(COLD SEASON: DECEMBER 2003–JANUARY 2004)
Our rickshaw has pulled up by the barbeque stall outside the Tarranum Cinema and we’re looking out of the door, shouting instructions and deciding whether to have chicken pieces or kebabs. Fewer men are around and the place has lost its bustle and energy. Many of the kothas are shut. I don’t know whether this is because the damp, aching cold is keeping the clients away or because there’s not enough custom even when the weather is good. Only a handful of performance rooms are open: they look rundown and very different from some of the lively, polished kothas I saw on my very first visit to Shahi Mohalla seven years ago. The shoe shops are creeping ever closer to the heart of the bazaar.
The last vestiges of the old Heera Mandi are being eclipsed and the world of the traditional brothels is almost at an end. No more nawabs and very few cultured tawaifs can be found in Shahi Mohalla. Today, an ambitious girl who wants to make it in Heera Mandi will aspire to be an actress—but most will settle for a dancing tour in the Gulf. This is where the clients are and where the money is to be made. Maha says it’s good work and that her daughters can make a handsome profit. Traveling on airplanes, staying in hotels, and joining an international scene is a glamorous escape from the stigma of being a kanjri in Heera Mandi.
Spinning the Wheel
Maha’s house is no longer half empty but full of people and noise. The girls have returned from the Gulf, and, as Maha predicted, they have brought with them a new kind of life. All are in the business. It’s the kind of life Maha can remember from her own youth. The generational cycle of Heera Mandi has at last come full circle.
The rhythm of the days and nights is confusing. No one goes to bed until four or five in the morning, and they sleep until long after midday. Last night Maha said she was going to have an early night, but then she started sorting out the clothes at two o’clock. Now it’s almost one in the afternoon and everyone is asleep, covered in mounds of blankets and lying perilously close to the gas fire. Four-inch flames are shooting from the top of the fire and gas is leaking and hissing around the sticky tape used to patch up the holes in the rubber supply pipe. I’m afraid there’ll be an inferno, with no way out.
I leave them to sleep and I sit in the weak winter sunshine under the big shiny panja watching customers eating lunch on Iqbal’s rooftop restaurant: they are modern, Westernized Pakistani women with short, blow-dried hair and designer sunglasses. The rough floor tiles feel warm under my feet. It’s peaceful—even the horns and screeching engines of the rickshaws on Fort Road are distant sounds. Birds circle around the minarets of the Badshahi Masjid as the men make their way to prayer. In the corner of the courtyard, the topmost floor of one of the houses has caved in and a group of khusras edge around the chasm to sit in the sun and oil each other’s hair. A couple of dogs bark at them but soon lose interest. They’re always there, confined to a few feet of terrace, barking and copulating endlessly. Below me, in her own partly screened terrace, a very pretty young woman is washing dishes and throwing grains of rice to the sparrows. She has long, glossy, red nails the same shade as the flowers she grows in a pot. They are startling splashes of exquisite color in the midst of so much dusty gray and buff.
By early evening the whole family is refreshed and hungry. At midnight they are just getting into their stride. At three in the morning, it’s bone-chillingly cold and the air is thick and foggy even inside the house. Smoldering hashish and fumes from the gas fires mix with the barbeque smoke drifting through the windows from the restaurant next door. They’re all eating ice cream and dancing. Mutazar is throwing shoes at his sisters, shouting over the sound of the music, and ordering them to address him in the polite form of the language—as one would address one’s betters. I don’t feel like participating in the party and lie on the bed in a very old black coat, trying to keep warm. They think I’m ill. Nena has brought me a plate of fruit. Sofiya has offered me different flavors of ice cream, a bottle of Coke, tea, chicken curry, and sweets. She treats me like a giant doll. Whenever I’m about to sink into sleep I can hear her rushing toward me saying, “Louise Auntie needs treatment.” I have pieces of wet tissue stuck all over my face.
The Old Arab
Nena is married at last. This time there was no hysteria, perhaps because she is older, no longer a child, and perhaps because the deed happened in her home, not in a foreign palace. They call her husband the Old Arab. He rings every day from Dubai to speak to Nena and make sure she’s being a faithful wife. He hasn’t seen her for weeks, not since the marriage. He flew to Pakistan and stayed with them for a month. They have lots of photographs of the event: Nena in her wedding dress; Nena on the morning after her wedding; the Old Arab smoking on the rooftop; the Old Arab eating meat. They say he’s 75—but he looks more like a well-used 65 to me.
