The second last in my series of profiles of dance bar girls, for Tehelka. Here is 1, 2, 3, 4.
‘My Love Encloses A Plot Of Roses’: It’s as if Vaishali lives split lives. There’s the raucous hardened woman who learnt early to barter sex for survival. And there’s the woman who nurses a passion for Osho, classical music, and dreams.
“My heart is beating, keeps on repeating, I’m waiting for you. My love encloses, a plot of roses. And when shall be then, our next meeting, cause love you know, that time is fleeting.” With her head bobbing, hands flailing unselfconsciously, a necklace of 108 beads attached to a picture of Osho Rajneesh swinging lustily, Vaishali, 38, is the cynosure of all eyes. In the coffee shop couples entwined over cake, gape. A barista smiling benevolently at his cash register looks up, appalled. The orchestra singer warbles on. In her mind’s eye, she is the sexy Julie of the eponymous film — beautiful, luminescent, able to absolve her sins and forget her sorrows with a single melody.
It’s been a month since Vaishali left her home in Ambarnath and moved into a two-room apartment in suburban Dombivali. On her way, she dropped off her 24-year-old son Sridhar at Shirdi and her 21-year-old son Srikant at her in-laws’ in Ratnagiri. For weeks, Sridhar had tried to recover from a broken love affair. “He became mental,” she explains, blowing into the foam of her cappuccino. “I put him in an institution.” One night, she says, her son Shridhar entered her room and raped her. It was July 26, the day of the Mumbai floods. “God cried,” she says.
Vaishali cried as well, then muffled her screams with her fist. Who would wipe away the tears of a bar girl who from the age of 11 had used her body to better her life? She says, “Log sochte hain, bar mein kaam karti hain woh French karti hain, back sex karti hai.” (People think, she works in a bar; she has oral sex and anal sex). Her son raped her again. Immediately after, she bought two bus tickets, and had him placed in a guesthouse in Shirdi. When he recovers, she says, he will be welcomed back. Vaishali looks away. Her bony fingers, each encircled by a ring, grasp the handle of her coffee mug. Her mouth appears shrunken, eyes droopy, cheeks concave. “I have no complaint,” she says, vehemently. “My sons are good boys. God has blessed me.”
The only daughter of classical singers, Vaishali was born in Dadar, the eldest of two siblings. She watched her parents — students and teachers of the Gwalior Gharana — pursue their art with a passion that did not extend to their children. They were so poor they would wait for vegetables and fruit to tumble off food carts. Yet, when she speaks of the music of Ustad Rehmat Ali Khan and Dinanath Mangeshkar wafting through her bare bones of her home, her eyes light up and she smiles guilelessly. Cocking her head, she hums a tune, clicks her fingers, and looks for a few seconds as she must have as a little girl before she was robbed of her childhood. “Even today I don’t listen to film music at home,” she smiles. “Only classical music, and every time, I cry.”
When she was six, an elderly family friend began to take Vaishali and her best friend to the terrace. “Balatkar karne ke liye jagah to honi chahiye. Che saal ki ladki ke paas kya hai? (You need a place to commit rape. What does a six-year-old have?) He played with me,” she says in a loud voice, startling a man seated behind. She never told her parents, suggesting they would not have cared. At 12, her parents separated for two years. Although he was paralysed on his left side and prone to fits, her father had needs, which he now expected his daughter to fulfil. “Naturally, he wanted sex,” she shrugs.
A year earlier she had begun sleeping with a fruit seller in the neighbourhood. Sometimes for a fistful of apples, the little girl allowed the old man to violate her. “I was so hungry. It wasn’t a question of choice,” she articulates. “I simply couldn’t survive on two rotis a day. At a young age I realised that when you lose something, you gain something as well. When I was small, I received Rs 5 and Rs 10, in exchange for sex. It was a lot of money. This is what I see in the lives of the dance bar girls now. The only security you have is what you provide for yourself. Even the man sleeping with you won’t give you security.”
Vaishali may have bartered sex for survival, but she did not allow her father to violate her. His subsequent verbal abuse, “hammering” as she describes it in English, continued for two years. Meanwhile, a 19-year-old signboard painter, Dilip, had ingratiated himself in her friends’ circle at school. In the Mithun Chakraborty look-alike with his laughing eyes and “maharaja’s” demeanour, Vaishali saw her escape. For four months, she courted Dilip.
