Authors: Suketu Mehta
The other dancers stopped talking to her. They wished upon her the ultimate revenge: that a customer would fall in love with her and stop her from dancing altogether. But Honey wasn’t so much interested in the money as she was in the performance itself, in hearing the customers clap and shout, “Once more, once more!” When she danced a full shift, sweating heavily, “I felt like I’d eaten a full meal.” Honey has since performed for celebrities as diverse as Steven Seagal and Chotta Shakeel. She has been to Nairobi for two months. She has customers from Africa, Jakarta, Mauritius, and Singapore. Honey was profiled in
Savvy
magazine and featured on the Priya Tendulkar show, but as a woman, a bar dancer. Her secret was safe.
Honey tells us about her breast operation. At the time, her daily collection was 35,000 rupees. But she thought that if she had breasts, her tips would increase, and she could get a break in the movies. “I wanted cleavage.” She used to tape the skin on her chest with bandages, to simulate breasts, and would get whistles. But when she took off the tape, bits of skin came with it. Manoj would change into Honey in the taxi going to the dance bars. She would put on her bra and stuff the cups with a handkerchief or a sponge. Sometimes she had to fill the bra with scrunched-up balls of newspaper, which scratched like hell. So she sought surgical intervention, going to the best cosmetic surgeon in India for silicone implants. When she woke up after the operation, she started screaming. It felt like there were two great weights on her. Now Honey had what she’d dreamt of: a pair of size 32 breasts. “Take them out!” she shouted. The doctor said she should be patient for a month; she’d get used to them. She left the hospital and got into a taxi.
Then the cab hit a speed bump.
“They bounced with such force, I had to grab on to them.” Honey directed the taxi to take her to another hospital right away; she was in pain and wanted her brand-new mammaries removed. When the doctors at the second hospital heard the name of the prestigious doctor who had put them in, they sent Honey packing. That night, the girls at Sapphire clustered around and poked at the sudden protrusions on her chest. “Honey didi, what is this? Tun, tun.” After weeks of searching, she found a doctor who agreed to remove them. Honey lifts her shirt and shows me the scars on her chest. His chest.
What Honey did had consequences for her family’s image in the community.
At one point early in her career, Honey was dancing in a bar in Ulhasnagar, stronghold of the Sindhis and a suburb where many of Honey’s relatives lived. Her uncle had a shop there. Customers of the bar told her uncle, Your nephew dresses up as a girl and dances in a bar. Her uncle spoke to Honey’s father. “Don’t bring your son by this lane in front of my shop. People will laugh at me.” Honey felt terrible about this, but she respected her uncle’s wishes and avoided that street. When Honey got famous and successful, this same uncle came to her to ask her for a loan of three lakhs, for another shop, and Honey gave him the money. Honey has also bought flats for her family and a phone shop for her brother Dinesh.
The bodyguard at Dilbar, a rather scrawny fellow, is in love with Honey and gives her 100 rupees a night. He calls her regularly and is very shy and polite. If Honey’s voice is a little deep, he’ll quickly apologize for having disturbed her sleep. “Did you eat?” he says, making conversation. “Did you sleep well?” He knows about her. That’s how Honey puts it: “He knows about me,” as if there is only one thing to know, as if someone who knows that Honey is a man who dresses as a woman has grasped the totality of her existence. That is the thing about secrets, and that is why we are so eager to know them. They give us, once revealed, a false impression of wider knowledge.
Some of the people who come to the bar think they know what is to be known about Honey: that she is a eunuch. Chotta Shakeel, the man who runs the D-Company, is one of these people. He came twice or thrice to Sapphire. Honey remembers a very short man, very respectful; he would never throw money with his own hands but instructed his boys to, a lot of money, after which Shakeel would ask Honey to pray for his soul. God has a special connection with eunuchs and hears their prayers. “Salaam,” the don would say to Honey. “Please do my dua.” But he would never publicly refer to Honey as a eunuch, because that would be insulting her credentials as a dancing girl.
Honey shows us a “portfolio” that she hired a photographer to shoot. First there are several dozen pictures of her as a woman, garish dresses and garish prints. Then there are smaller photos, of her as a boy. The difference is startling. The boy, Manoj, has a goatee and is dressed in jeans or a suit and tie. He is not overly feminine. “Two lives,” explains Honey. By day a man, by night a woman. What did this conflict do to Honey? It drove her to drink, drugs, and marriage.