Maha doesn’t like him. “He took medicine,” she says “so that he could have sex with Nena for hours. She was in such pain. And he has a big dick. The sister-fucker.”
Nena kept pretending to have headaches and was so glad when the month was over and he returned to his car service business in Dubai.
They endured him because the money was good: five lakh ($ 8,400); two sets of gold jewelry, and a top-of-the-line mobile phone. He was supposed to pay another lakh for every month that Nena remains his wife. Maha doesn’t think that this arrangement will last long. The Old Arab’s already talking about halving his financial support, so Nena is starting to search for a second rich husband.
A Baby for Nisha
Nisha is convinced she’s pregnant and she’s delighted. The father is Azim, a thin youth with a sparse moustache and long hair that hangs in front of his eyes. Nisha has a few photos of him. She met him in Abu Dhabi when he visited her club. He’s Pakistani—from Balochistan—and works as a jockey in the Gulf. Nisha has forgotten that she hates men: she loves Azim. She’s deliriously happy and lies next to me on the big bed musing over whether the baby will look like Azim. Nena snorts and skips off to laugh in the other room.
Maha is sorting out the clothes again and shaking her head. She doesn’t think Nisha is well enough to carry and deliver a baby. “She didn’t take her pills,” she complains. “And now we have this trouble.” All the girls take the contraceptive pill—except Nisha who thought it would be better to be pregnant.
Maha has more to say when we are alone. “This baby is bad for us. Nisha isn’t good at ‘relations,’ ” Maha insists, “but she can dance. If she has a baby her belly will be rotten and she won’t be able to dance anymore. We already have two children in the house. We can’t afford another one now. It’s not time for her to have a baby.”
Maha understands her daughter very well: Nisha wants a baby so she won’t have to work. But Nisha also wants to be in love. Azim visited her in Lahore for two days and two nights. They were the best of her life. Azim wasn’t so sure about the romance. He told her, “I like you. I like your eyes and I like your smile, but I don’t love you. I don’t like your figure.” He’s already married, but Nisha is sure that the baby will be a boy and that Azim will make her his second wife.
Nisha and I share the big carved bed paid for by Nena’s admirer, so I know that she cries herself to sleep every night, weeping silently for hours.
Sometimes she talks about a girl she knows in Abu Dhabi. This girl has a boyfriend, but the boyfriend doesn’t like the girl’s family. What, she asks, should this friend do? Should she give up her family to be with the man?
I tell her to advise her friend that men come and go but that she will always have her family. It must be the wrong thing to say because it makes her cry even more.
Last night Nisha talked with her mother and me about her future. Could she leave the family and marry Azim if he gave Maha forty lakh ($67,000)? Nisha is dreaming. She knows it’s impossible. He’ll pay nothing for her.
She’s keeping a record of the relationship in a large notebook. It contains every text message Azim has ever sent her and page after page of writing in English—lines that repeat the same words over and over again: Azim I love you; Azim I love you; Azim I miss you.
Dried Fruit and Nuts
Nena has a new admirer. He saw her dancing at a function a couple of weeks ago, and he wants to get to know her better and meet her in private. We’ve prepared for his visit: the house has been cleaned, all the rubbish has been thrown out the window, and we have taken great care with our makeup. Sameer, exporter of dried fruit and nuts, arrives at night bearing gifts; two shopping bags full of pine nuts and sultanas, plus two truly horrendous woolen cardigans for Nena. Maha raises an eyebrow. He’s pitching it all wrong. He’ll have to improve the quality of his presents if he wants a piece of Nena. Sets of gold jewelry are acceptable; woolen cardigans are not.
He’s an unlikely looking client: thin, 55, with flat hair and a small moustache. He sits nervously on an armchair in the main room while the family practices its craft. Nena sits next to him for a few minutes and then moves to the opposite side of the room, where she giggles, whispering to me behind her hand. Her mother and sisters take it in turn to talk to Sameer, chatting about everyday things, while Sameer casts quick but inquiring glances at Nena.
We’ve been eating nuts for two hours while smiling at Sameer. The nuts are fiddly to open and we’re surrounded by a sea of broken shells.
Maha lies on the bed with Sameer. They’re arguing.
“It’s not enough,” Maha is saying. “She’s only been married for a month.”
