The horrific tale of a Mumbai dance bar

Sometime last year I visited a dance bar in Mumbai. I’d gone in with two friends, with the largely platonic motive of experiencing firsthand the dying embers of a fire that once used to light up the Maximum City every night. I went in expecting nothing too different from a European strip club, maybe something only more tepid. Turns out it is arguably the only act I’ve committed that evokes the emotion of shame in me. It was traumatic, to say the least. The dance bar I visited, Ram Bhavan in Andheri, didn’t remotely pander to the dark, dingy stereotype created by Bollywood. It was far worse.

The description below was written in the immediate aftermath of my visit, and hence carries an emotional, first-person narrative. Of course, the passage of time allows me to restructure it into a more detached commentary, including bits on how bar dancers deserve and need far more respect and positive policy intervention than pity. I should also concede my hypocrisy in taking the moral high ground, but all that would not do justice to what I felt while I was in the midst of it. Read on.

I can never forget those eyes. If they gave off an aroma, I would know what lust smells like.

I tried mustering the courage to make eye-contact, but never could. She stood close enough to tempt, yet far enough to deter. Her gaze was captivating, inviting, and at the same time, puzzling, stupefying, and worst of all, intimidating. No female had looked at me that way before, not even in the most intimate of moments. Yet, I failed to capitalize on her lust. The best I could do, while she peered straight into my flinching eyes, was to watch her ring-laden fingers dance around her bare waist, the motions turning more suggestive as they moved towards the pierced navel, and slowly up to her cleavage-baring bosom. Yet again I tried following the movements of her fingers, hoping for them to lead my gaze right up to hers, almost failing when one of her fingers was juxtaposed with her cleavage, and finally giving up when the same finger brushed against her blood-red lips.

As if sensing my confusion and despair, a stout, bald, thickly-bearded man walked up to the table where I was seated with the two friends accompanying me, and stood right in front of me, blocking her gaze. For a second, I thanked him for taking the pressure off me. But the comfort was short-lived. Dressed in an immaculate dinner jacket, the man stood there silent and motionless, assuming such a wide-legged stance that our eye levels almost met. His aura was disconcertingly jaunty. His face carried a deep cut on the right cheek. It was clear he’d emerged victorious from a bloody battle. My heart skipped a beat as he slipped his hand inside the jacket, but luckily only to fetch a pen and a piece of paper. He sternly pointed to the shabby menu card on the table. Almost thanking him for sparing our lives, my friends and I wasted no time in ordering snacks. We were relieved that we saw him off quickly. His domineering presence had unsettled me deeply, even more than the stare of the dancing girl, which I somehow still craved. His departure gave me another chance to resume the battle between evolutionary instinct and decades of social conditioning.

To my sadness and consternation, her eyes were now turned away from me. I didn’t want her, but I didn’t want her to want anyone else. She was showering her oodles of lust upon another man seated close to me. Yes, there was another man. As captivation gave way to reality, I realised he wasn’t the only one. There was another, and another, and yet another. In a painfully calculative manner, she scanned every man, or more heartbreakingly, the thickness of the bundle of notes kept on their tables. The thicker bundles managed to hold her attention for longer. My bubble had started to burst. If her eyes indeed gave off an aroma, it wouldn’t have been of lust, but of sheer hopelessness. If they could talk, and they almost did to a willing listener, they would’ve told tales of how the need for survival triumphed over dreams, of how she practiced smiling till it turned into happiness.

She wasn’t the only woman, either. She was accompanied by at least 6 others – some heavier than others, all laden with strategically placed ornaments and dressed similarly in clothes revealing cleavage and waist – standing in the middle of the large room at whose periphery the men, including myself, were seated. The way the women looked at each other reminded me of how one looked at a same-sex roommate of years, every morning. Friendly, but not warm. Genuine, yet taken for granted. The attention of the men on the respective women was proportional to the lack of clothing on their body, the slickness of the waist, the voluptuousness of the breasts, and the lure in the movements which betrayed their disingenuous attempts at dancing. Adding to the nauseating aura of the place, the girls were placed on the same level as the guests, bringing down the subtle mental barrier that the European strip clubs create by having the girls perched on a distinctly higher platform.

