Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Honey shows us a “portfolio” that she hired a photographer to shoot. First there are several dozen pictures of her as a woman, garish dresses and garish prints. Then there are smaller photos, of her as a boy. The difference is startling. The boy, Manoj, has a goatee and is dressed in jeans or a suit and tie. He is not overly feminine. “Two lives,” explains Honey. By day a man, by night a woman. What did this conflict do to Honey? It drove her to drink, drugs, and marriage.

  Sarita Royce got the young Honey started on vodka. Drinking did not come naturally to her; she would shout at her father when he drank beer. But the vodka led to other kinds of spirits, till it became a need. Then one night, during one of the frequent dry days in the state, three customers came into Sapphire high. Honey asked them what they’d been drinking, and they came out with liquor bottles filled with Corex, a powerful codeine-based cough syrup. Honey took a swig; it made her pleasantly numb. That was the day she started on her habit. She was soon drinking eight or nine bottles a day. The bottles normally cost 30 rupees each; the couriers Honey sent out from the bar would see her drugged condition and charge 100. Customers saw this, and those who wanted to win her favor started buying bottles of Corex as gifts. This cough syrup is a favorite narcotic of the bar-line dancers; there are certain pharmacies in central Bombay outside which you can see a crowd of beautiful young women after one in the morning, all woozy from the medicine.

  The drug screwed up her system. Long after she quit it, Honey had stones in her gallbladder and needed an operation to take them out. Midway through the operation, she started coming to. The anesthetic was ineffective on her system, trained on heavy sedatives like Corex, and the doctors quickly had to administer a more powerful one. The addiction undid Honey. She would, while dancing, lift the liquor glasses of customers and gulp down the contents. Meanwhile, her jealous mentor, Sarita, noticed that customers were deserting her own private shows to go watch Honey dance and were throwing money on her. So Sarita started spreading the story of Honey’s real identity. The relationship with her neighbor cooled; even now, Honey barely says hello to the woman who got her into the bar line. But the customers started making remarks, calling her a eunuch, a homosexual. They would shout out, “Hey, Chakka!” “Hijda!” “Gaandu!”

  On Honey’s last night at Sapphire she was high on Corex and a customer began cursing her. “You don’t belong here, get out, you motherfucker.” She told the bouncer, who told BK, but the customer was not thrown out. That night she couldn’t take it anymore. She picked up a bottle and smashed it over the head of her tormentor, gashing his eye. Then she left the dance floor and packed her makeup. She had been working at Sapphire for nine years; she started working at White Horse the following week.

  After Sapphire, Honey hit the Corex even harder. Every day, Honey bought 400 rupees’ worth of the cough syrup. Her mother and brother, alarmed, stopped giving her money, so she cut her wrist with a razor blade. But, she recalls, she did it below her building, among a crowd of people, so someone would notice and alert her family. “If I cut myself somewhere I was alone, no one would notice.” She laughs. The cut was so minor that when she was taken to the doctor, no stitches were required.

  The personal history of bar dancers is written on their arms. Honey shows me another mark and tells me the story behind it. There was an Irani man in the bar, a loyal customer who professed to be in love with Honey and would blow as much as 40,000 rupees a night on her. One night, he was also spending on another girl, Sonali. Sonali was trying her best to woo the free-spending Irani away from Honey; she whispered into his ear that Honey loved him only for his money. So he asked Honey if this was true. Honey grabbed a glass, smashed it, and slashed her arm with the jagged edge. She said she would write “I love you” in blood on her arm to prove it. The Irani begged her not to further injure herself and asked what he could do to atone for doubting her love. “Go to Sonali and tell her to tie a rakhi on you,” Honey demanded. The Irani beckoned to Sonali and gave her 5,000 rupees to tear off a piece of her dupatta and tie it around his wrist, in front of the whole bar, forever making her his sister. The bleeding Honey had to listen to Sonali’s abuses, but the Irani has treasured that piece of glass that Honey cut herself with for three years now.

  “So he won’t give money to Sonali now?” I ask.

  “He will give, but not that much. A man won’t give as much to his sister as he gives to his lover.”

  One day, at the height of her addiction, Honey’s mother and Dinesh asked her to come with them to Pune. They offered an incentive: two bottles of Corex. So Honey went and found herself, by the end of the trip, engaged to be married, to a Sindhi girl named Jyoti. It was all done in a Corex daze. “I was like a cow.” Her head lolls, slack, bovine. Honey has been married for four years. “There is no love with my wife. I know what is love, when you know what the lover is thinking, when the lover knows what you’re feeling.” Though Manoj is not in love with his wife, he does want children, two boys. “Because boys care for their mother more, so they will care for me.” Then she realizes what she’s said and corrects herself. “They care for their father more.”

