Authors: Suketu Mehta
“For Muharram, the bar is very quiet,” she tells me one day. “All this wrong work has stopped.”
“Why? Do you think the work you do is wrong work?”
“Of course it’s wrong work. Drinking in a bar is also wrong work.”
I ask her if she thinks Sapphire is exploitative.
“It’s okay as long as there’s a limit,” she responds. “It took me two years to understand this. A man comes into a bar when he is tired of his family, of taking care of his wife and children, and tired of the office. The dancers are buying the armaan of the customers. That is a very bad thing. Why can’t we save our money? Why do we have bad luck? Because we buy their difficulties.” She has misunderstood my question. She is telling me that Sapphire is exploitative, but of the customers. Whatever happens to her and the other dancers after that—if they should fall in love with a customer and he mistreats them—is deserved, because they have been exploiting these men’s human need for comfort.
“I get very quickly attracted to a person,” explains Monalisa. “I like Hari even now, because at least he took care of me for a few months.” Recently, Monalisa was dancing at Razzberry when she saw a familiar face. It was Hari. She went up to him and confronted him. “Hari, you ruined my life. You taught me to drink, to smoke. Whatever I’ve become today is because of you.” Then she stopped venting, because when she looked closely at the old man in the flashing lights of the disco, she saw that his eyes had filled up with tears.
Hari has fallen on bad times.
WARRANT ISSUED AGAINST BOLLYWOOD FILM PRODUCER
says a headline in the paper one morning. A nonbailable warrant has been issued against Hari Virani for failure to repay a thirty-five-lakh loan taken from a car finance company. I call Monalisa and read the item on Hari to her.
“I am happy and upset also,” she says, without gloating. She’s happy that he’s now getting back what he did to her and to other girls, but “I’m upset that he still hasn’t improved himself.” His pictures have flopped, she points out, and “he has left the bar line”—as if Hari were also employed in the industry, just as Monalisa is. In Sapphire, Minesh had also put it that way: “I have been in the bar line for seven years.” The bar line has a wholeness
about it that can envelop even the customers, so that it becomes their primary point of identification, at least in the dark part of the twenty-four hours.
She says all of a sudden, in English, “You’re my best friend!”
These days, she’s my best friend too.
Monalisa asks me, “Where’s your family? Do you live alone in Bombay?”
“Most of my family is in America. I have family everywhere: in America, in England, some in Bombay. My mother’s family is from Kenya.” I haven’t told her about my wife and children. I remember that Monalisa is still under the protection of the don’s grandson. She is of the shadow world; I keep my family insulated from such people. Hit men, dancing girls, rioters: As far as they are concerned, I live alone in the apartment in Elco, which is actually my office. If there is a problem later, if they decide to take a violent dislike to me or what I write about them, it is only me they can hurt.
“I never talk about my life with anybody,” she says. I am listening.
R
USTOM CALLS
, and we arrange for Monalisa to be photographed in his studio.
Monalisa’s car is a battered Esteem. The air-conditioning is out of order, and she’s driving it without a license. My seat is missing the headrest, and paint is flaking across the bumper. She’s driving with her bare feet, because when she steps on the clutch her platform shoes get in the way and she can’t depress it fully. I get in and notice the profuse images of the goddess.
JAI SHRI MELDIMA
read the Gujarati stickers. We drive into town through exhaust fumes coming in the open windows. It is powerfully hot this afternoon. But she is, as always, cheerful.
When we step out into the crowd in front of Eros Cinema, every single human being turns to look at her. I watch their faces, the men and the women; their heads swivel like spectators at a tennis game. Some are walking, distracted by their own world until Monalisa passes by them, and they suddenly do a double-take. I fancy I hear the sound of many cars braking abruptly. If there were dogs around, they would bark. She’s dressed in a light-green halter top. It must be her platform shoe—raised walk, the confidence with which she holds her head. We go into a café for a quick
sandwich. Here, too, everybody turns around to look, surreptitiously or involuntarily. Monalisa is amused. Even when she wears a salwaar kameez, she gets it cut revealingly. “Those who want to, can see. Those who don’t, lower your eyes,” she instructs all of Bombay.
