BEAUTIFUL THING , livre ebook

Sonia Faleiro was a reporter in search of a story when she met Leela, a beautiful and charismatic bar dancer with a story to tell.
Leela introduced Sonia to the underworld of Bombay’s dance bars: a world of glamorous women, of fierce love, sex and violence, of customers and gangsters, of police, prostitutes and pimps.
When an ambitious politician cashed in on a tide of false morality and had Bombay’s dance bars wiped out, Leela’s proud independence faced its greatest test. In a city where almost everyone is certain that someone, somewhere, is worse off than them, she fights to survive, and to win.
Beautiful Thing , one of the most original works of non-fiction from India in years, is a vivid and intimate portrait of one reporter’s journey into the dark, pulsating and ultimately damaged soul of Bombay.

Sonia Faleiro is an award-winning reporter and writer. She is the author of a book of fiction, The Girl, and a contributor to numerous anthologies including AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India. She has reported for publications including India Today and Tehelka , and is now a contributing editor with Vogue. Sonia was born in Goa, studied in Edinburgh and lives in San Francisco. She is working on her second book of non-fiction.
Please visit www.soniafaleiro.com
‘A rare glimpse into dismissed lives. Sonia Faleiro brings a novelist’s eye for detail and a depth of empathy to her work. This is a magnificent book of reportage that is also endowed with all the terror and beauty of art’
KIRAN DESAI , Booker prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
‘ Beautiful Thing is a brilliant debut that catapults Sonia Faleiro straight to the top of the premier division of Indian writers of non-fiction. Faleiro has written a small masterpiece of observation and intimate reportage–a sassy, sensitive and deeply moving account of one bar girl’s journey spiralling down through the circles of hell that is Bombay’s sex industry. Beautiful Thing opens up a hidden world with startling insight and intimacy, and strangely is both a tragic monument to the abused bar girls of Bombay and a celebration of their amazing resilience and spirit’
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE , author of Nine Lives
‘Faleiro writes her way into the bloodstream with this mesmeric book, fashioned with heart and enviable acuity. A shocking, funny and memorable ride’
NIKITA LALWANI , author of Gifted
Cover photograph by Sara
Author photograph by Ulrik McKnight
Cover design by Nitesh Mohanty

