Authors: Suketu Mehta
One day his victims got back at Mehmood. He had gone into Congress House to pick up a girl and was identified. The girls of Congress House covered their faces and surrounded him. Gathering strength in their numbers, they beat him up and made him drink from the gutter. At one point they even pooled their money and put out a contract on Mehmood’s life. The hit man fired on him; the bullet missed and struck his friend, making Mehmood even angrier. Then Mehmood did something that finally brought the police down on him: He raped a girl from a rich family. This was beyond the pale for the police; they arrested him, beat him up, and put him in prison. “Now he’s become a little cold,” says Honey.
“Everyone should have two brains,” Honey announces suddenly. “One to keep in the freezer when it gets hot from thinking too much. Then you work with the spare brain till the other one cools down.”
M
ONALISA AND
I
HAVE BEEN TALKING
to Honey in the coffee shop all night. We walk out, say good-bye to Honey, and Monalisa and I sit on the parapet overlooking the sea at Marine Drive. The city is just coming to life. The early morning joggers trot by. A beggar ambles along, and Monalisa gives him money. She gives every beggar who asks money. For the first time, I see the lights of the Queen’s Necklace being switched off, in sections, all along the bay. Monalisa looks at the waves under her feet and points out the crabs crawling on the rocks. She asks me, “Do you believe that this is Kalyug? That Kalkiavatar will come? That Shiva’s third eye will open?”
She believes the world still has another couple of hundred years before Kalkiavatar arrives and it ends “because there are still many good people left.” She doesn’t want to leave the sea face. She is happy sitting there and talking about the good people in the world and how the others can be pacified, and about how many hours we can talk; she counts them each time we meet, like I used to once upon a time with a girl in a faraway country. Each time she is amazed that we find new things to talk about. She is sitting close to me and the top of her bra is visible from her loose top. But she’s a kid. She wants to go to Essel World, romp with me in the waterslides. She sits on the seawall with the morning tide coming in, in jeans and a kid’s zippered top, swinging her legs over the edge, while I perch gingerly next to
her, looking nervously at the steep drop below. “I wanted to die,” she says. “But then I changed my mind. Now I want to live.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Nothing. My brain was not working.”
And then I understand why older men fall in love with younger women. It is not because of their bodies; that is enough for lust but not for love. It is because of their minds—new, clean, still not cynical, still not hard. They drink their newness.
H
ONEY HAS ASKED
D
AYANITA
to take pictures of her in Sapphire too, but BK doesn’t want Honey in the bar even as a spectator. BK will help his girls out when they’re in trouble, but he will not forgive Honey. Honey is heartbroken. She swears she’s off the Corex and the chewing tobacco. She won’t drink the customer’s pegs anymore. She’s apologized for her past mistakes; why won’t BK take her back? But I get the feeling that none of this has anything to do with why she can’t go back to Sapphire. “You should have seen her five years ago,” BK says to me. “Nobody could have guessed she wasn’t a woman.”
So Honey invites us home one afternoon, Monalisa, Dayanita, and me, to meet her wife, and have Dayanita take pictures. Honey’s apartment building is next to the zoo. At 4 a.m., she can hear lions roar and owls hoot. It is a handsome old building, built by the inventor of Afghan Snow, a face cream reputed to turn dark complexions into fair ones. Honey owns a row of rooms in the building. One is for her mother, one for her brother, one for herself and her wife, and one for her grandmother. The rooms are connected by doors that are always kept shut, so traffic between the rooms is through the long lobby outside. Honey spends the days in her room, which is dark and cool, eating lunch, receiving visitors, watching television. The suite has a bathroom, a living room with a daybed on which Manoj and his wife sleep, and a balcony that is half kitchen and half prayer room. There are posters of two fat white babies on one wall.
Manoj sits on the bed now in a black buttoned T-shirt and jeans. The only trace of Honey is long hair tied behind the neck, and nail polish, and bad skin around the face where the hair has been tweezed. Even the voice has come down, an octave or two. Manoj shows me an album of his
brother’s wedding in 1995. There is Honey, being hugged by Pervez, the owner of Sapphire; and there, he points out, are many of the bar’s customers. They paid for the wedding, so Honey came to the ceremony, not Manoj.
I ask him, “Did you also go to your own wedding as Honey?”
“No, as Manoj. Does Honey want to die, getting married?”
