Maximum City (56 page)

I get the impression that, along with her gender, Honey’s sexual life is also bifurcated. Manoj attempts to impregnate his wife in the day; at night, Honey goes with men in cars, smooches with them, and they rub against her till they discharge. Manoj/Honey is like one of those earthworms that are simultaneously male and female, at opposite ends. This makes her tremendously lonely. “I have been searching for a friend who does it for the stomach.” Honey is aware of others who want to be like her. There are two or three boys who put on ladies’ makeup—but still wear men’s clothes—and dance in smaller bars, going from one to the next, as a curiosity item. But they are gay boys.

I notice that Manoj is wearing a thread around his wrist. Eunuchs had recently come to his building, to bless his brother’s child, and tied the red string around his wrist to ward off nazar, the evil eye. The eunuch community has also heard about Honey and sought her out. One day the famously beautiful eunuch Sonam, from Kamathipura, came to see Honey dance in Sapphire. “She thought I’m like them.” Sonam asked Honey why she was wasting her life and suggested that Manoj should have a sex change. Honey wanted to know how Sonam had had her breasts enlarged, and Sonam gave her the name of a drug that induces lactation in nursing mothers. Sonam told Honey to inject herself with 250 milliliters of the drug; Honey doubled the dosage. After a couple of weeks two knots the size of lemons appeared on Honey’s chest; when she wore a tight bra it hurt. “I wanted to be in the picture line. I was possessed.” Manoj was afraid of what the hormones
would do to his sex drive. His family doctor gave him another set of injections to get rid of the breasts.

Honey has even traveled on a woman’s passport, which she obtained by bribing the passport officials. The passport photo was taken when she had no facial hair. But for some years now, she has been tweezing her hair for two to three hours every evening, which has left her face a mess of pimples and blotchy skin. She has a problem with ingrown hairs; the skin forms over the hair and has to be broken. “It is hard, like an eggshell,” she says, and every second day it bleeds. Her customers are beginning to notice. Honey has been getting advice from her eunuch friends to start shaving instead of tweezing. The eunuchs maintain that they have been shaving for years without getting a bluish shadow. So Manoj sends Jyoti out to buy a Gillette razor. Manoj says, “They told me not to shave upside down. What does that mean?” I tell the twenty-five-year-old boy the correct way to hold a blade, as my father did when I was sixteen, and always to use downward strokes on the face.

The assumption that Honey is a eunuch leads to some strange propositions. Once, a customer was giving her money every day for fifteen days. Then finally he said he wanted to talk to her in private. Oh, no, thought Honey. But the customer explained. “I want you to get twenty of your brothers and sisters and go to this man who owes me thirty-five lakhs. I need to recover that money.” Honey realized what he wanted. He thought Honey was a eunuch. If she went with her eunuch “brothers and sisters” to the debtor’s office, to sing and dance and curse and raise their skirts, the businessman, shamed in front of the world, would pay up.

Honey got very angry that she was being taken for a eunuch, but the customer was on to something. Shortly afterward, I notice the following advertisement in the
SERVICES
section of the classified ads in a Bombay paper:

A Matunga East address is given, and a phone number. By the time I call, it has been disconnected.

In December of 1999, Honey is finally allowed back into Sapphire. The new Congress government has a freer hand upon the city. The bars close later. Some don’t close at all, and Sapphire needs more dancers to fill the extra hours. Honey had made a promise at the nearby Hanuman temple that if she got back into Sapphire she would feed the hungry. A couple of weeks go by after the god delivers, and one night her brother Dinesh has a dream in which he sees fifty-one coconuts. So Honey and Dinesh go to the temple, offer fifty-one coconuts, buy 11,000 rupees’ worth of food, and drive around the city distributing it to the hungry. Thus does the money thrown on the dancers circulate around the city.

As soon as she gets back to Sapphire, Honey starts earning a minimum of 2,500 rupees a night, ten times what she used to earn at Dilbar. Since her return to Sapphire, Honey has been attracting new customers, not all of whom know about her. She has been threading the hair on her eyebrows, rather than tweezing them, and she attributes her new luck to this. For Honey, facial hair is destiny.

“Are you a new girl here?” the customers ask.

