Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  The Brabourne has its set rhythms. It opens at six-thirty for people wanting their first cup of tea. Then the taxi drivers come in for their break fast of “doll,” which is the Parsi way of saying dal, eaten with pav bread. “The afternoon is colorless,” as Rashid puts it. In the evening, people come for their beer. There is a huge cloth market nearby, and the cloth traders come in around seven. They talk mostly among themselves and live in the suburbs; they have a couple of beers here because they can’t drink at home. At ten o’clock, Rashid pulls down the shutters. “For a bar we shut far too early,” he says.

  Most of the customers are of a certain age. In the mornings, from six onward, the tables are taken by the longtime regulars, mostly Parsis and Catholics. One group of four or five old Parsi men has a favorite table at the Brabourne. They get very anxious if they have to sit anywhere else. If there is just one person occupying that table, they will sit at the table next to or across from it and stare at him silently. Or they will stand around it and crowd the usurper. “It’s a fetish,” says Rashid. Once ensconced at their table, they will discuss issues of the day with vehemence. But the first thing they turn to is the Deaths column in the Jam-e-Jamshed, the community organ, the chronicler of the steady diminishment of their community.

  Another old Parsi gent would come every afternoon at three o’clock. As soon as the waiters saw him sit down they would put three cups of tea in front of him. He wanted, for his own reasons, all three cups of tea simultaneously, with three pieces of brun maska. The brun maska he would dunk in just one of the cups. As soon as he got there, he always made it a point to put a 50-paise coin on the table, for the tip. Most of the Brabourne’s clients, who are more affluent than he is, do not tip. But this gentleman had been cheated out of his house; all day long he sat in the fire temple down the road and lived on the alms the devout gave him. So, observes Rashid, “this man dependent on alms knew the value of both giving and receiving.” The photographer Sooni Taraporevala had once taken a picture of him, as part of her series on Parsis. She made a print and gave it to him. He took a look at it and gave it back. “What for?”

  A City in Heat

  CITIES LIKE BOMBAY live at night. The day is a gathering-up of forces for the night. The city unfurls itself, luxuriously, after the sun sets, in the receptions, premieres, parties, and dinners of the night; in the beer bars, hotels, dance clubs, whorehouses, and alleyways. The night has no time; it is freed from the corporate rigor of the day. And the night contains sexual possibility: that man so fine in his jacket, that woman across the room lighting a cigarette.

  “When the Crime Branch people catch you, they first ask who’s your kept woman,” says Mohsin the hit man. “Most people in this line have a mistress.” Some of them end up marrying the kept woman. Only gangsters will marry them, and this is due to a common absence of honor, Mohsin says. “If I don’t have izzat, what is her izzat?” The gangsters are free, like the bar-line girls, from the conventions and restraints of honor.

  At this point his friend Anees, who lives on the fringes of the gangwar, tells me about the courtship of bar-line girls. “Bombay has every taste, every fetish,” he begins. The city is humid with sex. At bottom are the Nepali whores, who the bhaiyyas from North India go to, paying by the half hour: 30 rupees, 50 rupees. “They are for the public. We won’t even spit on them.” For the gangwar boys there are only the bar dancers. There are several hundred bars in Bombay, variously called beer bars or ladies’ bars or dance bars. In suburbs like Chembur and Malad there seems to be one on every block. In these bars, fully clothed young girls dance on an extravagantly decorated stage to recorded Hindi film music, and men come to watch, shower money over their heads, and fall in love. That world, which the dancers and the patrons call the bar line, is unique to Bombay, and for me it is the intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: money, sex, love, death, and show business.