In the fourth month 14-year-old Vaishali was pregnant with their first child and in the seventh month, her mother returned home with a priest to solemnise the relationship.
The couple had no future together, but Vaishali, who had left school in the ninth grade, hoped to find relief from the “hammering” and the hunger, which remain the most profound and palpable memory of her childhood. Though Dilip’s career blossomed after he left painting to become a cameraman in Hindi films, his alcoholism and a sustained pneumonic bout threatened a return to poverty. Living in Malad’s Malvani slum, Vaishali began working as an orchestra singer in a dance bar. She earned Rs 20 daily, but the more lucrative career in dancing wasn’t an option. “I’m not a beauty,” she shrugs, “People didn’t like me. Just as well. I know what happens to beautiful girls. Murder, acid attacks, rape. A beauty can’t go through life in peace.” By pursuing singing she felt that she was honouring her parents. Though they cared to meet her but once after she married and despite her father’s attempted incest, Vaishali maintains: “My parents didn’t put one wrong thought in my mind. I couldn’t hope for a better father and mother.”
Vaishali’s marriage lasted six years. Six years of sickness and abuse. After Dilip left her, she sent her children to Ratnagiri. She sang long hours at Saat Rasta’s Canara Hotel to earn enough to support them. Eventually, she bought her own house in Ambarnath. She also drank heavily, and embarked on a series of affairs. “Kisi ne daru pilake soya mere saat, kisine chutiya banake soya, kisine badnam karke.” (Someone got me drunk and slept with me, someone fooled me, someone humiliated me.) Then she met a man who would indirectly change the course of her life. She knew him only as Tarzan. He wasn’t in the mafia clarifies Vaishali, shocked at the suggestion. He was a “goonda”, a murderer, with two police cases registered against him. He frequented the bar so often to watch her, he had a chosen corner on the velvet sofa, where he sat shrouded in the darkness, the music, the perfume. “Hum ek doosre ke deewane the,” she smiles. (We were crazy about each other). After four years Tarzan left. She coaxed him back 21 times, but now he’s a married man. “He was a great personality in my life,” she sighs.
When their affair ended in 1996, Vaishali was at her lowest point. Ironically, she elevated herself through a childhood connection. While buying a newspaper one morning, she spied the book Sambhog Se Samadhi Ki Aur (From Sex to Superconciousness) by Osho Rajneesh. At seven, Vaishali had watched her mother go for his lectures at Dadar’s D’Silva High School. “He had a very bad name then,” she laughs. “People warned us against the bearded baba who stole children.” Her mother wasn’t interested in Osho; she had a crush on actor Vinod Khanna, whose association with Rajneesh was well publicised.
Entranced by what she read, Vaishali left her job, packed a lone suitcase and went to the Osho ashram in Pune. She stayed five months, absorbed in meditation, inhaling Osho’s opinions on sex, women and music. She smacks her fingers hard on the table. “This is what he taught me,” she snaps, in flawless English. “This is the moment. Here. I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow, where I was yesterday. This is life. Moment to moment.”
When speaking of Osho, Vaishali’s shoulders rise from their customary slouch. Her hard eyes are focused, her expression commanding. She honours her “master” by speaking only in English when talking of him. In her determined reading of his teachings the potential of this tri-lingual singer is hinted at and, despite a lingering fondness for alcohol, her intellect to be contended with. She speaks of Buddha, casually mentions Freud, and asks if I’ve read the Kamasutra, in one breath. She suddenly suggests, “Have sex often. It prevents acidity. It dissolves all your problems. Main Meera bhi ban gayi. Main Draupadi bhi ban gayi. Main Radha bhi ban gayi.”
Although Osho’s spiritual guidance governs her inner being, the pressure cooker existence of Vaishali’s impoverished life is hers to bear, alone. She earns Rs 400 daily from singing in the orchestra, of which a portion is sent to her sons in Ratnagiri and Shirdi. She spends Rs 1,000 on rent and Rs 200 on electricity monthly, and up to Rs 200 daily, travelling to work. In her free time, she writes her autobiography and dreams of being a politician. She speaks passionately of her love of music.
Then just when one forgets about the horrors she has experienced, and begins to hope that she will have a better future, Vaishali reminds us of how a lifetime of sexual and emotional abuse can curdle the most determined mind. She sneers, “Afraid of HIV? For five years I had sex with a man who was HIV positive. Nothing happened to me. Don’t tell me about science. And don’t tell me it happens to bar girls. I don’t know one bar girl who has HIV. It’s all in your mind. If you think dirty thoughts you will get it. If you are not spiritual you will get it. I won’t.”
