by Suketu Mehta
The standard euphemism for taking a girl’s virginity is nath utarna. A Maharashtrian husband, before he makes love to his virgin bride on his wedding night, will tenderly take off her big golden nose ring, her nath, the first person to have the prerogative to do so. The defloration of a bar girl has its own ritual. When a bar-line girl loses her virginity, it is called sar dhakna, the veiling of the head—the first realization of shame. It is stretched out as far as possible. When a customer is desirous of deflowering a virgin dancer, as Monalisa was at the time, he will first contact her mother. He will find out what the current price is; a girl like Monalisa would have fetched at least five lakhs. If there is competition, the mother will try to get a little bidding action going, advising the customer, “Let the girl grow a little.” A lot of shopping is done for the girl’s family members, sometimes over years.
Hari did not want to wait that long. One night, he asked Monalisa to have dinner with him at the Sun ‘n’ Sand Hotel and to phone her mother and tell her that she would be late. When she got there, she found he had booked a room. He got on top of her. She was very scared and asked him to stop. “I said, get down, get down off me right now. I don’t like this. But he pataoed me.” Pataoed—not rape, not quite; not seduction, not quite. More like a confidence trick. When she came home, her mother took one look at her and knew she had lost her virginity. “She knew from the way I walked.” She gave it away to Hari for free, she says, because she was in love with him. If he called in the middle of the night she would run to him. He talked about his whole life with her: how he would sleep on the footpaths when he was new in the city, how he rose in the film industry. He promised her a flat in Lokhandwala. He protected her, enveloped her in his power.
One day Hari paid Monalisa’s mother 20,000 rupees to take her daughter to Indore, where he was writing a screenplay. The scriptwriter said to Hari, “I like this girl.” First they gave her two bottles of fortified beer; it was the first time in her life that Monalisa drank. Then the scriptwriter asked her to have sex with him. Hari, watching, told him to do what he wanted with her. But by this time the drink had got to Monalisa, and she vomited. “Then naturally no one can touch me.” She must have been incredibly hurt. But she had her revenge, a child’s revenge: “Hari then fell in my eyes.”
Within a few months, the demands for money from her mother, who sensed a mark, increased beyond all bounds. So Hari, who had a keen sense about the proper duration of an affair with a bar girl, dumped her after six months, but carefully. “He thought I loved him a lot and was scared I’d do something against him.”
One morning Monalisa’s mother woke her early and threw her out of the house. In her aunt’s house, Monalisa had been going to the temple and giving money to the goddess, whom she considered her real mother, which upset the one who gave birth to her. Monalisa moved out, living first with her aunt and then in a rented 1,000-rupee-a-month flat in Byculla. That was the first time she tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists.
Then Samar came into her life and saved it. It was September 15, 1996, in Ratna Park; she will always remember the date. Monalisa had a friend named Adi, one of the many men she considers a brother. Over the months, I was to hear about many more of these “brothers.” The relationship is a safe and efficient means of neutralizing sexual attraction and is laden with myth and meaning in India. When Monalisa tells someone she considers him a brother, not only will he stop thinking about her as a lover, he will be obligated to protect her.
Adi had stolen his father’s car. He had his arm around his “item” next to him, and he took Monalisa and another young man out for a drive. Adi’s friend was a handsome Muslim boy, sixteen and a half, a year younger than Monalisa, named Samar. They were out for a joyride; they might drive all the way to Lonavla. As they were driving, a car came up fast behind, overtook them, and cut them off. Adi’s father emerged from the pursuing car, wrathful. He slapped his son and he slapped Samar, but he said not a word to the girls; he understood immediately that they were bar girls. Adi was dragged back home by his father, the other girl went to her home, and Monalisa and Samar turned to each other.
“We went back to my house and didn’t emerge for three days. We were in the bed nonstop for two—three months. We never got tired. Every day. Two—three times a day, and then at night, after drinking. Four, six, ten times in one day. We went at it like insane people.”
