by Smita Harish Jain
Govandi Road Jail stood broken and decrepit on a dirt field inside the “Gas Chamber of Mumbai.” The pollution from the garbage incinerators at the nearby Deonar landfill, the largest dumping ground in the city, coated the buildings inside the prison with black soot and filled the air with the smell of rotting food and burning rubber.
I stood outside the prison’s massive iron gates, waiting for the warden to arrive. Several meters away, three young men—I guessed them to be in their early twenties—sat under a neem tree and shared a Gold Spot. They passed the bottle of orange soda around, until one of them waved it off and reclined under the shade of the giant tree, a temporary respite from the searing August heat of the city.
They were joined a few minutes later by two more men, who had just emerged from the prison compound.
“Then what, Vikas?” the one lying in the shade of the neem asked.
Vikas checked the sheaf of papers in his hand. “You have Shetty today at 7 p.m. Don’t be late.”
“Shetty is easy. I don’t even have to ask anymore,” the man said, puffing out his small chest and waggling his eyebrows.
“They’re all easy,” Vikas said. “One by one, we’ll take care of them. Amit, you keep the schedule.” He handed the papers to the other young man who had come through the prison gates with him.
Amit pocketed them and motioned the others to get up. The three friends rose to their feet, and all five mounted Maruti scooters and left in a cloud of dust.
Before I could make any sense of their conversation, I heard my name. “Mr. Dhawan?”
I turned to see the warden, a large woman dressed in a dark olive uniform and combat boots. Together we walked to Jali Mulaqat, the visiting cage for undertrials, where those waiting to move from the prison to the courts were housed. She described the many structures we passed along the way, sounding more like a real estate agent than a prison official.
“In these buildings, we keep our serious offenders, those imprisoned for murder, cheating, rape,” she said and directed my eyes to a row of five brick barracks with standing seam steel roofs. “No one has ever escaped from there.”
She continued her tour, taking me past outdoor toilets, a small grassy maidan, and a crude gym consisting of several mismatched barbells and a treadmill that was plugged into nothing. She gave me tidbits about each area that she hoped would make it into my article, until, finally, we arrived at the cage.
Inside, women sat in large groups, sharing their problems and proclaiming their innocence. Some were just girls, and busied themselves chasing cockroaches or pulling lice out of each other’s hair. I searched the crowded space for Kohinoor, and found her in a corner of the cage, listening to the occasional caws of an Indian ringneck perched in a peepul tree outside the Jali.
“Miss?” I started, not sure exactly how to address a dance bar girl.
“Sunilji, you have come.” She greeted me with the familiarity of a fast friend. Despite the closeness in our ages, she added the honorific ji to acknowledge the difference in our stations.
I bobbled my head from side to side, a classic Indian gesture which can mean yes, no and maybe—sometimes, all three at the same time. I felt like a teenager seeing a naked woman for the first time, even though she was covered from head to toe in traditional women’s prison garb, a white sari with blue borders. Still, she took my breath away.
“Kohinoor...ji,” I said, adding the honorific as an afterthought. It wasn’t necessary for someone like her, but in her presence, I was merely a disciple.
Kohinoor had hit the Mumbai dance bar scene just one year ago, and instantly became the subject of every male conversation and fantasy. No one knew where she came from, and no one cared. That was just part of her allure. I didn’t even know if Kohinoor was her real name. It didn’t matter. It was the name that had made her famous.
She motioned me to the floor space directly beneath us, and we lowered ourselves onto the slab of cold, gray cement. I turned to the first crisp page of my new notebook and waited for her story.
“They all come,” Kohinoor started. “The thugs and the taporis, the ministers and the Bollywood heroes. In the dance bars, everyone is the same.”
I wanted to tell her that I understood, that I, too, had been one of them; but this was her story, not mine.
“The dance bar is a place where people come to be entertained,” she said in clear self-defense. “It is not the purveyor of evil that the morality police will have you believe.”
Mumbai’s morality police had gained tremendous ground in the past five years. Self-professed custodians of Indian culture and tradition, they took it upon themselves to save India from what they termed, “the encroaching moral depravity of the West.” They openly threatened young couples holding hands in the park, loudly chastised female college students drinking in bars and even inflicted violence on restaurant owners advertising Valentine’s Day specials.