Sarita Royce got the young Honey started on vodka. Drinking did not come naturally to her; she would shout at her father when he drank beer. But the vodka led to other kinds of spirits, till it became a need. Then one night, during one of the frequent dry days in the state, three customers came into Sapphire high. Honey asked them what they’d been drinking, and they came out with liquor bottles filled with Corex, a powerful codeine-based cough syrup. Honey took a swig; it made her pleasantly numb. That was the day she started on her habit. She was soon drinking eight or nine bottles a day. The bottles normally cost 30 rupees each; the couriers Honey sent out from the bar would see her drugged condition and charge 100. Customers saw this, and those who wanted to win her favor started buying bottles of Corex as gifts. This cough syrup is a favorite narcotic of the bar-line dancers; there are certain pharmacies in central Bombay outside which you can see a crowd of beautiful young women after one in the morning, all woozy from the medicine.
The drug screwed up her system. Long after she quit it, Honey had stones in her gallbladder and needed an operation to take them out. Midway through the operation, she started coming to. The anesthetic was ineffective on her system, trained on heavy sedatives like Corex, and the doctors quickly had to administer a more powerful one. The addiction undid Honey. She would, while dancing, lift the liquor glasses of customers and gulp down the contents. Meanwhile, her jealous mentor, Sarita, noticed that customers were deserting her own private shows to go watch Honey dance and were throwing money on her. So Sarita started spreading the story of Honey’s real identity. The relationship with her neighbor cooled; even now, Honey barely says hello to the woman who got her into the bar line. But the customers started making remarks, calling her a eunuch, a homosexual. They would shout out, “Hey, Chakka!” “Hijda!” “Gaandu!”
On Honey’s last night at Sapphire she was high on Corex and a customer began cursing her. “You don’t belong here, get out, you motherfucker.” She told the bouncer, who told BK, but the customer was not thrown out. That night she couldn’t take it anymore. She picked up a bottle and smashed it over the head of her tormentor, gashing his eye. Then she left the dance floor and packed her makeup. She had been working at Sapphire for nine years; she started working at White Horse the following week.
After Sapphire, Honey hit the Corex even harder. Every day, Honey bought 400 rupees’ worth of the cough syrup. Her mother and brother, alarmed, stopped giving her money, so she cut her wrist with a razor blade. But, she recalls, she did it below her building, among a crowd of people, so someone would notice and alert her family. “If I cut myself somewhere I was alone, no one would notice.” She laughs. The cut was so minor that when she was taken to the doctor, no stitches were required.
The personal history of bar dancers is written on their arms. Honey shows me another mark and tells me the story behind it. There was an Irani man in the bar, a loyal customer who professed to be in love with Honey and would blow as much as 40,000 rupees a night on her. One night, he was also spending on another girl, Sonali. Sonali was trying her best to woo the free-spending Irani away from Honey; she whispered into his ear that Honey loved him only for his money. So he asked Honey if this was true. Honey grabbed a glass, smashed it, and slashed her arm with the jagged edge. She said she would write “I love you” in blood on her arm to prove it. The Irani begged her not to further injure herself and asked what he could do to atone for doubting her love. “Go to Sonali and tell her to tie a rakhi on you,” Honey demanded. The Irani beckoned to Sonali and gave her 5,000 rupees to tear off a piece of her dupatta and tie it around his wrist, in front of the whole bar, forever making her his sister. The bleeding Honey had to listen to Sonali’s abuses, but the Irani has treasured that piece of glass that Honey cut herself with for three years now.
“So he won’t give money to Sonali now?” I ask.
“He will give, but not that much. A man won’t give as much to his sister as he gives to his lover.”
One day, at the height of her addiction, Honey’s mother and Dinesh asked her to come with them to Pune. They offered an incentive: two bottles of Corex. So Honey went and found herself, by the end of the trip, engaged to be married, to a Sindhi girl named Jyoti. It was all done in a Corex daze. “I was like a cow.” Her head lolls, slack, bovine. Honey has been married for four years. “There is no love with my wife. I know what is love, when you know what the lover is thinking, when the lover knows what you’re feeling.” Though Manoj is not in love with his wife, he does want children, two boys. “Because boys care for their mother more, so they will care for me.” Then she realizes what she’s said and corrects herself. “They care for their father more.”
I ask Honey if she has sex with her customers.