There’s more discussion and then Maha speaks to Nena. A deal has been done: Sameer can kiss Nena and hug her—but no more. “He can’t get things for free,” Maha says, leaving the room with ten thousand ($169) of Sameer’s rupees.
Nena is on the bed with Sameer under a big blanket. She’s laughing…and it’s time for me to go. In the other room the rest of the family is watching television. Maha joins them and settles on the mattress. She lights a joint and tears open a bag of sultanas.
New Year’s Eve
Maha is highly agitated. It’s New Year’s Eve and the girls are performing at an important function. Everything has to be perfect. The clients are rich and influential and some of them might want more than a dancing show. The girls have been preparing for hours, choosing the right clothes, washing their hair, and applying makeup. They all want to wear bright-colored contact lenses with frighteningly blank pupils. They can’t decide on blue or green and they think I’m mad when I insist they should stick with their own brown eyes—they’re so much softer and prettier. Maha isn’t bothered about their eyes: she’s rushing around shouting about the time even though the taxi won’t come for another two hours.
She looks at my makeup and pulls a face. “Make it strong,” she tells me and hands me a bright lipstick. We’re in matching cream silk outfits and I’ve been loaded up with a lot of the Old Arab’s gold.
Such is the importance of the event that Adnan has been persuaded to look after Sofiya and Mutazar. I’m amazed that he’s still around but he seems to be a more frequent visitor these days now that he knows Maha won’t keep asking for money. He comes to take his drugs in peace, and this evening arrives with a companion, half-stoned, and with a supply that’s generous enough to see them through the night. I hope the children will be safe.
The function is in a house in Defence. It’s a big rambling place with an enormous hall and many half-empty rooms. A servant shows us into a room that has a bathroom en suite and the girls change into their dancing outfits. A friend of the host arrives to check us over. He has dyed black hair, sparse eyebrows, and very bad taste in burgundy, gold-buttoned blazers. Ariba says he was one of her clients a few weeks ago.
Seven middle-aged and elderly men are sitting on a shiny red-leather corner sofa in the main reception room. We sit opposite them in silence while they look at us, chatting among themselves and drinking Black Label whiskey. We’re not offered drinks until a charming general gives Maha and me gin and tonics. Maha recoils at the taste.
Other guests arrive and we’re shunted down the room to sit on less expensive chairs farther away from the food and drinks. One of the guests is doddery, fat, and covered in the blotchy pigmentation of the extremely old. He eases himself into the corner of the sofa with difficulty.
“Give me drink,” he calls to Nena. She walks across the room with perfect poise and proceeds to pour an entire tumblerful of whiskey. There are roars of laughter—she looks so naive. For a second, Nena loses her composure. As she stares at her mother in panic, Maha fixes an intent gaze on her daughter, smiles, and tells her that it’s okay.
“She’s very young,” she explains to the tamash been. The old man pats the sofa and motions Nena to sit down. He plays with her fingers and places a hand on her thigh and beneath her carefully painted smile—the one she spends so long cultivating in front of the mirror—Nena is rigid with humiliation. Men never touch women this way in public in Pakistan.
The room is filling up with rich men and their “keeps,” their “kept women.” This isn’t a party for husbands and wives but for the male elite of Lahore and their current mistresses. The men are industrialists, bureaucrats, generals, and senior professionals. Their keeps, beautiful women in their twenties and early thirties, are anxious to differentiate themselves from the dancing girls of Heera Mandi. This is probably because most of them also have their roots in the mohalla: they or their mothers were nachne walli too and were lifted out of the brothel to become the mistresses of influential men. They treat us with complete disdain and pretended indifference. When the music begins and Nena starts to dance in the center of the room, all the men are captivated but their women feign boredom. The host’s mistress, a well-groomed but hard-faced and thin-lipped woman, casts her eyes to the ceiling.
“Bitch,” Maha mutters. I couldn’t agree more.
Nena’s performance is accomplished and she’s far more beautiful than anyone else in the room. All the women are aware of it. She hides her face with her hands and peeps between her fingers. She stamps her feet, falling to her knees, arching her back so that her silky black hair cascades onto the floor. The tamash been cover her with money as she spins. They hold thousand-rupee bills next to their friends and Nena dances over to take the money and drop it on the carpet. Maha is keeping a keen eye on the servants to make sure they don’t pocket the family’s profits.