“Yes. I’m a virgin,” Honey replies.

I have acquired a reputation in Bombay society as the best guide to Sapphire. People pester me to take them there, and sometimes I oblige. Some are fascinated, some repulsed, others underwhelmed. An author asks me to bring Monalisa with me to parties in haute Bombay. I am to tell her what to wear, how to behave, what to talk about. My friends want to open worlds for her, guide her, protect her. There are others who would not be so careful. “She’s the Tendulkar of the dance bars,” a sports agent remarks. “Lips like pillows,” salivates a music channel executive. “You could drown yourself in the pools of her eyes,” rhapsodizes a crime journalist. They will not have so much self-control if I ever introduce her to them. “She’ll be eaten up,” I am warned by a society woman. Monalisa can deal with the
men who come up in the bar and give her money and tell her they’d like to fuck her; but she is easy prey for the South Bombay charmers, the ones she would give her heart to. Afterward, there would be another notch on Monalisa’s wrist, and this time it might be the last one. Her wrist has no more space to mark the ending of yet another love.

Monalisa gives me a pass to come to Sapphire for New Year’s Eve 1999: a small blue card with a white border. It doesn’t mention the name of the bar, only the address. A leprechaun straddles the lower border. “Entry strictly by invitation only.” Only the most favored, the best-paying customers will get these passes.

On New Year’s Eve, Sapphire is packed with lovers. Most of the songs being played tonight are maudlin, weepy songs from old films, songs that the men and their true loves think proper to express their feelings for each other, songs they have held each other to, songs that are not urgently throbbing with need but are about what the great poet Faiz identified as the true subject of poetry: the loss of the beloved. All the lovers here in this bar tonight will break up, in a month or a year or five, every single one. It is a palace of impossible love.

“We string along the ulloos till that night,” explains Monalisa. “We tell them, come on the thirty-first, and then we’ll go out with you.” If a customer wants to think he is special to his girl, he’d better be there on this night and prove it to the world, otherwise her attention will greatly diminish in the new year. The previous New Year’s Eve, Soni, another dancer at Sapphire, was publicly celebrated by Sajid, her main customer. He spent 900,000 rupees on her that one night.

Monalisa leads the way into the packed mujra hall, parting the waters. Space is made for me. Two cushions are moved, and the man to my left moves several piles of 10-rupee notes closer to him, some falling between the cracks of the cushions, some under the bolsters, and his hand is shuffling the stacks of currency closer so I don’t have to sit on them. For the first time in a long time I see Honey dance and understand what the big deal is about. It is not his looks; for the first time I think of him, in the evening, as a man. His belly is out and has a four-leaf henna design on it. He is wearing a wig and a veil over it, and his legs are bare up to just below his knees. But then I get to see his “knee dance,” and the illusion reappears.

When her song comes on, Honey gets down on the floor on her knees and swings rapidly around, from one end of the dance floor to another,
three quick turns on the knees, so fast you find yourself catching your breath. The whole room breaks out in spontaneous applause. Honey is by far the most energetic of the dancers. She is exhausted by one-thirty. She leans over and tells me, “I’ve been dancing since seven o’clock.” But she is getting garlanded with hundreds. That night, Honey makes 110,000 rupees, more than several months’ earnings at Dilbar. She says we must have lunch, and this time it’s on her. “I have a reason.” There is a pause, and her eyebrows go up; she is holding herself back from smiling. “Can you guess?”

“You’re going to be a father!”

“Yes.” His wife is pregnant. If all goes well this time around, Manoj will become a father before the year’s out. Honey will become a mother.

For New Year’s Eve, the girls wear outfits that cost them up to 100,000 rupees. One small dancer, Kavita, has a lot of jewelry on her head, 35,000 rupees’ worth. “Don’t you think it is a little over?” Honey asks me disapprovingly. I find it difficult to agree with her, since Honey’s own head is covered with a blue scarf fringed with gold balls weighing several pounds. And she has bought colored contact lenses with the outline of a flower on each one: “It’s soooo sexy.” Everything that night is “a little over.” Nobody minds.