In the studio, she is nervous and shy and giggly. Rustom has it all set up: two gay makeup men, two assistants, lights, umbrellas, props. Rustom tells her to take her bra off. But it’s not because he wants to see her boobs; Rustom has seen enough boobs to make an entire infant nursery coo with pleasure. It is because the marks of the elastic straps show up in the pictures. It takes at least an hour—an hour and a half for the women with the slightest fat on their skin, the “pleasant” types the regional ads need—for strap marks to fade. Monalisa complies and takes off her bra under her shirt. But then Rustom makes a more daring request; he asks her to remove the black thread from her neck. She shakes her head. A little later, the makeup man also asks her to get rid of the thread, and again she refuses. She’ll take off everything but Goddess Meldima’s token.
Rustom turns up the music in the large lighted space and begins shooting. In front of the camera Monalisa is not a good model. An assistant blows her hair over her face with a vacuum cleaner hose, which also blows her thread over her neck and chin, making it seem as if she’s being strangled or garroted. Under her black velvet top, I notice for the first time that she has a small paunch, a belly that has popped out. Her smile is crooked; her lips curl up at the extreme left of her mouth. The marks all down her arms can be seen clearly under the glare of the powerful studio lights. Rustom shouts instructions to her in English: “Play with your hair! Flip your head up!” I’m not sure she understands them fully over the music, and she is trying hard not to giggle. The music—Alanis Morissette, Phil Collins, assorted hip-hop—is not of her world, and nobody is throwing money at her. When the contact sheets come back, it is apparent that she has not tested well. Monalisa does not look like someone who could convince the great masses of Indian women to buy shampoo, refrigerators, or sanitary napkins.
A
COUPLE OF MONTHS
after I start meeting Monalisa, I am preoccupied for a month shifting my home and office to Bandra. I can’t return Monalisa’s daily phone calls. Monalisa goes crying to Minesh, who is still pursuing
her. “Suketu is drifting away from me.” She thinks she knows why, and she asks me when she calls one morning, “Is there anything you expect from me that I’m not giving you?”
I tell her there isn’t. I have just been busy.
“Every person want me,” Monalisa says, in English. It seems less a boast than a statement of fact.
She hasn’t eaten much the whole of the previous day: a club sandwich at Sapphire. And now her aunt has made her a full meal. “Have you eaten?” she asks me. I’m just about to, I say. “Then come here and eat with me.”
Monalisa lives on the ground floor of a middle-class building in Juhu. Her apartment has an outside room furnished with two faded sofas, which is never used except to take off your shoes. Inside is a kitchen, an Indian-style bathroom with a hole in the floor, and two bedrooms. There are no chairs in the bedrooms, so Monalisa receives her guests in bed. A television is always on and, next to it, a powerful boom box. The apartment is bereft of natural light; plaster peels from the ceilings, and the whole place badly needs a paint job. But Monalisa has her usual cheerful energy. She places the roses I have brought her on the headstand of her bed, next to a droopy stuffed toy gorilla. Her kitchen has a large shrine devoted to the goddess, with a fresh garland of white and red flowers around it. Her fridge contains only water, cheese, and one bag of vegetables. In the living bedroom there is a stack of liquor glasses but no liquor since her last suicide attempt.
What happens when you enter the apartment of a single Indian woman for the first time? She shows you photographs of her family. There are two little pictures of her kid brother Viju, a fair-skinned young boy. Monalisa loves Viju, who is seventeen, almost six feet tall, and with a good physique; she thinks he should be a model. He has left college and is in and out of work as a diamond cutter. He is aware of what Monalisa does for a living and meets her secretly on Sunday afternoons, telling his mother he is going out with his friends. He comes to her flat and watches television, and she feeds him chicken biryani. If her mother finds out, she will want to come too. Sunday is family day for the patrons of Sapphire; they spend the day in their legitimate households. Therefore, it is a day of rest for the bar girls.
Her brother is just about the only family that Monalisa keeps in touch with. Her relatives in the village, including her other brother—the one who was given up to her uncle at birth—think she’s married and know nothing about what she does for a living. This is one of the reasons she
stays away from her father as well: “so they don’t find out.” She won’t go back to her village. But the bar provides its substitute family. On top of the TV is a picture of Monalisa hugging a younger girl on a beach. “That’s my daughter.” It is Muskan, the girl Monalisa has “adopted,” in the bar-line way. Muskan is a dancer in Sapphire from Indore, and she is thirteen years old. She is one of the four remaining virgins in the bar, and the other girls treat her like a little doll. Very soon, she will sell her virginity for anywhere between two and five lakhs, maybe to Mohammed the Arab, who has been coming to Sapphire for the last five years and buying the right to deflower the youngest girls. He once told Monalisa, “You look like an ice cream.”
