Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  “Because I’ve never fallen in love. Neither with a woman nor with a man.” Manoj elaborates. “If love or even the hint of it had entered my life, my whole life would have changed.” If he had really been in love, he would not have been able to talk to his girlfriend as Honey. “I would have slipped into a man’s tone.” He would be talking to her all the time, even from the bar, and love would make it impossible to lie, to pretend to be a woman with his lover. Love exposes you, makes you vulnerable, and kills all the personas built on top of the true self. If Manoj falls in love, Honey will have to depart, killed off by Manoj’s lover. Jyoti poses no such threat, because Manoj is not in love with his wife. Jyoti actually helps Manoj turn into Honey every evening. I have a feeling that Jyoti might actually be closer to Honey.

  The bar girls’ involvement with love is total. It is their bread and butter, their dharma. They often fall in love themselves, which Manoj can’t fathom. “Now Monalisa’s mind is half in love, half in business. I don’t understand these people. Love is the blade that cuts down the ladder toward your goal in life. I am not falling in love,” Manoj repeats. “In this line we have lost our identity.” And a sense of your identity is essential to being able to truly love.

  We go up to the terrace of Honey’s building, where the evening light is perfect for Dayanita’s camera. Monalisa looks stunning, in her simple black dress. Her hair is up in a loose bun behind her head, and Dayanita points out to her that she has an exceptionally fine neck. She glows, unfurls, under the gaze of the camera. After the shoot, she is ravenous and eats everything that Jyoti gives her. Jyoti is amused by her. “She’s mad,” she declares, “but the world needs a little madness.” I feel very happy in this little room, with its whole spectrum of gender and marital status, from me, the married man with two children; to Dayanita, who claims to be having a love affair with Monalisa and Honey; to Honey, straddling the territory between all of us, in no-man’s-land; to his wife, who wants to get pregnant; to the exuberantly feminine, unmarriageable Monalisa.

  Monalisa and Honey are putting makeup on each other for the evening, and they are clearly enjoying the ritual.

  “Is my face too white? Do I look like a ghost?” asks Monalisa.

  “Put some brown on your nose,” Manoj responds. They are only going to work, but if you listen to their laughter and their jokes you would think they were going to a party. I feel a longing, watching them. Men never have this, this time among their own sex, this mutual boosting of self-esteem in the hours before a party. “Oh, you look lovely.” “Wow, look at that dress! Watch out, Bombay!” This time that is so often more fun than the actual party.

  As it indeed is for Honey. Business has been very bad for her at Dilbar. “Yesterday I only had four hundred rupees,” says the former Queen of Sapphire, who in her heyday would take home a hundred times that amount. Honey attributes her poor earnings to the fact that she can’t, or won’t, have sex with the customers. “Other girls go for night problem, they’ll get.” BK is not returning her calls begging to be taken back, and she feels it deeply. The dancer that made Sapphire an institution is not welcome there anymore. “The main thing isn’t even money.” Honey sighs. “The main thing is: The way I used to dance at Sapphire I can hardly dance half at Dilbar.” An artist scorned, unable to find a fitting audience for her art.

  Sapphire strings her along—or maybe she strings herself along on the expectation of returning to the scene of her glory. Honey is desperate, ready to do anything, even dance in the daytime among the faltus, the government clerks on their lunch hour, the idlers, the men with lots of time and little money. When she speaks to BK or Pervez, they never say no outright to her. It is always: Wait. Wait till after the elections. Wait till after the third hall opens. Wait till the hours are extended. Wait till this inconvenient DCP is transferred. It is the established strategy of avoidance in the Country of the No, and by this time in Bombay I am well familiar with it. So Honey sits at home in the afternoon watching television and dances at night in the sorry nightclub, waiting for the call from Sapphire.

  Surely all those men in the audience at Dilbar, at Sapphire, can’t have failed to notice Manoj’s sex. Is it this very fact that attracted so many of them and made Sapphire an institution? Has Honey unknowingly tapped some tremendous current of homosexual desire in the metropolis that needs to lie to itself about its origins, that can only pay to watch a man dance when he is disguised as an exaggeratedly feminine woman?

  I had mentioned Sapphire to Sunil, the Sena man. “That’s where the eunuch works,” he said promptly. He had gone there and seen the eunuch do a dance to a song he still remembers. The great secret about Honey, I am gradually beginning to realize, is that her identity is not really a secret. Men will bring their friends to the bar knowing about her, and watch their friends swoon over her, and then kid them about falling for a man. Lots of people know about Honey: models, gangsters, taxi drivers, journalists. And they all think they’re the only one, or one of a select few, to know the secret.

  Honey shows me a picture of herself at fifteen, in a short skirt with a fetching jacket over it. I would have gone out with such a girl. She is slim and attractive. She fits the accepted definition of pretty. But as Honey ages, she is outgrowing pretty. Her tread is heavier. There is a solid line to her jaw. She has put on weight, and there has entered an unsettling sexual attraction to her body: the way her belly button presents itself, a prominent gash in the center of the pudgy white flesh of her stomach. Most women are in a race against time: As they get older, they lose their looks. But Honey is in a different, altogether more desperate race. As Honey gets older, she is losing her very sex.

  Honey and Manoj are at war over their body. Manoj wants to grow biceps, a beard, a gut. Honey wants breasts, smooth skin, an admirable ass. Honey is constantly trying to outsmart Manoj, aided by a retinue of surgeons in Bombay. She has started popping diet pills, three capsules at a time, to become slim. “After having sex, after marriage, the stomach starts to come out,” she avers. But occasionally the desire to change runs the other way. Once, Honey ate sindhoor, the red powder put on a woman’s forehead, in the belief that it would make her voice deeper, more like what would be expected of Manoj’s. Honey cut her hair short about a year ago, when she decided she was going to get out of the bars for good and try to find work as a male model. She got a photographer to make up a portfolio, a set of pictures of Manoj. Then he went around the advertising companies to find work. But in the waiting rooms he saw the other male models: hunks with bulging biceps, aggressively masculine. He soon realized he had no chance in this world. Manoj could not earn a living. So he came back to the dance bars, put on his wig and brassiere, and called Honey back into his life.

  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 mill
iliters 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:

  Outstanding Dues???

  Take It Easy!!

  Now Available with

  UNIQUE RECOVERIES:

  A Trained Group of Educated

  Eunuchs Who Ensure Speedy

  Recovery from Defaulters

  Enquiries Invited from Individuals, Banks, Corporate Sector

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

  New Year’s Eve

  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.