The audience is calling “Vah, Vah!” (Bravo) in appreciation and the bitter keep is furious. When the music ends she glides passed Nena and presses several buttons on the music system. It’s such a sophisticated but badly put-together system that it takes a long time to reset. Nena has been sabotaged.
Once the music has been restored, the other girls take turns dancing: Nisha does so stiffly and Ariba performs in a white glitter shalwaar kameez that makes her large breasts look even bigger. One of the generals is riveted.
He wants to meet her but doesn’t get the chance because we are asked to leave immediately after midnight. The thin-lipped keep insists on it. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be categorized with the fallen women of Heera Mandi or perhaps she doesn’t feel comfortable about the way her own patron is looking at Nena.
“Insults. Insults,” Maha fumes as we stuff all the dancing outfits into the suitcase.
The blotchy old man shouts at us to go quickly and laughs as the servants usher us through the doors.
“Our honor is destroyed,” Maha moans. “That bitch woman. I hope she dies.”
We’re in the taxi, driving home in silence. Nena’s forehead is pressed against the window, Nisha is crying, and Ariba has her head in her hands. Everything has gone wrong. We have the money, barely contained, inside Maha’s handbag, but the family’s honor has been compromised. All those tamash been will know that we were humiliated. It’ll do the girls’ reputations serious damage. Just as important, Maha and the girls feel that their pride, that thing they cling to and preserve through good times and bad, has been injured.
Maha wipes her eyes on her dupatta, rocks back and forth in her seat, and tells the taxi driver to go to Mall Road. We stop outside a drive-in restaurant and Maha orders plates of fried chicken, french fries, and so many bottles of Coke that we’re soon stuffed with food and everyone is beginning to laugh at the memory of the keep and her acid face.
To add to the fun we ask the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way home. We watch Maha though the windows, pointing to this and that.
“Look at Mum,” Nisha says, “she’s buying the whole shop.”
Maha pulls thousand-rupee notes from her bag and the shop assistants carry shoppers full of food to the car. At home, the food is spread on a chador in the best room. We have an odd combination of olives, namkeen, dates, biscuits, tinned pineapple, and a giant ice-cream cake. Adnan has woken up and looks on sleepily as Maha sticks a dozen candles into the cake so that we can celebrate New Year in style. We all sing “Happy Birthday to You” and Maha laughs, watching the children blow out the candles. But then she roots around in her bag and shouts at the girls to bring the Old Arab’s phone. They can’t find it and no one can remember seeing it since we left the function.
Maha has stopped laughing. She’s stricken. The phone is worth a fortune and all the clients’ names and phone numbers are stored on its memory. It is, as Maha often reminds me, her “big pimp.” Losing the database will be a disaster. “What a night. What a night,” Maha is crying. The ice cream is melting fast in front of the gas fire, but no one cares.
We think it might be in the taxi, so we rush out into the street and run through the bazaar. The taxi walla is pulled out of a tea shop. The phone isn’t in his car, but Maha has made up her mind that he stole it while she was buying the food in the bakery. Adnan talks to the driver and asks him to come to the house, where he sits looking patient as Maha shrieks that he’s a thief and that she’ll call the police. Ariba adds her own loud voice and Nena and Nisha look on accusingly. “You stole my phone because your wife is pregnant and you need the money,” Maha maintains. The taxi driver just shakes his head and leaves.
The next morning the phone still hasn’t been found. Maha is catatonic and Nisha is fretting that she’ll be missing text messages from Azim. One of Maha’s many cousins is here to discuss the crisis. I can hear them talking in the other room and deciding what to do.
“Shall we ask Louise what she thinks?” the cousin suggests.
“No,” Maha answers distractedly. “She’s simple. She won’t understand.”
An hour later Maha has her phone back. The taxi driver said it had fallen down the side of the passenger seat. It’s not true. We checked there last night and when we dialed the phone’s number from Adnan’s mobile it had been switched off. The driver must have stolen it but then relented under pressure.
Maha has collapsed on the bed with relief. Nisha is sad: Azim hadn’t sent a message after all and Nena is wondering if the Old Arab will be angry because she wasn’t on the other end of the line when he called. The reflections don’t last for long because there’s a loud shout from the family living on the ground floor. Maha has left the water pump on and a flood is cascading down the dark well of the building. Nena shouts back and a volley of abuse follows from the depths of the house. Nena replies with uncharacteristic venom and Maha joins in with her usual gusto.