After three days Samar went home to get money. He came back to Monalisa, and the honeymoon continued; they spent their nights in the discos, in the pubs, just wandering around the illuminated city. He wanted to hear every detail of her life. Monalisa had stopped going to work. Samar had left his studies and his large family. Then one night—two weeks after they met—Samar took her to a bar named Sapphire. Here, she would be able to earn a lot more than what she was making at Ratna Park, he said. It was the soundest career advice anyone had ever given her.
“Even now I am very afraid of the world. If I had been alone till now I would have been ruined.” But by the goddess’s grace she found Samar. “I looked at Samar and found the love with him in one year that I didn’t find in seventeen years.”
Samar was the grandson of a man named Karim Lala, who in the seventies had been the biggest don in Bombay, leader of the Pathan gang. Samar had a way of talking, a kind of shaan, bravado. “You just see what I do in six months! I’m off to Dubai, and then you see how I make money!” he would say to Monalisa. It was a high-energy affair. “We lived like children, often fighting.” Once Monalisa fought with him and walked out onto the street, wearing her skimpy little clothes. Two rickshaw drivers saw this tasty bit walking down the street and approached her. They told her to come with them, but she felt threatened and went back up and told Samar. He came down, took off his belt, and beat both rickshaw wallahs into the gutter. “He is Mohammedan. They have that anger, and they want what is theirs to stay theirs.” He told her not to wear such clothes. But she was heedless. “He wanted me to dress like a Mohammedan; I said, I’m Gujarati.” She didn’t compromise even during the one time she met Samar’s parents. It was at his sister’s wedding. She was dressed in a black sari and a tiny blouse. After she passed, his father turned to Samar and asked, “Who was that madam?”
Monalisa met his sister, his grandmother. “He said, ‘I only loved my grandmother and then you.’” But there was no way Samar’s family would accept Monalisa, so Samar did what very few customers ever do: He moved out of his house and lived with her. His family hated her for this. He didn’t tell them about her work. “If they had found out I was a bar-line girl, they wouldn’t have let him live, so he had to lie.” When he moved in with her—she bought a flat in Mira Road for them to live together—she also supported him. For Samar had no income. He was only a teenager.
One night they went to Madh Island for a rave, and they were drinking and dancing on the beach. Going back early in the morning, they passed by a lane, and Monalisa pointed down it, telling Samar, “This is my home.” Her mother lived there. Samar decided he would go with her to meet her mother. When they showed up at her house, her mother threatened to call the police; Monalisa was still a minor and could be forced to go back home. Then Samar spoke up. He told her to leave Monalisa alone and to deal with him directly. For the first time in her life, Monalisa had found someone who would protect her from her mother, stand up to her bullying.
She got pregnant by Samar, more than once. She tried various home remedies: eating papayas, drinking hot pepper water with jaggery and then having very hard sex till the bleeding started. At one point she was three and a half months pregnant. She was prepared to have it, but she miscarried while dancing. “I cried a lot. I wanted the child.” But after a few months of living together, Monalisa left Samar. She is frank about the cause: “Because he wasn’t earning. I told Samar, I want the money that you’ve earned, not the money your father has earned.” She wanted to leave the bar line, and Samar was not her exit ticket.
They still speak on the
phone, but she doesn’t go to meet him. Every year, a couple of months before her birthday in October, he’ll ask Monalisa what she wants for a gift and save up to buy her a gold chain or locket. He asks her, “If I start earning, will you marry me?” She won’t. “I can’t marry Samar now because I stayed with him for one and a half years and then went with another. The thing that was his then belonged to someone else. I fell in my own eyes.” She feels soiled by living in another man’s house, like Sita in the Ramayana.
ONE NIGHT after Monalisa broke up with Samar, a group of boys from Hong Kong came into Sapphire. Among them was a very handsome Sindhi named Vijay. He flirted expertly with Monalisa, and she gave him her mobile number. Vijay was a dance-bar stud. He had girls in every bar: Dilbar, Pinky, Golden Goose, Carnival. Like Samar, he too had a kind of style about him; he would grab a girl’s hand and flood her with his charm. He cried easily, and all the girls fell in love with him. One New Year’s Eve, a friend of his was giving Monalisa a line; he presented her with a rose. Vijay took him outside and beat him till blood ran down his shirt. “Any girl will think he loves her.”
