When Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, it influenced a generation of young writers; since then the only book that has had such impact is Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. We had, till its publication, mainly been a nation of novelists—Mehta proved that it was also possible to write gripping reportage. In answer to his call, the last few years have seen exciting new non-fiction by a crop of young writers—work that to my mind has surpassed much of new fiction. I am thinking of books such as Pallavi Aiyar’s Smoke and Mirrors, Aatish Taseer’s A Stranger to History, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, Namita Devidayal’s The Music Room (these last two published by Random House India). Now we have Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing.
Of all these writers, Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing owes the greatest debt to Maximum City. Both are about noirish Bombay, of homely nightclubs, dingy brothels, and brushes with the bhai log. Both also feature beautiful young bar dancers, which is the subject of Faleiro’s book.
Mehta’s Monalisa and Faleiro’s Leela are almost identical, their lives mirroring not just each other, but the lives of countless other bar dancers. Leela, like Monalisa, is a victim of a turbulent childhood, a young runaway who escapes to Mumbai and ends up as the highest-paid dancer in a dance bar. She is proud of her independence, the money she earns (and fritters) and sees herself as apart from sex workers. ‘When you look at my life,’ she says to Faleiro, ‘don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road.’
But Leela also dreams of (and yet is resigned to not) finding a secure relationship, and she cuts herself with blades regularly. She is a girl without a future, locked in a present of lovers, drink, dancing and parties. Like Monalisa, she is above all full of seductive appeal, drawing the author into her cat and mouse games. “I called Leela. She ‘missed-called’ me,” says Faleiro, ruefully describing their relationship.
Full of light and shade, the young woman is a vivid character and Faleiro especially gets her voice, full of chutzpah, pathos and tough love. When a journalist asks her how she feels after the ban on the dance bars, she replies sarcastically, “too good”. Her motto is, ‘if not now, then when I’m a mother of six?’ Indeed, Leela’s high-octane voice permeates this book, spilling into Faleiro’s prose, leaving one slightly dazed. Mehta conveys the same complexities in his character with greater economy and style and for this reason Monalisa remains, I think, the definitive portrait of the bar dancer, with Leela as something of her shadow.
Where Faleiro truly excels (and departs from Mehta) is when she moves her focus away from Leela to the world around her. Some of these details are surreal; many are heartbreaking. We learn of a beautiful beach-side brothel run by a madam who wears lime-green shorts; of a woman who has been raped by her son; and here is Faleiro at a hijra birthday party: “Asha Bhosle began to sing Dil cheez kya hai from the soundtrack of the film Umrao Jaan, a favourite with bar dancers.... I looked around and nothing I had seen before prepared me for what I saw then: everyone in the room was crying.”
Such intimate glimpses—of unknown worlds—give Beautiful Thing its particular charge, and it is this quality that has made the current non-fiction stand out from the fiction.
Faleiro’s narrative becomes particularly affecting in the second, darker, half of the book, after the ban on dance bars. The ban, of course, is the pivot on which the narrative hinges; without the protective space of the dance bar, Leela and her friends are compelled to work the streets, proving how close to the edge they really are. The sex work comes with perils. Girls are murdered and raped; if they are lucky they get away with just paying bribes to the police. Faleiro’s strength as a writer has always been her eye for detail, and she writes of the horrors that follow Leela with painful clarity. But Leela remains unflappable, steered by a steely fatalism—“I thought through everything. So I have bad luck, I thought to myself. Bad luck is in my blood.” This fatalism gives her resilience and us a fragile hope. Like Faleiro we leave Beautiful Thing wishing Leela well, hoping she will come through, knowing she won’t.
(Chiki Sarkar is the editor-in-chief of Random House India)