Tehelka, October 29 , 2005
Photo: Sanjiv Valsan
Friday, October 21, 2005
The Dying Of The Evening Stars V
The second last in my series of profiles of dance bar girls, for Tehelka. Here is 1, 2, 3, 4.
‘My Love Encloses A Plot Of Roses’: It’s as if Vaishali lives split lives. There’s the raucous hardened woman who learnt early to barter sex for survival. And there’s the woman who nurses a passion for Osho, classical music, and dreams.
“My heart is beating, keeps on repeating, I’m waiting for you. My love encloses, a plot of roses. And when shall be then, our next meeting, cause love you know, that time is fleeting.” With her head bobbing, hands flailing unselfconsciously, a necklace of 108 beads attached to a picture of Osho Rajneesh swinging lustily, Vaishali, 38, is the cynosure of all eyes. In the coffee shop couples entwined over cake, gape. A barista smiling benevolently at his cash register looks up, appalled. The orchestra singer warbles on. In her mind’s eye, she is the sexy Julie of the eponymous film — beautiful, luminescent, able to absolve her sins and forget her sorrows with a single melody.
It’s been a month since Vaishali left her home in Ambarnath and moved into a two-room apartment in suburban Dombivali. On her way, she dropped off her 24-year-old son Sridhar at Shirdi and her 21-year-old son Srikant at her in-laws’ in Ratnagiri. For weeks, Sridhar had tried to recover from a broken love affair. “He became mental,” she explains, blowing into the foam of her cappuccino. “I put him in an institution.” One night, she says, her son Shridhar entered her room and raped her. It was July 26, the day of the Mumbai floods. “God cried,” she says.
Vaishali cried as well, then muffled her screams with her fist. Who would wipe away the tears of a bar girl who from the age of 11 had used her body to better her life? She says, “Log sochte hain, bar mein kaam karti hain woh French karti hain, back sex karti hai.” (People think, she works in a bar; she has oral sex and anal sex). Her son raped her again. Immediately after, she bought two bus tickets, and had him placed in a guesthouse in Shirdi. When he recovers, she says, he will be welcomed back. Vaishali looks away. Her bony fingers, each encircled by a ring, grasp the handle of her coffee mug. Her mouth appears shrunken, eyes droopy, cheeks concave. “I have no complaint,” she says, vehemently. “My sons are good boys. God has blessed me.”
The only daughter of classical singers, Vaishali was born in Dadar, the eldest of two siblings. She watched her parents — students and teachers of the Gwalior Gharana — pursue their art with a passion that did not extend to their children. They were so poor they would wait for vegetables and fruit to tumble off food carts. Yet, when she speaks of the music of Ustad Rehmat Ali Khan and Dinanath Mangeshkar wafting through her bare bones of her home, her eyes light up and she smiles guilelessly. Cocking her head, she hums a tune, clicks her fingers, and looks for a few seconds as she must have as a little girl before she was robbed of her childhood. “Even today I don’t listen to film music at home,” she smiles. “Only classical music, and every time, I cry.”
When she was six, an elderly family friend began to take Vaishali and her best friend to the terrace. “Balatkar karne ke liye jagah to honi chahiye. Che saal ki ladki ke paas kya hai? (You need a place to commit rape. What does a six-year-old have?) He played with me,” she says in a loud voice, startling a man seated behind. She never told her parents, suggesting they would not have cared. At 12, her parents separated for two years. Although he was paralysed on his left side and prone to fits, her father had needs, which he now expected his daughter to fulfil. “Naturally, he wanted sex,” she shrugs.
A year earlier she had begun sleeping with a fruit seller in the neighbourhood. Sometimes for a fistful of apples, the little girl allowed the old man to violate her. “I was so hungry. It wasn’t a question of choice,” she articulates. “I simply couldn’t survive on two rotis a day. At a young age I realised that when you lose something, you gain something as well. When I was small, I received Rs 5 and Rs 10, in exchange for sex. It was a lot of money. This is what I see in the lives of the dance bar girls now. The only security you have is what you provide for yourself. Even the man sleeping with you won’t give you security.”