  I ask Honey if she has sex with her customers.

  “The time I’m in my sex mode, I’ve got my wife. I’m satisfied with her.” But she will allow her customers, especially the good-looking young guys, some liberties. “I do smooching.” Then she reflects. “How strange it is, one tongue searching around for another tongue. It cleans out my teeth. I tell my customers, I won’t have to brush my teeth in the morning.”

  “Do the men realize you’re not a woman when they get close to you?” I ask.

  “The men are not in their senses. When a person is hungry he doesn’t care what he eats, even if it’s stale.” Honey explains the excuses she uses when she doesn’t want to talk on the phone with a new customer. She’ll pick up the phone, pretend to be her sister, and say to the eager caller, “Honey can’t come to the phone right now. She’s gone to the shithouse.” This image destroys a certain delicacy essential to romance, and the customer rings off.

  Honey had no idea about how to kiss till she met the dancing girls. “One of these bitches taught me. But then I didn’t like it. She was drunk, and I felt like vomiting.” But she has to give at least this to her customers, so she allows the customers to kiss her. Parked in a car, they put her on their laps, put a hand up her T-shirt, and try to remove her brassiere. She protests, just like a woman: “Not today, I’m not feeling well.” Not all of them stop at this point. Some men try to unzip her skirt from the back; Honey grabs their hand at that crucial point, just before discovery. They take her hand and put it on their erections, or they grab her by her hair and thrust her face in their crotches. “Some of these assholes, they are just dirty assholes. They just would rag themselves on me and discharge on me. You can make out a person coming desperately on sex and then stopping. Then they are satisfied.” Honey says she doesn’t let the customers penetrate her; but some of them boast to the other customers, “I’ve taken Honey.” Honey doesn’t mind. “This is good for me. Then four more people say, Take me around in your car.” It is the life of a man constantly teasing other men, constantly fending them off at the last moment.

  Monalisa and Honey have no sweet men, no protectors. This has put Honey, especially, in some very dangerous situations. The most notorious customer of the bars, the sabertooth tiger of the dancers’ nightmares, is a man named Mehmood. All the girls know about him. Honey says, “He would have sex with them and then burn them with cigarettes on that particular place. He put needles inside. He was a maniac type, a sex maniac.” There was a girl in Congress House that he loved; he would piss in her mouth to show his love. He had a daughter with this girl, and the mother ran off to Dubai. When the daughter came of age, he took her to Congress House in revenge.

  One day Mehmood asked Honey to come out to Chembur for a private party. “He was a Muslim,” begins Honey. “You know how these Muslims are.” Among Honey’s customers, Gujar
atis and Marwaris are the most free-spending, because they come from rich families. “Muslims are the most rough. They are the real motherfuckers. Assholes.” I remember that her family is Sindhi, partition refugees from Pakistan. When she got to Mehmood’s residence, his men were beating up someone they had kidnapped. They broke his legs with hockey sticks; there was blood all over the floor. After they had finished, Mehmood turned to Honey. “So you’re a dancer. Show us. Dance.” She felt threatened and didn’t want to. They insisted. She was in a chowk, surrounded by buildings. So Honey danced among the buildings, and all the people leaned out of their windows to look and threw coins—25 paise, 50 paise—at her. Then Mehmood took her into a hut and locked the door. He was going to have sex with her, he told her. Honey tried to fob him off. “I said, I’ve sworn on the Koran that I won’t do all these things.” So had he sworn on the Koran, responded Mehmood: that he would have sex with Honey. “He said, either have sex with me or with ten of my friends.” There followed an encounter that Honey variously describes as either a rape or a providential escape. Tonight, she says that she escaped by telling Mehmood she had to go back to Sapphire for just one dance, and then she would return to him. He let her out, and the next day she ran away from Bombay to a village.

  But I later read the Savvy magazine article on Honey that claims that she was raped by Mehmood and then tried to kill herself by swallowing Baygon. I ask her if it’s true. “He came on me,” Honey says. “He would smooch me. He fell off the bed.”

  “Did you try to kill yourself after the rape?” I ask, citing the magazine article. It features vivid descriptions of Honey trying to do herself in with a bottle of insecticide, cutting her wrists, and dancing in a frenzy on her knees till they bled. Honey laughs raucously. “Why should I try to kill myself, only girls do that. The day after the magazine came out, my mother and Sarita and I burst out laughing. ‘Whore! Rape! Rape!’”

  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.”

  MONALISA 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.

  HONEY HAS ASKED DAYANITA 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 patie
nce 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?