His wife, Jyoti, comes into the room, a tall, fair, good-looking Sindhi woman in her early twenties. She doesn’t say much; she is not so much shy as quiet. Manoj and Jyoti are not an entirely harmonious couple; there is a distance between them. “If she gives me a suggestion, and my friend gives me the same suggestion, I’ll listen to my friend’s suggestion,” Manoj had told me earlier.
There was somebody in Manoj’s life whom he has alluded to only once: “There was a girl long ago.” She was beautiful, he says, and lived on Foras Road. Manoj met her before he got married. He and the girl would go for long drives, as far away as Khandala. After a full night’s dancing, the girl and Manoj would go back to his flat and stay over. “She was the only girl I told about my whole life, all that has happened.” They had some sort of a physical relationship: “Smooching and this and that we had, but no sex.” It went on for a couple of years, and then they broke off, because both families were pressuring them. Now she has two or three children and still lives on Foras Road.
Around five o’clock, Manoj is in front of the mirror, in his undershirt; his chest is still flat. Every day at twilight, Manoj puts on a padded bra and three corsets. But he has broken out. He raises his shirt to show me the rash, and I feel I should turn my eyes away. Then, for the first time in my life, I hear a husband say to his wife, “Hand me my brassiere.” Jyoti helps Manoj turn into Honey with patience and skill and what looks to me like love. She pins her husband’s blouse, ties his sari. She knows exactly what points on the wig to press while Manoj attaches the pins that will keep it on his head. Says Manoj, “Sometimes I’ll be talking and my glance falls on a mirror and I think, ‘Who’s this?’” So skilled is the makeup. So adept is his deception.
I am fascinated by how Honey and Manoj mark their boundaries in the self; how the dancer keeps the two personas separate. Among the customers who are aware that Honey is not a woman, half think she is gay, half think she’s a eunuch. But she is neither of these. Not a transvestite, or a
homosexual, or a eunuch, or a cross-dresser, but a man who dresses as a woman out of economic necessity. Her closest equivalents are the jatra or tamasha artists, the men who make their living playing female characters in folk theater, who spend their entire lives playing one female character, till the character takes over the life.
The people who know Honey’s secret make the necessary distinctions between her and Manoj. I am standing early one morning with Minesh on Marine Drive, watching Dayanita take pictures of Honey and Monalisa together. Monalisa leans over on the divider on Marine Drive and hugs Honey from behind, kisses her on the cheek.
“Are you jealous?” I ask Minesh, watching this exhibition.
“Not with Honey. Maybe with Manoj.”
Even Manoj’s family seems confused about his identity. I once ask for Honey on the phone, and her mother says, “She’s sleeping. Fast asleep.” At home during the day, Manoj generally dresses like other men of his class, in shorts and a T-shirt. When Manoj speaks to his wife in Sindhi, he never, even accidentally, refers to himself in the feminine person. In the bar, when Honey speaks to her customers or the other girls, she never, even accidentally, refers to herself in the masculine person. How are they kept apart, compartmentalized?
“Because I’ve never fallen in love. Neither with a woman nor with a man.” Manoj elaborates. “If love or even the hint of it had entered my life, my whole life would have changed.” If he had really been in love, he would not have been able to talk to his girlfriend as Honey. “I would have slipped into a man’s tone.” He would be talking to her all the time, even from the bar, and love would make it impossible to lie, to pretend to be a woman with his lover. Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable, and kills all the personas built on top of the true self. If Manoj falls in love, Honey will have to depart, killed off by Manoj’s lover. Jyoti poses no such threat, because Manoj is not in love with his wife. Jyoti actually helps Manoj turn into Honey every evening. I have a feeling that Jyoti might actually be closer to Honey.
The bar girls’ involvement with love is total. It is their bread and butter, their dharma. They often fall in love themselves, which Manoj can’t fathom. “Now Monalisa’s mind is half in love, half in business. I don’t understand these people. Love is the blade that cuts down the ladder toward your goal in life. I am not falling in love,” Manoj repeats. “In this
line we have lost our identity.” And a sense of your identity is essential to being able to truly love.
We go up to the terrace of Honey’s building, where the evening light is perfect for Dayanita’s camera. Monalisa looks stunning, in her simple black dress. Her hair is up in a loose bun behind her head, and Dayanita points out to her that she has an exceptionally fine neck. She glows, unfurls, under the gaze of the camera. After the shoot, she is ravenous and eats everything that Jyoti gives her. Jyoti is amused by her. “She’s mad,” she declares, “but the world needs a little madness.” I feel very happy in this little room, with its whole spectrum of gender and marital status, from me, the married man with two children; to Dayanita, who claims to be having a love affair with Monalisa and Honey; to Honey, straddling the territory between all of us, in no-man’s-land; to his wife, who wants to get pregnant; to the exuberantly feminine, unmarriageable Monalisa.