Vaishali may have bartered sex for survival, but she did not allow her father to violate her. His subsequent verbal abuse, “hammering” as she describes it in English, continued for two years. Meanwhile, a 19-year-old signboard painter, Dilip, had ingratiated himself in her friends’ circle at school. In the Mithun Chakraborty look-alike with his laughing eyes and “maharaja’s” demeanour, Vaishali saw her escape. For four months, she courted Dilip.
In the fourth month 14-year-old Vaishali was pregnant with their first child and in the seventh month, her mother returned home with a priest to solemnise the relationship.
The couple had no future together, but Vaishali, who had left school in the ninth grade, hoped to find relief from the “hammering” and the hunger, which remain the most profound and palpable memory of her childhood. Though Dilip’s career blossomed after he left painting to become a cameraman in Hindi films, his alcoholism and a sustained pneumonic bout threatened a return to poverty. Living in Malad’s Malvani slum, Vaishali began working as an orchestra singer in a dance bar. She earned Rs 20 daily, but the more lucrative career in dancing wasn’t an option. “I’m not a beauty,” she shrugs, “People didn’t like me. Just as well. I know what happens to beautiful girls. Murder, acid attacks, rape. A beauty can’t go through life in peace.” By pursuing singing she felt that she was honouring her parents. Though they cared to meet her but once after she married and despite her father’s attempted incest, Vaishali maintains: “My parents didn’t put one wrong thought in my mind. I couldn’t hope for a better father and mother.”
Vaishali’s marriage lasted six years. Six years of sickness and abuse. After Dilip left her, she sent her children to Ratnagiri. She sang long hours at Saat Rasta’s Canara Hotel to earn enough to support them. Eventually, she bought her own house in Ambarnath. She also drank heavily, and embarked on a series of affairs. “Kisi ne daru pilake soya mere saat, kisine chutiya banake soya, kisine badnam karke.” (Someone got me drunk and slept with me, someone fooled me, someone humiliated me.) Then she met a man who would indirectly change the course of her life. She knew him only as Tarzan. He wasn’t in the mafia clarifies Vaishali, shocked at the suggestion. He was a “goonda”, a murderer, with two police cases registered against him. He frequented the bar so often to watch her, he had a chosen corner on the velvet sofa, where he sat shrouded in the darkness, the music, the perfume. “Hum ek doosre ke deewane the,” she smiles. (We were crazy about each other). After four years Tarzan left. She coaxed him back 21 times, but now he’s a married man. “He was a great personality in my life,” she sighs.
When their affair ended in 1996, Vaishali was at her lowest point. Ironically, she elevated herself through a childhood connection. While buying a newspaper one morning, she spied the book Sambhog Se Samadhi Ki Aur (From Sex to Superconciousness) by Osho Rajneesh. At seven, Vaishali had watched her mother go for his lectures at Dadar’s D’Silva High School. “He had a very bad name then,” she laughs. “People warned us against the bearded baba who stole children.” Her mother wasn’t interested in Osho; she had a crush on actor Vinod Khanna, whose association with Rajneesh was well publicised.
Entranced by what she read, Vaishali left her job, packed a lone suitcase and went to the Osho ashram in Pune. She stayed five months, absorbed in meditation, inhaling Osho’s opinions on sex, women and music. She smacks her fingers hard on the table. “This is what he taught me,” she snaps, in flawless English. “This is the moment. Here. I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow, where I was yesterday. This is life. Moment to moment.”
When speaking of Osho, Vaishali’s shoulders rise from their customary slouch. Her hard eyes are focused, her expression commanding. She honours her “master” by speaking only in English when talking of him. In her determined reading of his teachings the potential of this tri-lingual singer is hinted at and, despite a lingering fondness for alcohol, her intellect to be contended with. She speaks of Buddha, casually mentions Freud, and asks if I’ve read the Kamasutra, in one breath. She suddenly suggests, “Have sex often. It prevents acidity. It dissolves all your problems. Main Meera bhi ban gayi. Main Draupadi bhi ban gayi. Main Radha bhi ban gayi.”
Although Osho’s spiritual guidance governs her inner being, the pressure cooker existence of Vaishali’s impoverished life is hers to bear, alone. She earns Rs 400 daily from singing in the orchestra, of which a portion is sent to her sons in Ratnagiri and Shirdi. She spends Rs 1,000 on rent and Rs 200 on electricity monthly, and up to Rs 200 daily, travelling to work. In her free time, she writes her autobiography and dreams of being a politician. She speaks passionately of her love of music.