“You’ve a fire in your cunt,” the downstairs woman calls.
Maha roars as we drag her back from the railings. “That bitch has two hundred men a week.”
Dreams of Abu Dhabi
Ariba has put on a lot of weight. She looks 30 not 15. The clients must like it because plenty of men request her services. She’s no longer the louse-ridden girl of two years ago—but she’s still “bad.” She smokes in the bathroom and makes no effort to hide the evidence. There are cigarette butts floating in the toilet and a box of matches on the long-defunct cistern. She drinks alcohol with the clients too. Elite dancing girls are not supposed to drink—it’s shameless—but Ariba isn’t an elite girl. She’s a fun girl and, though she earns far less than the beautiful Nena, she has a lot more customers. She keeps their phone numbers in a tin: some have given her their business cards and others have left their names scrawled on scraps of paper, tissues, or napkins.
Her success hasn’t erased her browbeaten look and she’s just as desperate for affection. She’s given me dozens of little gifts: hair clips, hairbands, eye shadow, socks, bubble gum, bracelets, a picture of herself. When I apply some makeup she stands close by watching intently and breathing heavily. She sits next to me and stares when I try to work. She’ll sit quietly for hours, just looking. I can’t believe I’m so interesting.
Her sisters make an effort to look glamorous around the house, but Ariba never bothers. She slops around in red tracksuit pants and an old lamé top. She doesn’t even change when dalals come to the house. Today a big dalal who supplies girls to senior bureaucrats and industrialists has called to assess the girls informally. He’s in cricket whites, a blazer, and a knitted woolen hat and relaxes on the bed eating pineapple cake. The girls are courting him. He’s very funny and makes Maha laugh. They’re discussing Nena and the dalal advises her not to wear too much makeup: she is young and fresh and has a natural beauty. Many tamash been value such beauty, he adds with a nod to her mother.
Ariba hasn’t joined us on the mattress. She’s busy cleaning in another room. She never stops working; she’s always peeling vegetables, washing dishes, or sweeping the floor. Whenever she sees me with the jharu she snatches it from my hand and shouts, “No, Louise Auntie. Sit down.” I’m tired of sitting down, watching her work.
She works hard at pleasing her clients too. Tonight she’s entertaining a customer at a big hotel. She’ll spend two hours getting ready. He lives in England and always asks for Ariba when he comes to Pakistan on business. He’s become a regular and Ariba says he’s okay. She knows what he wants: a night full of cuddles and kisses because he can’t manage much more.
“What do you wish for in your life?” I ask her as she’s getting ready.
She looks at me as if it’s a really odd question. “I don’t know.”
“You want nothing?”
“A car, perhaps. Some nice clothes.”
I look at her quizzically. She’s nervously excited. “Perhaps I will go back to Abu Dhabi.” She tries to look relaxed and unfazed by the topic, but it’s not convincing.
“You like Abu Dhabi?”
“Yes.”
She stops applying the makeup and shows me a photograph she keeps hidden in a zipped compartment of her bag. It’s of a very ordinary middle-aged man. He’s standing, slightly awkwardly, in a dry-cleaning store, in front of racks of laundered dresses and suits, and he’s smiling. It’s a gentle, embarrassed, bashful smile. Looking at him makes Ariba smile too.
I ask her why she likes Abu Dhabi and she struggles to find an answer. There’s a long pause and then she sighs deeply. “Because here I am old and there I am young.”
Behind Locked Doors
Everyone is irritable and complaining of stomach cramps. In households of women, reproductive cycles synchronize and everyone has her period at the same time. Customers aren’t welcome for a while. Nothing is happening. Life is on hold and there’s no business to structure the day. We sleep most of the time. There’s no difference between day and night. Sameer, exporter of dried fruits, phoned but Maha was frank with him. When he spoke to Nena, he said he’d call back in a week once the “menses” were over.
We’re waiting to hear confirmation of Nisha’s pregnancy, anxious for news, but she’s said nothing. She’s quiet and withdrawn over the meal, and then Nena points to some spots of dried blood on Nisha’s shalwaar.
“It’s from my nose. It’s from my nose,” Nisha screams and rushes from the room, not knowing whether to clutch her face or her shalwaar.
She’s sobbing quietly on the bed. There is no baby and there will be no marriage.