When I am ready to eat she suggests we sit on the bed she sleeps in, and I prop myself up on her pillows and put my feet on the bed. She gets on and stretches out likewise, very close to me. I see her very long legs for the first time, in her very tight spandex shorts. She hugs a pillow and points out the bloodstains on it. “This is from when I cut myself. I haven’t got it washed.” Behind us is a telephone scratch pad filled with dozens of numbers, most of them beginning with 98: mobile phone numbers. Most of the men’s names have only a mobile number next to them; the females have land lines. Monalisa is the kind of girl men don’t give their home numbers to.
She had asked me if I liked my food spicy and I had foolishly said yes. It is the hottest food I have ever eaten in an Indian home. Baby chili potatoes, a spinach dal, chapatis, rice. In addition to this, Monalisa brings out two bottles of pickles. She spoons more chilies out of them on my plate, one green, one red. I am ravenous, and I eat—first with pleasure, then with pain; in the way, I imagine, any kind of relationship with Monalisa would be. I am not shy of spice—my kitchen cabinet in all countries always has a stash of habanero peppers—but this is beyond me. Monalisa, however, shows no signs of being on fire. “This is why they say to me, You’re so spicy,” she says, her long fingers mixing the rice and the dal. Talking about the food, Monalisa switches to Gujarati, the only time she uses the language common to us. Her Gujarati has a strong Kathiawari accent, but she is self-conscious about it. She prefers Hindi: Bambaiyya Hindi, filmi Hindi, tapori Hindi. Gujarati is the first language, the core language, and it is too intimate to be used between us, narrator and chronicler.
She tells me about how she discovered her own body and its pleasures. The girls in the village were no innocents; they had sex with eggplants, relations with trees. After moving to Bombay, after her menses, Monalisa
found that she was “interested in myself.” She remembers the first time she had a period; she was eleven or twelve. “I was sleeping. I woke up and felt very wet. I thought, What happened, who did this? I was very hot. I hated myself. I would sit the whole day: What happened to me?” Her mother, of course, had explained nothing. All she had taught her was fear. “My mother wouldn’t even let me sleep with my father.”
She would watch music videos on television, and they would affect her dreams. “My feeling would be completed in sleep. Then I used to get frightened, that someone was doing this to me in my sleep and impregnating me.” She actually went to the doctor once, when she was sixteen and had missed her period, to check that she was not pregnant from the vision in her sleep. Even now, she says, if she hasn’t had relations for a month, she will “discharge” in her sleep. “I sleep with a pillow between my thighs; even if it touches me lightly, I’ll discharge.” Lately, she has been finding that she can also discharge in the shower. It is an apt term, one I have not heard before in this context, like a battery stored for too long. As the electricity within builds up, discharge it or it will leak or explode.
Monalisa has a keen understanding of why sex for most middle-class Indians is such a joyless experience. “Here what happens is, the man lives with his parents. Then he goes into his family business; he can’t do what he really wants to. Then he has to get married to the girl his parents choose. There is no feeling. When he wants sex, he has relations in the same mood with his wife—as a bodily need. He discharges. When he finds a new girl, he has relations the same way. He might want to do something else, but he doesn’t know how. The wife also, breeding children, cooking at home, doesn’t know what life is like outside. They have to give when the husband wants, not when they want. Many women don’t know what discharge is. Their life is: They cook all day and watch TV at home. Even at night, in bed, all they say is, ‘Your sister did this, your brother’s wife did that.’” It is not a happy view of marriage. Monalisa has made the connections—why there seems to be such sexual unhappiness in the city. If all the other areas of a person’s life—work, family—are circumscribed, if the pattern has been established even before they are born, then when it comes to sex it will be similarly conditioned, its positions and its techniques preordained or hastily improvised in the darkness. A man or woman with a deadened brain could not possibly realize the peaks of pleasure that Monalisa and Samar, adventurous spirits in all areas of life, climbed so readily and so often.