Then just when one forgets about the horrors she has experienced, and begins to hope that she will have a better future, Vaishali reminds us of how a lifetime of sexual and emotional abuse can curdle the most determined mind. She sneers, “Afraid of HIV? For five years I had sex with a man who was HIV positive. Nothing happened to me. Don’t tell me about science. And don’t tell me it happens to bar girls. I don’t know one bar girl who has HIV. It’s all in your mind. If you think dirty thoughts you will get it. If you are not spiritual you will get it. I won’t.”
Tehelka, October 29 , 2005
Photo: Sanjiv Valsan
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25 comments:
One more in an excellent series that uncovers the truer facets of the lives of Mumbai's former bar girls.
Well done!
Shreya
lovely piece.
Another beautiful piece. Best series I have come across in a long time - and much needed!
You should submit it for some competitions or something, maybe make a TV report out of it...
I hated this.
Not your writing , which is spare and satisfying as usual.
I'm just ashamed to be a man.
I have a daughter. Would I want her to ever face these choices?
J.A.P.
I have read all the articles and without doubt these are the best examples of writing I have seen in a very long time... Congrats and my regards to Sanjiv Valsan as well. Good work by him too.
Nice articles, things i never knew existed.. And your post on the eunuchs was quite moving since i had read another post the same day. i hve never liked them, no pity whatsoever, i don't know why but I am beginning to see them in a diff light. thanks
This is the kind of thing which makes me wish that we bomb ourselves out of existence. :-(
very disturbing....our lives are so shielded that its very hard to digest...is this stuff really true...or part of her hallucination...
excellent writing as always. but very disturbing
I am afraid to re-visit your posts. Heart-breaking stuff.
Krishna
Reading this is so depressing !
I truely feel for all of them
and I hope someday I could do
a lot for them
But as of now there is very little
I think
Unless you know of some way by which
I could help them all the way in
Bombay from bangalore ?
I still can't believe some people have such horrible lives !!!
Extremely disturbing. But wonderful reading. It was indeed excellent work. Does this have to be the second last though?
Its amazing how we live all our lives not knowing what and where we could have been...
raped by father and son?
this woman has a spirit..
reading this series, only leaves me with more questions about their lives.
Excellent writing. Less disturbing. More revealing. Then again, it takes a lot more to disturb a hard-boiled cynic. Hope something comes out of this. Then again, what will come out of this? What are we hoping this will achieve? Not sure. Superb journalism. Excellent reading. Gritty writing. Thank you.
Makes me want to climb into some coccoon and never come out of it...scary thoughts
Lovely,
Soem really good i hve read in blog.
I don't write, i only read. and this is the best i hve read.
Great writing, and very interesting comments. Are these reader remarks being sent to your paper? Doesn't seem fair to have so many lovely thoughts on what is a series of newspaper articles restricted to just this blog - on you, and on the readers and publishers of the paper.
Thanks for making it available.
Superb piece - sensitive and true without any silly sentimentality.
We desperately need more top quality writing like yours in our mainstream media!
Rajat
you are a talented and thought provoking writer. your humourous pieces rock too!
have got you on my favorites list - now that i'm an insider, i just have to get my sonia fix :)
shikha
A powerful series of exposés on the dismal condition of mumbai's former bar girls. Thank you.
I hope something is done very soon to provide these hapless women with an alternative means of livelihood, or it's obvious that prostitution will be their only recourse...
A very sad state of affairs...
Shankar
regarding previous post: feedback@tehelka.com
U
Really scary...and disturbing. We live such a sheltered life...that we forget how cruel world is..
Shatters every illusion you might have about our humanity, our culture, any 'progress' we might be pretending to have made, our future...and perhaps above all, ourselves.
Most of us will probably have forgotten this woman and her life(?) in the next couple of hours.
But this woman's reality is probably not so far from our own. Many of us probably know of or suspect near/distant family or friends of similar horrors such as incest but choose to look away.
Please don't. You may be looking away from the murder of a soul that will then merely exist- and it will be a miserable slimey existence such as Vaishalis'.
Do something...*NOW*
Sonia,
How do you separate yourself from your interview subjects? Just reading about the abuse this woman has gone through makes me want to puke. It must be so difficult to keep replaying the interview in your head and then write about it.
I guess that's why you're an excellent journalist.
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