If ‘courage’ and ‘chivalry’ carried the connotations of not rejecting a woman’s amorous advances, each of those men was far more courageous and chivalrous than my timid self. But their gentlemanly traits went beyond mere responses. In a room creaking under the load of women looking for their highest bidder, lighting so bright and music so jarring that it made my eyes and ears bleed, there was hardly anything that could be more gut-wrenchingly lewd. But perhaps I was being foolhardy in forgetting that the human male species is a bottomless pit.

All men have a beast within them, and nothing brings it out more than a woman at their mercy. In this case, there were many. As alcohol provided lifeblood to this beast, the eye-contacts grew bolder and gestures kicked in. Yet to lay hands on the gyrating bodies in front of them, some men indulged in repeated movements of tracing the bodies’ outlines in the air and withdrawing their hands under the table to give a quick boost to their testosterone levels, only to bring them back up to repeat the motion. The kinder ones held out crisp notes of ten to lure the women closer. I couldn’t exactly determine whether this act made me loathe them or admire their magnanimity, given their obvious penury. Perhaps the kindest man was the one who held out notes of twenty, though he suffered from the peculiar habit of sneakily pulling the bait back as the chosen woman reached for it. Sometimes this kind man would even bless the woman, raising the note high to do a quick roundtrip around her head. Acknowledging this act of saintliness, the woman would accept the note only in duly folded hands.

Every now and then, one of the many waiters around the place guided one of the dancing women towards a door. Seeing this, the face of the woman in question lit up and she happily abandoned the floor, and a yet unseen one took her place. Of course, this would only happen after she had managed to elicit enough monetary kindness from her patrons. Nonetheless, it gave me a modicum of relief to see at least one of them escape the insult. Soon however, relief turned to shock and helplessness as my friends pointed out a curious pattern of one of the patrons disappearing along with each girl. I am not sure if it was the prospect of more money or less insult that made the exiting girl happy. Unsettlingly, the realization that she could be at the job only if she had stopped bothering about the insult brought back some relief to me.

As a strong urge to escape the ghastly scenes overcame me, my eyes wandered to the epicentre of the jarring music. It was the far end of the big room, occupied by men and women whose zombie-like faces indicated that they’d experimented with every other profession before they finally found themselves incarcerated in the small enclosure. I wondered if I should pity the male musicians or be thankful for them, for the poor chaps never had the option of making a living by exposing their midriff to a pack of ghouls. Clearly, the two women amongst them had been through the infamy in their heydays. The patronizing ‘been there, done that’ stare with which they checked out the apprentices’ bodies was a giveaway. In their stares, envy was the overpowering emotion.

The music, if at all it can be termed that, was startlingly discomforting. In sheer contrast to the ambience, the few lyrics I could grasp consisted of sobering words like ‘pyaar’, ‘izzat’ and ‘khushi’. To my mind, the lyrics were an attempt to cater to the ubiquitous human need for moral justification, in this case of the girls and their patrons, if at all any was possible in this most odious corner of the world.

As the night progressed, the music started to warm up to the ambience. Soon, the two started to reinforce each other in a vicious cycle. The men, by now armed with ample moral justification, started blowing kisses to the tune of ‘chumma chumma de de’. The women inched closer to the men, ripping apart the veneer of gentle swaying to unleash ferocious dancing moves. The bulkier ones among them refused to be left behind, even as their heaving abdomens peered through their now half-unbuttoned lehenga. The bundles of notes being thrown at them increased in thickness and rapidity, and the uneasy distances started to diminish.

As we prepared to leave, I stole one last glance at the girl who had me all confused with her stare when I’d entered. She wasn’t looking at me anymore, of course, and I was not remotely upset about it. In her hand, she held an iPhone 6. Characteristic to the night, I was yet again overcome with paradoxical emotions as a part of me felt happy that she had not been one of the exiting girls, though another part felt sad that she had not got her due, unlike those nights which helped her buy the expensive phone. Long after, it struck me that I’d chosen to not have any bundle of notes placed on my table. Why would she have looked at me for so long, then?

I never had the desire to bid for her body, but as compensation, this is my bid to immortalize her.