And Vijay was an expert at playing games. When Monalisa phoned him, he would say he would call her back in half an hour. She would wait by the phone. Three hours would go by, then four. Then Monalisa would call him. Vijay turned the tables on the relationship between dancer and customer. He wanted to show his friends that he could get money from a bar girl. He gave nothing to Monalisa: “I never took five paise from Vijay.” At the height of Monalisa’s love, he told her he needed money. She promptly gave him 25,000 rupees; he never returned it. “I never asked, because I gave it to him in love,” said Monalisa. “He had a mind that could get money out from anywhere.” I came across many such stories, of bar girls supporting some deadbeat for years, because they had given their hearts to him. In the end, the biggest suckers—ulloos, dhoors, chutiyas—were the bar girls, and the people who made ulloos of them—lovers, parents, siblings—used the same confidence trick the dancers did: love.
Finally, Vijay left her for another dancer. Monalisa was devastated. After dancing most of the night she would spend the remainder of it at the discotheques, drinking hard. There were drugs, too; marijuana regularly and the filthiest of drugs, brown sugar, once. She would go home, cry herself to sleep, and, as soon as she woke up, have two or three beers for breakfast. Minesh, a regular customer at Sapphire, took care of her at that time; he paid her rent and gave her money to go to the discos. “He was my friend in a bad time.” And he was falling for her. She took advantage of this. She would get drunk, go to his apartment, say she was feeling hot, take off all her clothes, and go to sleep on his bed. He would cover her with a sheet without touching her.
Three months before I met Monalisa, she had gone to Carnival one night. Vijay was there with his friends, and she was talking to them when Vijay introduced someone to Monalisa: his new girlfriend. Monalisa talked to her normally, but her insides were churning. The drinking helped. She went home and drank some more. The next night, she was dancing at Sapphire and not feeling very good about it. “I was afraid of the future.” Abruptly, she left the bar and drove home. Minesh, who was at the bar, noticed. After a while he called her mobile. There was no answer. He called her home. No answer. So he jumped into his car and drove all the way to Juhu and rang her doorbell. When she opened the door, there was blood all over the floor; it had been three-quarters of an hour since she had begun savagely hacking at her arms with a razor blade. She was prepared to go. She had put on the song “Missing” by Everything But The Girl that she had danced to with Samar at the discotheques, the one she would request that the DJ play and call out publicly, to embarrass him, “To Monalisa with love from Samar.” This song was now playing over and over again as Monalisa, drunk, weeping, slashed her arms.
Minesh asked her to hold her hands up. Her veins had come out of the flesh. He opened the top of the bottle of RC, the whiskey she’d been drinking, held it over her arms, and poured the alcohol over her open veins. “I didn’t even flinch.” She took out a cigarette, lit it herself, and sat smoking, as Minesh called his family doctor, who got her a room at the hospital.
The first time she tried to kill herself, she could bandage her hands herself and then go to the doctor to have a plaster cast put on. That time, and the second time she cut her wrists, there had been no need for stitches. The third time, she required eight stitches. But this time, all her veins were showing and her hands had turned black. The hospital attached a heart monitor to her. The doctor was talking to her like a child, and injecting her with something, and sewing her flesh up. Forty-five stitches were required to close the wounds. Even now, three of her fingers don’t work properly. Monalisa had done a thorough job.
As she is telling me all this, she is taking puffs of her cigarette, shutting her eyes, lightly rocking and saying something to herself.
“Are you praying?” I ask her.
“I won’t tell you.”
Why does she do it? Why does she cut and burn herself?
“I was angry.”
“Who at?”