HAMISH HAMILTON
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Hamish Hamilton by Penguin Books India 2010
Copyright © Sonia Faleiro 2010
All rights reserved
The views and opinions expressed in this e-book are the author's own and the facts are as reported by her, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same. Names of some people have been changed to protect their privacy.
ISBN: 978-06-7008-405-0
This digital edition published in 2011.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-291-5
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.
For Ulrik
‘My story is the best you will ever hear. The best, understand? Now come close. Closer! Okay, ready?’
Contents
Copyright
PART I: JANUARY 2005
‘CHALLENGE ME. ANY MAN, ANY TIME’
‘MANOHAR WANTED ME TO START MODELLING; HE SAID I WAS BOOTIFUL’
‘A BAR DANCER’S GAME IS TO ROB, TO FOOL A KUSTOMER’
‘MY MOTHER IS FAT. AND VERY, VERY SIMPLE’
‘I WANT A GOOD BREAK, YAAR. NO CUT-PIECE, SIDEY ROLE FOR ME’
‘TO BE HELD, EVEN IN THE ARMS OF A THIEF, IS WORTH SOMETHING’
‘I TOO LOVE YOU JANU!’
‘I’M GOING TO SKIN YOUR FLESH AND THROW IT TO THE DOGS!’
‘THE LUCKIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD’
‘IF I FALL, WHO WILL ACCEPT MY OUTSTRETCHED HAND?’
‘I SELL WATERMELONS. WATERMELONS AND WATCHES’
PART II: SEPTEMBER 2005
‘NOW THAT YOU’RE UNEMPLOYED, HOW DO YOU FEEL?’
‘EVERYONE DRINKS! EVERYONE BEATS!’
‘IF ANYTHING HAPPENS, RUN LIKE SITA SHOULD HAVE RUN FROM RAVAN!’
‘THEY SHOWED ME. THEY SHOWED ME ALL NIGHT’
‘MOVE ON. STAY AWAY. LEAVE ME ALONE’
‘ONCE THESE RANDIS COME UPSTAIRS, THEIR CHAMRI IS MINE’
‘TELL ME, DO YOU SEE IT?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I January 2005
{ 1 } ‘Challenge me. Any man, any time’
L eela told me she was beautiful. And as she assessed herself in front of a full-length mirror in a vest and the boxer shorts of the customer asleep on the bed beside her, I had no reason to disagree.
She wasn’t tall she admitted. And her breasts were make-believe; her bra was ‘imported-padded’. Her shoulder-length hair was streaked butterscotch and her eyes, unlike those of any girl from her hometown of Meerut up north, were a velvety mauve you might see in the sky on a day that promised rain. If a customer gestured, ‘ Asli ? Ya nakli ?’ Leela would pretend she didn’t know he was referring to the colour of her eyes and smirk, until the customer, flooded with nervous excitement, felt like he’d spied something he shouldn’t have—the creamy curve of her chocolate breast between the metal hooks of her sari blouse.
But Leela as Leela had been born was in there too, and it was this natural ‘booty’, ‘straight from the hand of God’, that she was most proud of. The other girls, she said, were ‘black, like Banglas’, and once they’d scrubbed their faces clean of the Dreamflower powder without which they wouldn’t leave home, they were no prettier than the beggar-monkeys snatching bananas out of the hands of devotees at the Hare Krishna temple down the street.
But not Leela. Stripped of everything, including her knicker-bra, she was still a wonder she said—not unlike the Taj Mahal of Agra city bathed in moonlight.
Although I couldn’t attest to all of the above, this much I will say: Leela’s face was a perfect heart, the sort style magazines use to demonstrate make-up most suitable for different face shapes. Her hands and feet were shapely and smooth and, like her complexion, of a dark gold. Her bare fingers were tipped with hard, square nails that came in use when the dance floor got too crowded for her liking. And knowing well the elegance of her little nose, Leela would flaunt it like an engagement ring. On certain evenings at the dance bar, when she needed to increase the padding of hundred rupee notes in her bra, Leela would engage only in silhouette.
But beauty wasn’t everything. What you wore made the difference between a fifty and a five hundred.
What you said to your customer when he feigned reluctance to spend another evening merely watching you was crucial. So was how you said it. Remember the wise words of the legendary courtesan Umrao? ‘No one knows how to love more than we do: to heave deep sighs; to burst into tears at the slightest pretext; to go without food for days on end; to threaten to take arsenic …’
Umrao was a beauty, but it was her epic nakhra , pretense, that made her legend. Leela understood this immutable fact of her profession and so she stayed sharp, ‘sharp’ she said, ‘as a double-edged razor blade’.
‘Challenge me,’ she would say, ‘any man, any time. A hi-fi man, your kind of man. I’ll snap him up, like a fisherman does a pomfret.’
‘Challenge me,’ she would demand, and on evenings when she talked drunk and stepped funny, when the roots of her hair, black as her real eye colour, showed up disloyally under the twenty-watt bulbs of her 1 Bedroom-Hall-Kitchen flat (BHK), there would be something like hope in her eyes.
Leela asked for trouble because trouble was free.
‘Challenge!’ Snapping my bra strap.
‘Challenge!’ Pretending to burn me with the ever-present Gold Flake between her fingers until I cried out, I believe you Leela! You will win.

I wasn’t being conciliatory. Leela was the winning sort; the kind of girl you wanted by your side when you bought your stack of Friday morning lottery tickets outside Churchgate station.
She won against her lover Purshottam Shetty. The sharp-faced, short-legged, married father of two was her ‘husband’ and by any standard, even by that of the dance bar, she was his down low. And yet the value of what she received from him, Leela said, like a child insisting to her mother she could play in the rain and not catch cold, exceeded the value of what she gave up to be with him. She won against her mother, Apsara, though Leela’s tactics weren’t fair. ‘Apsara’ means ‘celestial nymph’, but Leela’s Apsara weighed over eighty kilograms and had a face like a cutting board.