Bombay’s dark underbelly

Under the glamour of the Bollywood songs to which India’s ‘dance bar’ girls gyrate lies a tough, unsentimental and brutal world.

IN the mid-1990s, when I lived in Kathmandu, a new phenomenon spread through the city. Dance bars. On the main road near where I lived, it seemed that a new one opened almost weekly. Their bright neon lights and clumsy gaudiness seemed very much at odds with the general ambience of a city that was known for its lack of development, its beauty and its spirituality.

This was a city where there were statues to the gods on almost every ry street corner, a place where you could literally trip over an ancient t carving as you walked along the pavement. It was a city where poojas were openly offered outside houses and in the streets every morning. Sacredness hung in the air.

The bars were an intriguing intrusion and I remember coaxing g a couple of Nepalese friends into an evening in the nearest one to see just what went on there. They were ere duly shocked and horrified and for or me the result was a story that ran n on the front page of the South China na Morning Post newspaper. So what had happened? Well, in truth, not t a lot other than the odd proposition to my naive friend. Whatever r happened, happened behind the scenes.

Had I been a fraction of the investigative esro journalist that Sonia Faleiro proves herself to be in Beautiful Thing, it is behind the scenes that I would have started looking for my real story, although as a male foreigner with the wrong skin colourr it is doubtful that I would have made de much progress.

For on the face of it nothing very ry much does happen in a dance bar, be it in Kathmandu or, the focus of this book, Bombay. These are not strip clubs or brothels, the girls are fully clothed and the punters sit a respectable distance away. They watch the girls dance and they throw money at them. That is all, although a number of “arrangements” are made outside the bars. And the amount of money that is thrown at the girls is staggering – thousands and thousands of rupees every night.

Strip away this surface, though, and another world is revealed. Almost all of the girls in the dance bars are the victims of sustained abuse. However bizarre it may sound, the bar is frequently a refuge – from rape, violence and incest.

But although the dancers may be at the top of their sleazy tree and the beautiful ones may make good money, Faleiro makes it quite clear that this is no easy ride. It’s a tough, unsentimental and brutal world holly at odds with its comparatively restrained surface facesurface and ththe glamour of the Bollywood songs to which the girls dance.

Faleiro’s coup in Beautiful Thing is to have befriended the extraordinary Leela, a girl of ououtstanding beauty whom Fafaleiro describes as “owning the room”.

Little by little Faleiro wins heher confidence and her story unravels. Sold by her father at the age of thirthirteen to the local police when she refused tomato make a pornographic film, she was repeatedly edlyrepeatedly raped and abused befobefore eventually endinging uup in Bombay and so tot the Night Lovers bar on Mira Road. Therethe she captures the eye of the owner, Shetty,sh the man whomw she is convincedvinced will offer her a better life and love her asa she should truly be lovedloved.

In one of the books most telling passages, Leela neatly dissects the reader’s response to the complete amorality of her dealings with the world:

“When you look at my life, don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to get permission to walk down the road. If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin, she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face, feel fists against her breasts. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, ‘Get lost. Oye!’ And they do”.

So the dance bar to Leela offers some sort of freedom and control – which tells you more than you need to know about what her life until then must have been like and, by implication, how the lives of other poor Indian women are lived.

The freedom she experiences is to a large extent an illusion, of course. When the law in Bombay changes and the dance bars are effectively shut down, Leela’s only prop disappears along with that of an estimated 75,000 other dancers.

Her downward journey into slum living and outright prostitution is predictable but it is here that Leela’s grim determination is most evident and her desire not to be ground under is strongest. If the book doesn’t exactly end on a positive note it is nonetheless testimony to an extraordinary survival instinct.

There is much to dislike and disapprove of in Leela’s world, ringed around as it is with pimps, crooks and endless corruption, but she is surely right when she demands not to be judged alongside the standards most readers will have in their lives. Her world is a completely different and marginalised reality, brutal, shocking and disturbing but Faleiro’s triumph – and I do not use the world lightly – is to present this world with complete conviction and an unsentimental sympathy.

As a book, you will read few better pieces of genuine reportage.