“The time I’m in my sex mode, I’ve got my wife. I’m satisfied with her.” But she will allow her customers, especially the good-looking young guys, some liberties. “I do smooching.” Then she reflects. “How strange it is, one tongue searching around for another tongue. It cleans out my teeth. I tell my customers, I won’t have to brush my teeth in the morning.”
“Do the men realize you’re not a woman when they get close to you?” I ask.
“The men are not in their senses. When a person is hungry he doesn’t care what he eats, even if it’s stale.” Honey explains the excuses she uses when she doesn’t want to talk on the phone with a new customer. She’ll pick up the phone, pretend to be her sister, and say to the eager caller, “Honey can’t come to the phone right now. She’s gone to the shithouse.” This image destroys a certain delicacy essential to romance, and the customer rings off.
Honey had no idea about how to kiss till she met the dancing girls. “One of these bitches taught me. But then I didn’t like it. She was drunk, and I felt like vomiting.” But she has to give at least this to her customers, so she allows the customers to kiss her. Parked in a car, they put her on their laps, put a hand up her T-shirt, and try to remove her brassiere. She protests, just like a woman: “Not today, I’m not feeling well.” Not all of them stop at this point. Some men try to unzip her skirt from the back; Honey grabs their hand at that crucial point, just before discovery. They take her hand and put it on their erections, or they grab her by her hair and thrust her face in their crotches. “Some of these assholes, they are just dirty assholes. They just would rag themselves on me and discharge on me. You can make out a person coming desperately on sex and then stopping. Then they are satisfied.” Honey says she doesn’t let the customers penetrate her; but some of them boast to the other customers, “I’ve taken Honey.” Honey doesn’t mind. “This is good for me. Then four more people say, Take me around in your car.” It is the life of a man constantly teasing other men, constantly fending them off at the last moment.
Monalisa and Honey have no sweet men, no protectors. This has put Honey, especially, in some very dangerous situations. The most notorious customer of the bars, the sabertooth tiger of the dancers’ nightmares, is a man named Mehmood. All the girls know about him. Honey says, “He would have sex with them and then burn them with cigarettes on that particular
place. He put needles inside. He was a maniac type, a sex maniac.” There was a girl in Congress House that he loved; he would piss in her mouth to show his love. He had a daughter with this girl, and the mother ran off to Dubai. When the daughter came of age, he took her to Congress House in revenge.
One day Mehmood asked Honey to come out to Chembur for a private party. “He was a Muslim,” begins Honey. “You know how these Muslims are.” Among Honey’s customers, Gujaratis and Marwaris are the most free-spending, because they come from rich families. “Muslims are the most rough. They are the real motherfuckers. Assholes.” I remember that her family is Sindhi, partition refugees from Pakistan. When she got to Mehmood’s residence, his men were beating up someone they had kidnapped. They broke his legs with hockey sticks; there was blood all over the floor. After they had finished, Mehmood turned to Honey. “So you’re a dancer. Show us. Dance.” She felt threatened and didn’t want to. They insisted. She was in a chowk, surrounded by buildings. So Honey danced among the buildings, and all the people leaned out of their windows to look and threw coins—25 paise, 50 paise—at her. Then Mehmood took her into a hut and locked the door. He was going to have sex with her, he told her. Honey tried to fob him off. “I said, I’ve sworn on the Koran that I won’t do all these things.” So had he sworn on the Koran, responded Mehmood: that he would have sex with Honey. “He said, either have sex with me or with ten of my friends.” There followed an encounter that Honey variously describes as either a rape or a providential escape. Tonight, she says that she escaped by telling Mehmood she had to go back to Sapphire for just one dance, and then she would return to him. He let her out, and the next day she ran away from Bombay to a village.
But I later read the
Savvy
magazine article on Honey that claims that she was raped by Mehmood and then tried to kill herself by swallowing Baygon. I ask her if it’s true. “He came on me,” Honey says. “He would smooch me. He fell off the bed.”
“Did you try to kill yourself after the rape?” I ask, citing the magazine article. It features vivid descriptions of Honey trying to do herself in with a bottle of insecticide, cutting her wrists, and dancing in a frenzy on her knees till they bled. Honey laughs raucously. “Why should I try to kill myself, only girls do that. The day after the magazine came out, my mother and Sarita and I burst out laughing. ‘Whore! Rape! Rape!’”