Muskan is there too, taller than Monalisa, fairer than Monalisa, younger than Monalisa. Muskan has just turned fifteen. Should Muskan lose her virginity to love or money? There is Mohammed the Arab, and there is a teenage boy that Muskan is sweet on. Monalisa advises her that her first time should be with someone she loves—“but Raju is determined to break her seal.” Raju is a man living in America who has given her a lakh as a down payment on her virginity. He is fifty years old. Monalisa advises her to chill out for a year or a year and a half. To not go down that path at all. But Muskan is thinking. The man from America has offered her a lot of money.

In the VIP room there is a party of men from Gujarat with their whores. One of the whores is all over the men, indiscriminately. She is on their laps; two of them are touching her at the same time. She is dressed in a black sari. After a while I notice she is on the floor; she has fallen down. One of the men, in jest or anger, has shoved her and she fell forward, hit her head against the table, and passed out. A whole gaggle of the men take
her away. She might be unconscious; what will they do to her now? She would be around twenty. They will defile her.

Monalisa, too, is attending to the men from Gujarat, big thick men with cops’ mustaches. One of them is on the floor, dancing with her. “I’m earning well from them,” she tells me in my ear. But it is a delicate art; she has to dance with them and keep the money flowing without stimulating them to the point of madness. So her dance is inviting without being provocative; she is not rotating her buttocks in their direction. Every time they try to touch her, she fends them off with a smile. They follow her from room to room.

Monalisa has not made as much money as she could have. She is helping the other dancers with their saris and dresses and only comes out of the dressing room at eleven-thirty, missing out on two lucrative hours in the room with the group from Gujarat. Her collection at Sapphire is “not so good” nowadays; most of the customers know she is faithful to Minesh and there is no chance of anything beyond coffee. There are many other dancers with whom the horizon of sexual or romantic possibility is unlimited. So Monalisa tries to move up in other areas of the world. To get into modeling, everyone tells her, she has to learn English. She has hired a tutor to come to her home and give her English lessons. Her phone message is now in English. “You have reached Patel residence. Sorry we can’t attend to your call right now.” Minesh coached her, including the inflections of voice and the pauses. She sounds like a scheduled-caste receptionist now.

What is Monalisa’s future? What can she do after the bar line? I finally ask Rustom bluntly if she could ever get work in advertising. “I don’t think so,” he replies. “The face and everything. . . .” Monalisa is not going to be a high-fashion model. This face can stop traffic, but it cannot be in a Pond’s Face Cream ad. She has no college degree. Her English is weak. She could be a dancer in films or music videos; she would make in a year what she now makes in a week. This is where she shines: on the floor at Sapphire. But here she has three, maybe four years left before she’s too old or the bar line changes.

When Monalisa shows the pictures Rustom and Dayanita took of her to the girls at Sapphire, the reaction is less than enthusiastic. They are in black-and-white, which the bar girls do not consider an attractive set of colors. In the villages most of them come from, black-and-white was what
you got because you didn’t have enough money to pay for color. Monalisa tries explaining to them that these are art pictures. But she is increasingly alone in the bar.

I take Monalisa one evening for cocktails at my friend Manjeet’s, a large flat overlooking the Oval. Manjeet is a journalist for an American magazine, and the guests are diplomats and a lawyer. They interact with her with the manners of the well bred. Monalisa is struck by the fact that even though the people at the party know what she does, they treat her “as family.” This is going too far; Manjeet has only offered her a glass of orange juice and made light conversation with her, avoiding difficult topics such as her work. But for Monalisa, any kind of acceptance into these unapproachable Bombay circles is a huge gesture, and she is grateful to me for showing her this world. Here nobody is pawing her, scattering currency over her head, speaking to her with overt sexual intent. She has to go from this party to work at Sapphire, where immediately another dancer accuses her of wanting to steal a client the previous night—she had given him her phone number—and curses her in the most foul language in front of the other dancers. Monalisa gives it back, full-throated, and the screaming match almost turns physical—the bar girls occasionally bite, scratch, punch, and pull each other’s hair—before BK restrains her. Monalisa is caught between these two worlds, the one she aspires to but can never be accepted in and the other, which she wishes to leave but which keeps pulling her back. She is in transit between these worlds, and it is a damned lonely journey.