We were woken by an enormous crash at dawn; we’d only just gone to sleep. The storage unit in the kitchen had fallen over. Shattered glass covered the floor and Maha’s spices, sugar, and salt lay in untidy piles. The tomato ketchup looked like blood. We were all too tired to bother to clean it up, so we left it: we’ll deal with it like the rest of the mess—when the customers return. We’ll also have to deal with the aftereffects of a flood from the bathroom. Mutazar or Sofiya must have left the tap on and the water spilled into the hall, on to the carpet, and down the stairs. Ariba mopped it up with one of Sameer’s dreadful cardigans. It’s been lying, sodden, in the hall for three or four days. It’s icy when you step on it and the wool has matted into a dense green mass.
Maha’s mother is weeping in the other room. She’s heard that Maha doesn’t want her to visit. It’s true. Maha is scared. Things aren’t going well again. There was the humiliation of the New Year’s function, the phone crisis, the toppled cupboard—and Maha is convinced it’s because of her mother’s black magic. She’s jealous of their newfound prosperity. I’m not surprised; Maha doesn’t share her daughters’ riches with her mother. Blood was sprinkled on the stairs last week and we all trampled it into the house. Maha says her stepfather is responsible for the worst of it. He took soil from the graveyard and added it to the blood on the steps. We’re living amid powdered death.
Sameer is on the phone again today and Maha is talking softly and laughing, calling him beta—son—while chiding him that he’s not offering enough. She’s speaking about insults and honor.
“Look,” she says in exasperation, “this is a business and I’m not giving my daughter for free.”
She turns to me and shrieks, “He’s bringing us some more nuts and dried fruit.”
Nena takes the phone and giggles. Her mother is livid but faintly amused at the man’s stupidity. “He thinks he can pay for my daughter with five hundred rupees’ worth of dried fruit and nuts. Idiot.”
Ariba’s been thieving again. Maha found lots of my things in her cupboard—nothing important or expensive, just little things like mints, felt-tip pens, a pink lip gloss. She’s also been using my mobile phone to call someone in Abu Dhabi. Maha is furious. And she thinks Ariba is stealing more than mints: she thinks she’s keeping money that the clients give her instead of handing it over to the family. Ariba sobs and cowers in the corner, her glass bangles broken and blood trickling down her arms. Maha is screaming at her. “Your father was a dog and you are a dog.”
Maha’s breathing is jagged and shallow, her eyes filling up with tears as she sinks onto the bed. Her anger at Ariba’s financial independence is rooted in fear. “My daughters don’t want to live with me,” she cries. “They want to leave me.” Maha is afraid they will do what she did to her own mother and that she’ll have no one to support her as she enters middle age.
Ariba is saved from another beating by a phone call from the Old Arab. Nena doesn’t want to talk to him, so Nisha takes the call. “Hello, my darling,” she breathes. “I miss you. When will I see you?”
The Old Arab can’t distinguish between his wife and her sister.
Nisha covers the mouthpiece to tell us that the Old Arab is drunk. We all have a turn listening to him slurring words of love and lust. “It’s a dirty call,” Nisha explains, without bothering to hide her hysterical laughter.
Nena rolls her eyes and watches television while Nisha remains half engaged with the call, eating namkeen and remembering, now and again, to ask the Old Arab what he’d like to do and to murmur, “My darling.” It’s a hopelessly amateur performance, but the Old Arab is too drunk to care.
Pictures from a Brothel
Maha’s diet is working. She’s far slimmer and can wear many of the clothes she hasn’t been able to squeeze into for years. She’s happier: happy that they no longer have to beg for money to pay the rent, happy that her daughters are successes. Adnan makes a little contribution to the house but it doesn’t really matter now that they have other sources of income. They will be secure while the girls’ youth and beauty last. Adnan must be happy too: he can enjoy his drugs in nicer surroundings, paid for by his stepdaughters’ labor.
Maha is telling me that she wants to come to England. She wants to come to my wedding when I find a husband—as she’s so sure I will. Then, after the wedding, she wants me to bring him here to Heera Mandi.
“Promise me, Louise. Swear on the Quran. Promise Shahbaz Qalandar: you will bring him here.”
Maha insists that I’ll sleep with him on the big bed and that she’s going to treat him like a king and cook him stuffed karela—a short, knobbly-skinned squash that she packs with lamb and spices and fries in a delicious gravy. It will make him strong. They used to give it to all the prestigious clients, but today they don’t bother. The clients just bring their own Viagra. She says no husband of mine—no man married to her own sister—will ever require medicine. It’s the greatest compliment she’s ever paid me.