Herself, she answers. When she gets angry at a man, “when he doesn’t understand what I want, when he doesn’t understand what I need, I get angry at myself. Why is the person opposite behaving like this with me when I don’t take any money from him?” It is a term she often uses to describe her men: “the person opposite.” Since the person opposite is treating her badly, and she can find no reason for the bad behavior, the fault must lie with her. It must be her fault that he’s so selfish, so unthinking.
When Monalisa got out of the hospital, Minesh knew she would probably try to kill herself again. Although he was in love with her, he made a phone call to his rival, Samar. They knew each other; at one point, they had even considered going into business together, selling mobile phones. He told him what had happened and then discreetly left the scene. Samar immediately went to Monalisa’s house. Since her arms were bandaged, he bathed her, and he cleaned the house himself—not something a Bombay boy, a don’s grandson, ever does. For seven days and seven nights he stayed with her. They slept spooned together like little children; not once did they make love. But Minesh did not know this. Minesh stayed away, but he could not sleep at night. “I imagined him touching you,” he told Monalisa later.
Both of them have offered to live with her. “Forget the past. Begin a new life with me.” Monalisa has gradually allowed Minesh into her life, into her flat. He was with her all night once, and his father, a rich solicitor, got mad at him when he got back home. So Minesh phoned Monalisa and said that he was leaving his home and renting his own apartment, and was now free to marry her. There was just one obstruction.
“I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You have to say yes.’”
But she is not attracted to him. Samar was handsome, a Pathan, with a wild anger in him. Minesh is a short Gujarati man, balding, with glasses. Next to her, he looks like a kid brother or attendant. “Minesh is a good friend; I give him izzat.” A month ago Monalisa told Minesh, very gently, that she doesn’t love him. That she would be leaving him today so that his life would be set tomorrow. So that he wouldn’t bankrupt himself. Every month he had been blowing a lakh or more at Sapphire, plus rent for the apartment he maintained to be with her, and the clothes he bought her, and what he spent on her at the discos and the meals he bought her at five-star hotels. He wept when she told him this; he begged her not to leave him. But it had to happen sooner or later, and she told him she would still meet him, talk to him, be his friend. “But for the last month there have been no relations.” So now Minesh goes with other girls and then comes home and gives Monalisa the details.
MONALISA HAS TWO LIVES. One is her life in the bar and the time she spends with her customers. Then there is the other life: her time in the discos, watching TV, sleeping all day. She never goes to bed before six in the morning. In our conversations, if I mix up the lives, she will say about her work world, “That life is complet
ely different. That is a jooth ki duniya”—a world of lies. Once, on the phone, I tell her in English that I am going to lie down and take a nap. She asks what “nap” means. When I explain the meaning, she repeats it, making a connection. “Lie. Lie also means jooth. It also means to sleep.” In Monalisa’s world, to tell a lie and to lie with someone are not so far apart.
“For Muharram, the bar is very quiet,” she tells me one day. “All this wrong work has stopped.”
“Why? Do you think the work you do is wrong work?”
“Of course it’s wrong work. Drinking in a bar is also wrong work.”
I ask her if she thinks Sapphire is exploitative.
“It’s okay as long as there’s a limit,” she responds. “It took me two years to understand this. A man comes into a bar when he is tired of his family, of taking care of his wife and children, and tired of the office. The dancers are buying the armaan of the customers. That is a very bad thing. Why can’t we save our money? Why do we have bad luck? Because we buy their difficulties.” She has misunderstood my question. She is telling me that Sapphire is exploitative, but of the customers. Whatever happens to her and the other dancers after that—if they should fall in love with a customer and he mistreats them—is deserved, because they have been exploiting these men’s human need for comfort.
“I get very quickly attracted to a person,” explains Monalisa. “I like Hari even now, because at least he took care of me for a few months.” Recently, Monalisa was dancing at Razzberry when she saw a familiar face. It was Hari. She went up to him and confronted him. “Hari, you ruined my life. You taught me to drink, to smoke. Whatever I’ve become today is because of you.” Then she stopped venting, because when she looked closely at the old man in the flashing lights of the disco, she saw that his eyes had filled up with tears.