.
Monalisa was told to go meet her fiancé for the first time at Nariman Point. She decided to come clean with him. She told the older man she had a boyfriend and begged him to tell her family that he didn’t want to marry Monalisa for his own reasons. But the fiancé did not respect her confidence. He told Monalisa’s mother everything. At this point the mother hit her again, savagely, and this time she was assisted by Monalisa’s younger brother. But during this beating Monalisa rebelled and spoke back. “I got mad and said I’ll
never
get married.” That was when Monalisa’s mother took her for the first time to the stage at a bar called Deepa. Since Monalisa would never get married, she would be put into the bar line.
When the first garland of 100-rupee notes was put around her neck, she started sobbing in front of the whole audience. As a Gujarati, she had been brought up to respect money; this was its shaming. But the other girls were nice to her. They showed her how to put on makeup. She soon got used to the bar line. The suburban bars operate according to different routines from the ones in town. There, a good dancer can make a “single entry”—she will be the only one onstage. A typical night for Monalisa would include two singles and six duets. In the suburban bars she had her own makeup room. She would walk into the owner’s office and sit on his chair; the owners smiled, indulged her. She started out in Deepa, then went to Night Lovers, Natraj, Jharna, Ratna Park. Monalisa had a reputation as a sexy dancer from the beginning. “I danced without any fear, bindass.” She also knows how to reveal herself while dancing. “To expose is an art. Open, but try to hide it.” In the bar line, she is thought of as being awara—fallen.
In Jharna a man in his forties would come daily to watch her. He was experienced in the bar line and a frequent customer of the top bars, looking for very young girls that he could treat like children. Every day he would give Monalisa fifteen, twenty thousand, and then one day she met him outside the bar. She started to like him. “He was decent with me. He took care of me like a little girl.” The man was a film producer named Hari Virani. His wife had jumped out the window of their sixth-floor flat, leaving him
two sons, eight and ten. He started giving money to Monalisa’s mother as well.
The standard euphemism for taking a girl’s virginity is nath utarna. A Maharashtrian husband, before he makes love to his virgin bride on his wedding night, will tenderly take off her big golden nose ring, her nath, the first person to have the prerogative to do so. The defloration of a bar girl has its own ritual. When a bar-line girl loses her virginity, it is called sar dhakna, the veiling of the head—the first realization of shame. It is stretched out as far as possible. When a customer is desirous of deflowering a virgin dancer, as Monalisa was at the time, he will first contact her mother. He will find out what the current price is; a girl like Monalisa would have fetched at least five lakhs. If there is competition, the mother will try to get a little bidding action going, advising the customer, “Let the girl grow a little.” A lot of shopping is done for the girl’s family members, sometimes over years.
Hari did not want to wait that long. One night, he asked Monalisa to have dinner with him at the Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel and to phone her mother and tell her that she would be late. When she got there, she found he had booked a room. He got on top of her. She was very scared and asked him to stop. “I said, get down, get down off me right now. I don’t like this. But he pataoed me.” Pataoed—not rape, not quite; not seduction, not quite. More like a confidence trick. When she came home, her mother took one look at her and knew she had lost her virginity. “She knew from the way I walked.” She gave it away to Hari for free, she says, because she was in love with him. If he called in the middle of the night she would run to him. He talked about his whole life with her: how he would sleep on the footpaths when he was new in the city, how he rose in the film industry. He promised her a flat in Lokhandwala. He protected her, enveloped her in his power.
One day Hari paid Monalisa’s mother 20,000 rupees to take her daughter to Indore, where he was writing a screenplay. The scriptwriter said to Hari, “I like this girl.” First they gave her two bottles of fortified beer; it was the first time in her life that Monalisa drank. Then the scriptwriter asked her to have sex with him. Hari, watching, told him to do what he wanted with her. But by this time the drink had got to Monalisa, and she vomited. “Then naturally no one can touch me.” She must have been
incredibly hurt. But she had her revenge, a child’s revenge: “Hari then fell in my eyes.”