I can never thank Maha enough for all she’s given me: a window on her world and her generous, all-embracing, sometimes overpowering friendship. I go home to England soon but these won’t be my last days in the mohalla. I’ll return in the summer and, like Maha and the rest of the nachne walli, I will never really leave Heera Mandi.
I treasure Maha for all the things she is and try to understand all the things she isn’t. She has moments of such spectacular anger and cruelty, and at times these are almost unforgivable. I pity and admire Ariba, the loveless daughter, but I am sad too for Maha—born and raised in a brothel and sold as a child. Such violence breeds violence. Maha should have had all the joy of life knocked out of her. She should have no affection left for her children. She should be the most strident, embittered cynic. And she should hate men—but she doesn’t: she still, miraculously, believes in love. Maybe that great romantic hope is the thing that keeps her going, even though all around her she can see that love is a chimera, that it can never last, that the women here are playthings, valued only for their beauty and erotic skills. One day, she’s convinced with all her heart that she will meet a man who will love more than the dancing girl.
After a long break Iqbal is painting again. He’s working on Maha’s portrait: pictures of her dancing; of her sitting in a shaft of afternoon sun; of her with the children. She’s flattered by all the attention.
“Make me look small,” she instructs. “Make me look slim.”
He laughs and tells her to be still for a moment so he can begin to capture a fragment of her beauty and her restless energy. He adjusts his easel and mixes his oils, but she’s already moved again. He smiles patiently and sighs, exasperated and yet captivated by his model. He won’t be able to make her look small. It’s impossible. He couldn’t make her look anything other than larger than life.
The Triumphs of a Nachne Walli
Nena is very different from the shy and gentle 12-year-old girl I met almost five years ago. She’s no longer a child but a young woman. She also has a harder edge and an unwieldy ego. She tells me over and over again about her triumphs with men and her marriage to the Old Arab. She’s full of herself: confident of her beauty and seductive powers. She spends several hours a day applying makeup and preening in front of the mirror. At the moment she’s particularly taken with applying a special kind of lengthening and thickening mascara that makes her lashes look as if they’re coated in iron filings.
She’s sitting with Nisha and me on the bed. Maha has gone out to see the magician. I’m hearing a familiar tale about how all the men in the club in Dubai are enchanted by her beauty. She mentions one name again and again and it’s not the Old Arab’s. She closes the door.
“Louise Auntie, I don’t want to have relations with old men,” she whispers seriously. “I want to have relations with young men.”
“Only one young man,” Nisha adds.
Nena grows flushed and embarrassed.
“Who is this young man?” I ask.
Nena can’t speak, so Nisha answers. “Yusuf. He’s an Arab. A young Arab from Dubai.”
Nena is nodding and now she can’t stop speaking. “He’s eighteen and handsome. So very handsome…and I love him.”
“He loves her too,” Nisha adds conspiratorially. “And his family is rich.”
Nena has been out with him in his car. They went to the beach and he kissed her, and it was nothing like kissing the Old Arab. It was beautiful. She shivers at the memory.
“He wanted to marry her but his family wouldn’t allow it,” Nisha chokes, thinking of her own bad luck in love.
So, instead, Nena married the Old Arab. No wonder she has a harder edge. Now she can never be Yusuf ’s wife, or the wife of any respectable man. Maha thought it was better this way—she didn’t want Nena falling in love with a young man, surrendering her virginity for free and then leaving the family. The boy would only abandon her in the end. Nena has promised her mother that she’ll never see Yusuf again. I don’t think she will keep this promise: one day, even if only for a day, she’ll be with Yusuf. And while she waits to enter this heaven, she’ll apply her makeup and smile and dance for other men as if it were her joy and her whole life.
Pakeezah
We are sitting in the best room talking about my work and the book I’m writing about Heera Mandi. Maha wants to know what new things I’m saying about her. I say, “Everything,” and she’s pleased.
“I’m the star of the book, aren’t I?” she questions.
I confirm that she is and that the children are stars too.