In the last election, the candidates running on a morality platform had won in landslide victories all over the state of Maharashtra. “We must create boundaries for our women, if we are to succeed as a nation,” Deputy Home Minister Ram Shetty had shouted from his pulpit at the morality rally organized by his supporters. “We must give them decent work to do, and not allow them to sell their bodies to drunks and degenerates.” Then, addressing the dance bar activists who had come, many of them the bar girls themselves, he declared, “It is more dignified to take your life than to live with immorality.”
Once in office, Shetty and his cronies in the Mumbai city and Maharashtra state governments had organized themselves into the Ring of Morality, and enacted legislation that closed down the thriving dance bar industry. A mainstay of Mumbai’s nightlife, dance bars had been part of the city’s entertainment offerings for over forty years. The move by the ministers was historic and left approximately seventy-five thousand bar dancers in the state unemployed; the majority of those were in Mumbai.
“They blame us for corrupting others, but where is the responsibility of those who come to us?” Kohinoor asked. “We must show everyone, Sunilji, or the truth shall surely lie rotting.”
Only days after Kohinoor had been incarcerated for threatening the lives of the Ring’s members, blaming them for the death of her younger sister, she called me and offered to tell me her side of the story.
“I brought her to Mumbai.” Kohinoor spoke softly. “I couldn’t let her stay with our parents in Tandur. They would have sold her to the highest bidder. A virgin requires less of a dowry, you know.”
Tejal was only thirteen when she started dancing in the bars. The bar ban took effect only a few months later and Tejal, lost for money, turned to prostitution. When she learned she had become pregnant by a client who had then abandoned her, she could not face the shame of telling her sister. Instead, Tejal swallowed a mostly full bottle of DDT insecticide she and her sister kept at their flat in Harmony House. When Kohinoor found Tejal, she was having violent convulsions, which turned into paralysis. A few minutes later, Kohinoor held her dead sister in her arms.
The death of a thirteen-year-old girl by her own hands riveted the city. The papers, including the Mumbai Times where I worked, called Tejal “the first casualty” of the Morality Ring’s war on indecency and vulgarity, and made Kohinoor the face of the anti-ban rebellion.
“This is a morality of convenience,” Kohinoor said, her tone a combination of grief and defiance, anger and sadness.
She rubbed her wrists and cried quietly. I had read once that bar dancers cut themselves every time they lose a love, either by choice or otherwise. A quick glance told me that Kohinoor had loved only once. Tejal, I thought.
“Kohinoorji, what will you do if the High Court does not overturn the ban?”
The Dance Bar Workers’ Union had put forward an appeal of the bar ban immediately, and now, nearly six months after the passage of the ban, the Bombay High Court was scheduled to consider it. Kohinoor wanted the truth out there before the trial.
“We will continue to fight the bar ban and, one day, it will be lifted,” Kohinoor said, confidence gleaming in her eyes. “Only this time, we will fight the morality police with morality.”
I assumed she meant that by leading a good life, by showing that the bar workers were decent people, just like anyone else, they would convince the High Court to overturn the ban.
I’d soon find out that that wasn’t what she meant at all.
The first time I saw Kohinoor was at the Maharajah Dance Bar in Wadavali. Some college friends and I had heard about the sexy village girl who had moves that would put any Bollywood item to shame, and we had to see for ourselves.
The drive to the notorious nightspot took us out of our predictable, middle-class existence to a world known only to the initiated. We headed down the Eastern Express Highway, through Kanjurmarg and Ghatkopar, and watched the Mumbai we knew fade into VD clinics, prostitutes and the best dance bars in the city.
Not sure what to expect, we dressed in our temple best and tight double underwear for good measure. We parked in Nirman Colony in Ghatkopar East and walked the rest of the way. We passed a row of shops hawking everything from sexual aids to rosary beads, before reaching a tin door with a sign for Seema’s Restaurant. The entrance to the Maharajah wouldn’t be visible until we stepped inside.