  It goes this way: A gangwar boy might start becoming a regular at a bar. He might see a girl that he fancies. He might imagine himself protecting her from villains, or he pictures the girl nursing his wounds after a gunfight or an encounter. So he goes up to the girl on his way out and asks to see her after the bar closes. She smiles and asks him to come back tomorrow. He comes back the next evening and sits there and now watches only her among the dancers. She remembers him from the previous day, smiles once or twice at him, and he asks the waiter to garland her with 1,000 or 5,000 rupees. She dances a little faster for him, in his direction. He stays till the bar closes and then asks her again for her number. She asks him to come the next night; she will be waiting for him. And so he comes again and again to the bar, throwing a little more money over her head each time, till finally one night when he is least expecting it she quickly thrusts a piece of paper into his hand. On it is written the magic telephone number and her name.

  The next day he gets on the phone as soon as he wakes up, eleven o’clock. There is no answer or, in the case of the more modern girls, an answering machine. All morning he calls, until finally, at one or two in the afternoon, a sleepy voice answers. “Hullo?” And so begins their relationship on the phone. In the big anonymous city, she becomes an ear for him. She listens to his problems with his wife, his parents; she understands when his work isn’t going well, she worries when he doesn’t eat. “Had your lunch?” she asks him.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you have?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . a vadapav.”

  “You call that lunch? You just eat anything, don’t even take care of yourself.”

  “So I’m coming over and you make me lunch,” he might say at this point, trying his luck.

  “Not today, my brother is coming. But soon I want to make you a meal with my own hands. I don’t know why, I feel good with you. I haven’t found anyone that can understand me like you. Will you come to the bar tonight? I’ll be waiting for you.”

  And so, each afternoon, he talks to her on the phone, each evening he goes to the bar, and now when he watches her on the stage there is an intimacy between them. Of all the people in this room, of all the people in this city, she knows secrets about him. She is the only one who has asked him that day if he’s eaten. He sits behind the table stacked with his money and smokes and drinks and watches her steadily, watches the way her hips rotate to the song he keeps paying 50 rupees to the waiter to play, thinks about her lying in bed talking to him, thinks about that comment she made, that she’d just come out of the bath when his call came and hadn’t had time to put on any clothes.

  Each day now he wants to meet her outside the bar. “Let’s go to Khandala for a couple of days,” he suggests.

  “No. I like you a lot, but I’m not that kind of girl. I’m not like the other girls in the bar line.”

  He keeps coming to the bar. He keeps blowing money on her. He keeps asking her to meet him.

  “Not yet, not yet,” she demurs. What she doesn’t say, what keeps him going, is “Not ever.” By now she’s the centerpiece of his fantasies; he sees the way she’s looking at him in the bar, differently from the way she looks at everyone else. When she dances for other men, he knows she’s only doing it for the money, but when she turns to him, when she comes in front of his table, it’s quite clear she’s doing it because she wants to. Didn’t she say so herself, this afternoon? One evening he couldn’t come to the bar—the bhai had some work for him—and she rang him early the next afternoon and was almost crying. “Where were you? I was so worried about you! Your work is so dangerous. Always, always call me if you aren’t going to be coming. Otherwise the whole of last night I kept watching the door, hoping you would walk in. The other girls noticed, they kept joking with me about it: When is your chhava coming?”

  SO HE ASKS HER to meet him just for a cup of coffee, and one afternoon after he’s spent a lot of money the night before, after the notes showering from his hand have made her twirl in a frenzy that dazzles the entire bar, she agrees and asks him to meet her at the Heera-Pan
na Shopping Centre that Saturday. When he shows up, she is very happy to see him and tells him so. They stroll among the lanes of the mall, just a regular guy and his girl, just like all the other dating couples from Malabar Hill and Breach Candy, and he thinks he notices some of the men look in her direction and then look at him with envy and admiration. They walk by an electronics shop, and she squeals, turns to him, and says, “Oh, that’s such a nice juicer! You know, the doctor’s asked my mother to drink fresh juice every morning!” And so, gallant that he is, he will walk into the store and, without asking the price, tell the clerk, “That juicer. Pack it.” They will go into other stores. “That’s such a lovely shirtpiece,” she says. “It would look great on my little brother.” As a reward, she might lead him into a lingerie store and get the clerk to show them their most exciting underwear. She might deliberate over the purchases, holding the bra over her shirt, the g-string over her crotch, might ask him to admire the material, giggle over her naughtiness. The clerk has seen all this before, many times, and he plays his part well, showing them his most expensive wares, addressing the suitor with the respect appropriate for a big man, a ladies’ man. He orders Cokes for both of them, which take some time coming, during which she keeps making more purchases, so that every time the mark makes a move to go, the clerk protests, “But the cold drinks are just coming, sir!” The clerk knows he is too embarrassed to ask the prices of the items he is buying, so they can be made up on the spot; the next day the girl will come back with her wispy purchases and bargain hard over splitting up the spoils. But in the meantime, the suitor is thinking of her in all of these items, that red lace bra, those see-through panties. He is determined that tonight he will see her in them, and then he will see her without them.