Monalisa and Honey are putting makeup on each other for the evening, and they are clearly enjoying the ritual.
“Is my face too white? Do I look like a ghost?” asks Monalisa.
“Put some brown on your nose,” Manoj responds. They are only going to work, but if you listen to their laughter and their jokes you would think they were going to a party. I feel a longing, watching them. Men never have this, this time among their own sex, this mutual boosting of self-esteem in the hours before a party. “Oh, you look lovely.” “Wow, look at that dress! Watch out, Bombay!” This time that is so often more fun than the actual party.
As it indeed is for Honey. Business has been very bad for her at Dilbar. “Yesterday I only had four hundred rupees,” says the former Queen of Sapphire, who in her heyday would take home a hundred times that amount. Honey attributes her poor earnings to the fact that she can’t, or won’t, have sex with the customers. “Other girls go for night problem, they’ll get.” BK is not returning her calls begging to be taken back, and she feels it deeply. The dancer that made Sapphire an institution is not welcome there anymore. “The main thing isn’t even money.” Honey sighs. “The main thing is: The way I used to dance at Sapphire I can hardly dance half at Dilbar.” An artist scorned, unable to find a fitting audience for her art.
Sapphire strings her along—or maybe she strings herself along on the expectation of returning to the scene of her glory. Honey is desperate, ready to do anything, even dance in the daytime among the faltus, the government
clerks on their lunch hour, the idlers, the men with lots of time and little money. When she speaks to BK or Pervez, they never say no outright to her. It is always: Wait. Wait till after the elections. Wait till after the third hall opens. Wait till the hours are extended. Wait till this inconvenient DCP is transferred. It is the established strategy of avoidance in the Country of the No, and by this time in Bombay I am well familiar with it. So Honey sits at home in the afternoon watching television and dances at night in the sorry nightclub, waiting for the call from Sapphire.
Surely all those men in the audience at Dilbar, at Sapphire, can’t have failed to notice Manoj’s sex. Is it this very fact that attracted so many of them and made Sapphire an institution? Has Honey unknowingly tapped some tremendous current of homosexual desire in the metropolis that needs to lie to itself about its origins, that can only pay to watch a man dance when he is disguised as an exaggeratedly feminine woman?
I had mentioned Sapphire to Sunil, the Sena man. “That’s where the eunuch works,” he said promptly. He had gone there and seen the eunuch do a dance to a song he still remembers. The great secret about Honey, I am gradually beginning to realize, is that her identity is not really a secret. Men will bring their friends to the bar knowing about her, and watch their friends swoon over her, and then kid them about falling for a man. Lots of people know about Honey: models, gangsters, taxi drivers, journalists. And they all think they’re the only one, or one of a select few, to know the secret.
Honey shows me a picture of herself at fifteen, in a short skirt with a fetching jacket over it. I would have gone out with such a girl. She is slim and attractive. She fits the accepted definition of pretty. But as Honey ages, she is outgrowing pretty. Her tread is heavier. There is a solid line to her jaw. She has put on weight, and there has entered an unsettling sexual attraction to her body: the way her belly button presents itself, a prominent gash in the center of the pudgy white flesh of her stomach. Most women are in a race against time: As they get older, they lose their looks. But Honey is in a different, altogether more desperate race. As Honey gets older, she is losing her very sex.
Honey and Manoj are at war over their body. Manoj wants to grow biceps, a beard, a gut. Honey wants breasts, smooth skin, an admirable ass. Honey is constantly trying to outsmart Manoj, aided by a retinue of surgeons in Bombay. She has started popping diet pills, three capsules at a
time, to become slim. “After having sex, after marriage, the stomach starts to come out,” she avers. But occasionally the desire to change runs the other way. Once, Honey ate sindhoor, the red powder put on a woman’s forehead, in the belief that it would make her voice deeper, more like what would be expected of Manoj’s. Honey cut her hair short about a year ago, when she decided she was going to get out of the bars for good and try to find work as a male model. She got a photographer to make up a portfolio, a set of pictures of Manoj. Then he went around the advertising companies to find work. But in the waiting rooms he saw the other male models: hunks with bulging biceps, aggressively masculine. He soon realized he had no chance in this world. Manoj could not earn a living. So he came back to the dance bars, put on his wig and brassiere, and called Honey back into his life.