Now, you guys know I’m a sucker for books about places I know. It’s being able to read the name of a place and think, “Oh, I’ve been there” and being able to remember the sights and sounds and smells. It’s almost like having a little TV inside your head to work side by side with the words. And okay, I’ve just moved to Delhi, but technically, the maps and sights in my head are still Mumbai. It’s still what I picture when I think of “home”, my flat in Bandra, not my flat in GK 1.
Anyway, so I recently read Sonia Faleiro’s new book Beautiful Thing. All about bar dancers (and one bar dancer in particular) before and after the ban, it’s a fascinating book about a culture that coexisted side by side with the one I knew. Okay, so Mira Road wasn’t exactly anywhere I had ever been. But I could imagine it, and imagine the bars and the girl, and that made it all the more exciting.
Beautiful Thing is about Leela, a young, pretty girl, who was pimped out by her father when she was young and who then ran away to Mumbai, as people do, to make her fortune. In her case, her face was her fortune and she wound up swaying her hips and being showered by cash in one of Mumbai’s many dance bars (now a thing of the past).
What I liked most about the book was watching Faleiro’s relationship with Leela evolve. They began as just a reporter and her subject, but later you see the two of them becoming friends, although it’s a bit of a one-sided friendship, because Leela is, as very lovely young women often are, a little self-centred.
Of course, I’m not the first one to recommend this book. Reviews are everywhere, all raves as far as I can tell, all saying similar things. That this is a heartbreaking book but an important read. That it delves into the lives of people often marginalised. That there is no other way to get a perspective into the lives of bar dancers, prostitutes and eunuchs. I thought it also helped the narrative a great deal that Faleiro is a woman — having a woman’s point of view about other women is always, I find, a little more insightful than if the interviews were done by a man.
So, yes. Read this book. I couldn’t put it down.
The columnist is an author