  The shopping expedition might have cost him over a lakh. He will have to ask the bhai to send down some more money and, in return, he will have to kill or beat someone for the gang. On his way out, he says to her with urgency, “After you get off work tonight you’re coming with me.” This time he will not take no for an answer. This time she can see he intends to have his way or she will lose him. He will curse her and never come to the bar again, and neither will his money.

  So she will finally say, “Okay, tonight.” And after the bar closes, he will be waiting outside for her, and they might take a taxi to a good hotel—the Oberoi or the Taj or the Marine Plaza.

  Or, if the girl is more imaginative, if she has a poetry about her, they will do what Anees the gangster tells me they have done with him. She will use the birds.

  “You have to go to Haji Ali, to drink juice at one a.m.,” he begins. Haji Ali is the tomb of a Sufi saint, and there is a causeway leading off the road to go to his tomb, on which there is always a line, Hindus and Muslims both, seeking the blessings of the saint. Every year, on a monsoon high tide, waves wash some of the worshipers from the exposed causeway. The taxi drivers touch their lips and their hearts as they drive by Haji Ali. At night it becomes a juice center. When I was growing up, I used to be taken by my parents after an evening in a restaurant to Haji Ali, where we would sit in the car and a man would bring fresh juice to our car windows. The breeze that comes in off the sea from the west cools you, and the iced juice with a little masala refreshes you and is good for your health. I did not know then what Mohsin and Anees told me, that one of the people associated with the juice stand is a brown-sugar smuggler, dealing in very large heroin shipments. To me it was just a beautiful place to drink a nonalcoholic beverage.

  So at 1 a.m. the suitor will be waiting for the bar girl in a taxi at Haji Ali, anxiously scanning every person walking toward him, every car that pulls up. She might be late, he might think she’s ditched him and might start cursing her, but then finally she shows and she takes his breath away, she is so beautiful. When she gets in the taxi with him she is dressed in a miniskirt, and he notices how smooth and fair her thighs are. He smells her perfume. She is wearing something that leaves her arms bare, or she is wearing a sari and a backless blouse. She is not smiling now, she is not meeting his eyes now. She is watching the sidewalk for something, till finally she sees him: a man with a couple of cages slung over his shoulder, filled with birds.

  She gives the taxi driver a fifty and tells him to take a walk, go drink some juice.

  She calls out to the bird seller and he comes over. His cages have tiny songbirds fluttering about inside, with beaks of different colors. The dancer asks her man to buy some of the birds—six for 500 rupees; “If you want more fun take a dozen,” advises Anees—and the girl rolls up all the windows of the taxi and opens the door of the cage and all the birds fly out and fill the small dark taxi with their energy and their music. She laughs with delight and asks her man to play a game with her: Catch the birds. They reach out their hands to grab the birds, who are small and quick, and they have to wave their arms wildly about even to touch them. As the girl and her ardent suitor reach out to catch a bird, they sometimes, accidentally, can’t help touching each other. This is new for the man—remember, he hasn’t touched her up to this point. As a bird lands on her shoulder, he must make a grab for it, and if the bird flies off, his hand lands on her shoulder. If it should fly close to her breast, why, it is within the rules of the game that he should try his best to capture the songbird, which might just be that little bit too quick for him, and his hand, in its dart forward, might meet with something else, softer, harder. And so the whole of the tiny Fiat taxi is filled with birdsong, her giggling, his laughter, and, every now and then, a quick female gasp. And so it is that at last, at long last, the dancing girl and her patient suitor go all soft and hot in the back of the taxi, the space around them filled with fluttering and panicked songbirds.