I think I understand the kind of star Maha wants to be. She enjoys lots of Bollywood films and she knows one especially well—Pakeezah, which means “Pure Heart,” a classic film made in the early 1970s. It’s a story about a tawaif who is rejected by her lover’s family and who dies in childbirth. Her daughter, a courtesan too, struggles for honor and fulfillment. The film romanticizes the world of the tawaifs even as it damns it. Meena Kumari, the legendary Bolly-wood actress, played both the lead characters, alluring and gracious even as she neared death both in the film and in reality. Sumptuously dressed, adored by men, technically skilled in the performing arts, innocent and yet battered by life, the courtesans in Pakeezah possessed the pure heart of the film’s title. It was Meena Kumari’s last movie—arguably her most famous—and one that immortalized the tragedy of the courtesans she played and her own tragic death from alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver. Perhaps Maha wants this kind of immortality too—a lasting record of her life, something to lift her out of the ghetto.
I explain that I’ve got to change all the names in the book so no one will know for sure who they really are.
They sit around and argue about how they would like to be known by people in America and London. They suggest first one thing, then another and then it’s settled. I write their pseudonyms on a piece of paper and they look at it, seeing how the names appear when they are written in English. They’re unusual names in Shahi Mohalla: they’ve chosen the names of higher-status women—the women they’d love to be.
I’ve been in town all afternoon sorting out my return ticket. It’s uncharacteristically quiet as I walk up the flights of steps to Maha’s house. The children aren’t fighting, I can’t hear Maha’s voice, and the doors are all open.
Sofiya and Mutazar are bending over a large cake. Bits of pineapple have fallen on to the mattress and cream is smeared all over their faces. A chocolate ice cream cake is half defrosted and oozing over the rug.
“What’s happened?” I ask. “Who bought the cakes?”
“A tamash been,” Sofiya mumbles through a mouthful of pineapple.
“Sameer?”
Nisha and Nena shake their heads. They aren’t happy. They’re standing stiffly at the far end the room. They don’t like what’s going on: they thought that they had eclipsed their mother at last.
Maha is sitting on the bed I share with Nisha and she beckons me to come quickly. There must be four dozen roses in the room. They are tender-stemmed, pink, red, and yellow, picked just as the buds are about to open into full bloom. Mutazar and Sofiya have stuck each one to the walls with bits of sticky tape. It’s strangely, surreally beautiful.
The flowers and the cakes were delivered to Maha from an admirer who chose not to give his name. A card came with them. The printed verse is written in English and I struggle to translate it slowly and hesitantly into Urdu. It’s about the path of life, and tears and a lost heart and a soul that finds the place in which it belongs—a place in which it will find happiness. Maha listens intently, staring at the card. And when I’ve finished my clumsy translation she makes me repeat it.
She turns to the wall and places her hand over one of the flowers. It’s already beginning to wilt.
Maha smiles and presses her head against her hand. “Tell me again,” she sighs. “And after that, tell me again.”
On my last day in Heera Mandi I’ve been asked to bring a notepad and pen into a tiny interior room full of suitcases and old clothes. Maha is pulling her hoard out of a steel box. She’s taking it to the bank, but she wants to count it all first. Rolls of notes, dozens of mobile phones, watches, fancy electronic gadgets, and boxes of jewelry are stacked in neat order. We sort the money into piles: the five lakh ($8,400) from the Old Arab—the price of Nena’s virginity—is arranged in neat rows all over the floor. The money from the dancing tours is sorted and arranged in another careful row. Nena has totted up the total, and I have to check it to make sure they’ve got their sums right.
It’s a small fortune but one that can’t be earned quickly again—not until Sofiya enters the business. Maha will have to be careful how she spends the cash. It’s the family’s future and its security. They’re going to use the money to put a deposit on this house so that, one day soon, they can buy it and stop paying rent.
We wrap up the hoard and put it in bags that are strapped to Maha’s body and concealed by a giant chador. We stop by the door to put on our shoes and Maha pauses. Someone is coming up the stairs. They’re dragging something.
It’s Adnan. We can hear him pulling his crippled leg behind him.
We look down the stairs. A man is here, but it’s not Adnan. It’s Sameer, exporter of dried fruit and nuts. He’s puffing his way toward us heaving a sack.
“What’s that?” Nisha asks as he drops the sack at Maha’s feet.
We’re staring at his expectant face, his moustache spiky with excitement and effort.
“Pistachio,” Sameer crows triumphantly.
Nisha pushes open the door to the best room and Nena vanishes to put on her makeup.
“Beta,” Maha chortles as she kicks off her shoes. “Come in.”