Shetty had booked them into a resort called River View (‘A Treat of a Retreat’). It had a swimming pool and a waterfall and offered a buffet of delicacies likepulao and mutton curry, golgappas and fountains of fresh, flavoured lassi.
Leela would have been happy to be a tourist, her camera slung around her neck. She had no need, she said, to dance to the loud Bollywood music a DJ in a bandana and shades was spinning, to stand under the waterfall in her new swimsuit and black lace leggings, to mirror the couples entwined in the pool—their love, their lust, a tangible thing it was only natural to want for oneself.
She could be haappy, in a quiet, regular way, just being with Shetty.
‘If he’d only sat beside me . . .’ Leela sighed. ‘But he was happy with his blue films and beer.’
When Shetty called Leela out on her glum face, she said what she always said when she didn’t want to admit she felt low.
‘I’m expecting my MC,’ she lied.
He wondered how old Leela was. She had been thirteen when they had met, thirteen when he pursued her, fourteen when she agreed to be with him. She had been fourteen when he started looking around, fifteen when he found another ‘wife’ in another dance bar, sixteen when Leela found out and confronted him. She had been sixteen when he swore to be faithful, sixteen when he broke his promise, sixteen when he started looking around again. He hadn’t kept track since.But she had been thirteen when she had first laughed at his jokes, thirteen when he had wanted her, thirteen when he swore he would never stop making her laugh.At thirteen her teeth had been like a string of Hyderabadi pearls fit for the neck of a queen.
In Bombay, a nobody could die with nothing.
Tell me, sister, would you like to join me in prayer?’
‘Yes, that would impress her. Why were these girls so taken by God anyway? Was it because God had given them nothing? Yes. Because they had nothing, they had nothing to lose.
Leela didn’t dwell on Shetty’s quick change of heart. ‘Maybe his nasha wore off?’ It didn’t matter. He was a man in a hundred. And he made her feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
Excerpted from Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro, Hamish Hamilton.
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