  Half an hour or an hour later, the door of the taxi opens and half a dozen or a dozen dead birds are thrown out on the road. If there are any remaining alive, they fly out over the great dark sea, free at last.

  Monalisa Dances

  I started going to the beer bars because I was puzzled. I couldn’t figure out why men would want to spend colossal amounts of money there. On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high-class stripper in a New York bar. The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn’t have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.

  One night a young man named Mustafa, who used to manage my friend Ashish’s computer business, takes me to Worli. As we drive up the avenue, there are no lights outside the Carnival Bar. It is way after twelve-thirty, when the bars are supposed to be closed. But we drive slowly. A man sitting in front of the small alley asks us, “Hotel?” and we get out of the car, and other men appear and park the car opposite. We are motioned to walk inside the completely dark alley and I think we might be in the wrong place, but suddenly a small flashlight comes on at the other end and we walk toward it. A burly man salaams us and passes us on to the next torchlight. Finally we get to the back entrance of the bar. The door opens and inside it is ablaze with light and music and flowing with liquor and filled with people at 3 a.m., five rooms packed to the walls. There are about ten dancers to a room, dressed only a little provocatively in full saris and tight backless blouses. One or two of them have such young faces they must have padded their blouses. The men in the audience, Mustafa says, are diamond merchants and bankers. I think I recognize the fat man sitting next to us, one of my uncle’s friends, and he too looks at me a second longer than the generally accepted definition of “casually.”

  Mustafa worked in the stock market in the fat times. In the mid-nineties, subbrokers could make two lakhs a day from cheating a client, telling him his shares were sold at a few paise lower than they really were, pocketing the difference—and then blowing it away that night, as easily as it came, in the beer bars. The boom went bust, but Mustafa is still here, drinking his rum with soda and Coke.

  The customers literally blow money away on the da
ncers: paise udana, send money into flight. They will walk up to the dance floor and stand with a stack of notes over the head of the favored dancer. The notes, in an expert hand, traverse the distance between customer and dancer on air and fluff out, forming a halo or fan around the girl, enveloping her in the supreme grace of currency, its wealth adding immeasurably to the radiance of her face, exalting her in this most commercial of cities, till the floor is littered with rupee notes and the male attendants scurry around to collect them and deposit them in the dancer’s account.

  The more timid admirers will give their money to a waiter, who will shuffle it out over the dancer like a deck of cards downward from the palm, a more precisely targeted stream of paper, easier to collect and allot to the particular girl. Other customers like to play games. A dancer named Kajal plays the lottery with one of her customers. He sits at the bar with ten slips of paper, on each of which is written an amount of money. She dances and then picks one of the slips, and the customer gives her that amount; it could be anywhere from a few thousand up to 100,000 rupees. Another man is at a table, singing dreamily along with the songs. There is a pile of tens in front of him, which he holds up in the air two at a time, singing all the while and not even looking at the girls, who dance over, pick them up quickly, and dart away, like goldfish nibbling in quick jerks at pieces of bread you throw into a pool.

  You can also “garland” the girl of your choice, with a ring of plastic-encased 50-, 100-, or 500-rupee notes that is draped around the dancer’s neck and stays on her through the entire duration of the song you have requested. If you are annoyed at her, if you have figured out that money is all she wants, you can fling a huge stack of money at her face or, most carefree or contemptuous of all, not even look at her while throwing hundreds of notes back over your shoulder in her general direction, while smiling at the audience. Then you throw your empty hands into the air: This is how little the money and the girl mean to me.