Authors: Suketu Mehta
The college boys, said Monalisa, are better in bed. They get drunk, see adult movies, set up their own businesses, do things their own way. She likes their freedom from convention; she herself wants Rustom to take nude shots of her. As she is telling me all this, I get the feeling that the air conditioner isn’t working. As she is telling me all this, she has the cushion grabbed tight between her legs.
I tell Monalisa that I am changing the names of all of the people who might get in trouble from being in my book. “What name do you want for yourself in the book?”
“Why? No, no, no!” she cries, beating her fists in the air. She wants to be known by her real name; she has nothing to hide and is quite delighted that the world should know about her life.
I insist; I tell her there is no predicting what consequences publishing these intimate details of her life might have. So she suggests one: “Finalfi.”
“Finalfi? That’s a dog’s name.”
She says she hasn’t heard it before, so she likes it. It shouldn’t be a very common name. Then she comes up with another suggestion: “Monalisa.”
And that’s how Monalisa gets her name. It fits. Beauty, mystery, and a little bit of sadness.
Later, we go to Just Around the Corner, a trendy new cafeteria that Monalisa has been curious about. I am nervous. At any moment somebody’s going to recognize me and ask, “How’re the kids?” Monalisa suggests that she and I go away for a few days to the seaside resort of Daman—“with two or three couples,” she adds. She tells me she had missed me very much on Sunday and had gone out to catch the last show at Sterling. I don’t tell her that I was there too, in the audience, with my wife. I realize the chances were very great that we would have met and I would have had to explain my wife to her. It is now too late in my friendship with Monalisa to mention my family without some explanation. Nurtured in the shade, it has acquired the status of a secret.
Instead of Daman, I take Monalisa out for dinner and a movie. At the arcade in the theater, we play video games, shooting cowboys and racing cars. She gets samosas and two containers of popcorn, and we sit in the balcony and watch
A Bug’s Life
, Monalisa eating throughout the movie. She has bought lots of tokens for the video games, and after the movie we shoot some more cowboys. I try to be nineteen again, but I am always conscious of it.
After the movie we go to the Orchid, a new hotel near the airport, and wait for Minesh, who—with slow and patient wooing, after I pass up the opportunity to accompany her to Daman—is back in Monalisa’s life as a lover. The hotel has a waterfall in the center of the lobby atrium, tubes of water falling from a great height. We eat and make inconsequential conversation about the World Cup. I am beginning to realize that there is very little I can communicate to her about my world; she doesn’t know where France and Kenya are, has no wish ever to leave Bombay, go to the village, or go abroad. When I tell Monalisa I’m off to Delhi and might be meeting Vajpayee, she doesn’t say anything.
“Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The prime minister.”
“I don’t know who the prime minister is these days. I only know Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Mahatma Gandhi. These were the names that were taught to us.” She doesn’t ever read a newspaper, never watches the news on TV.
Minesh comes in, dressed in baggy shorts. He is thirty-two and looks older. He is losing his hair, and there is a curious darkness around his mouth, probably from tobacco. He went to a Gujarati school—“I am a vernacular boy.” Then he got a law degree but never practiced. Instead, he started a software company which exports to the United States; the previous year he traveled there four times. Minesh is also an amateur playwright, in Gujarati, and, like many amateur playwrights, wants to start his own political party in ten years. We talk in English, about technical recruiting and costing software and taxes, with Monalisa between us. We’re both hiding something: I’m hiding my family from Monalisa, Minesh is hiding Monalisa from his family. Only Monalisa’s hiding nothing. She has no family to hide anything from. She is sleepy and tired. She does not belong with us, I feel; she is young and beautiful and she should be with people her own age, young men filled with the same energy and lightness, men who have different uses for her, more innocent ones, than either of us do.
A
ROUND THIS TIME
, Dayanita Singh, a photographer friend of mine from Delhi, comes to Bombay for a shoot. She is supposed to be here only for a couple of days. Dayanita has a special rapport with sex workers and people of indefinite gender: eunuchs, prostitutes. I describe the world of the bar line to her and she wants to go immediately. She ends up staying in
Bombay for several weeks, following my friends with her camera. At Sapphire, watching the way Monalisa’s face brightens up on seeing me and the extra energy that infuses her dancing when she’s in front of me, Dayanita says, “I’m worried that she’ll fall in love with you.”
“Or vice versa.”
“That’s impossible,” she says. Why? I am about to ask.
“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.”
A
S
I
AM LEAVING
S
APPHIRE
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 fellow 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.’”