At the door, we were greeted by an East Indian man, judging from his speech—o’s drawn out into aw’s—probably a Bengali. He was small-framed but still managed to look fierce, a wad of paan lodged in his cheek, the red juice from the betel leaf coating his lower lip. He slurped up the tart liquid before welcoming us.
“Hellaw, sirs. Good evening, sirs.” In the distance, we could hear a tune from the latest Hrithik Roshan film.
A quick exchange of money for passes, and we moved into the dark hallway, slapping each other to celebrate our coup: we had gotten in.
The large room at the other end was awash in bright lights strobing from the ceiling and floor, the unnatural colors more suited to a children’s cartoon than to a target of the morality police. In every corner, security guards in half-sleeve shirts that accented their biceps stood akimbo, watching everyone’s movements. On the stage, a woman shimmied in place to a popular classic film song from the eighties. Her feet never moved; only her hips swayed in a half-hearted attempt to keep time with the music. I wondered who was more bored, me or her?
“What rubbish dancers. Chee!” my friend Manish said.
“I hope those others can dance,” Babu said, indicating the row of women sitting in chairs at the back of the stage, waiting their turn. They all looked out of shape—midriffs pouring out from under too-tight costumes, flabby arms barely fitting inside their blouses, faces full of baby fat. If they were providing the evening’s entertainment, we had doubled our underwear for nothing.
“Arre, why are they wearing saris and ghagaras? My sister wears those,” I said, adding to our disappointment. These weren’t the skimpy outfits we had hoped for; merely traditional garments covered in sequins.
“Yah, yaar, I can’t see anything good,” Manish complained. He downed his Johnnie Walker and motioned to a waiter to get him another one.
An announcer gave details about each dancer as she took the stage. Nothing an ardent fan could use to find the girls once they left the safety of the bar, just their stage name, city of origin and a carefully chosen tidbit: “Shefali is from Bangalore and enjoys eating warm moongaphalees on the beach.”
“Kumkum was first-pass in school in Pipad.”
“Divya comes from a long line of Kashmiri entertainers. Her mother and aunties were also bar dancers.”
I checked the time. Kohinoor always danced at midnight. I ordered another Kingfisher and settled in for the long wait.
The parade of dancers over the next hour and a half did little to hold my interest. Others felt differently. I watched as a handful of men walked up to the prettier dancers and pulled ten-and twenty-rupee notes from a stack in their hands, raining them down on the dancer of their choice in an act known as scratching. They were careful not to touch the dancers, with so many security guards watching. Other men invited a girl to come to their tables and, in exchange for letting them hold her hand, the girl made an easy fifty rupees or even a hundred rupees. If she sat down and talked, maybe gave them her name, her number—both assuredly fake—she could make even more money.
The combination of the men’s becoming enamored of their favorite dancer, coming in nightly to see them, and the free-flowing booze in these establishments allowed bar dancers to make upward of two hundred thousand a month for their “dancing.” The story of Abdul Karim Telgi’s dropping ten million rupees on a bar dancer in a single night is now the stuff of envy and aspiration among many regular bar customers. That men would spend their hard-earned money on a bar dancer instead of on their wives and children was just one of the many reasons Ram Shetty and his cronies gave for the urgency of shutting down these “dens of wickedness,” as they called them.
By the time the last of the second-string dancers had exited the stage, the crowd had become lulled into an easy, alcohol-induced stupor, many of them forgetting their reasons for coming. I hadn’t forgotten, and nudged my friends to wake up.
The lights dimmed, the music slowed and time seemed to stop. Smoke released from a noisy apparatus on the floor behind the stage, and when it cleared, the most sublime creature stood in its place, striking a pose straight out of the Kama Sutra.
The crowd erupted, their cheers drowning out the music coming from the large speakers flanking the stage. Men lined up to shower Kohinoor with bills. Some came prepared with their notes already strung into garlands; others patted themselves, frantically looking for even more cash, any excuse to be near her longer. Hundred-rupee bills, five hundred–rupee bills. If they held the deeds to their houses, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them scratched over her. Anything less for this goddess would be an insult, even a risk that the offender may be removed from her presence, never allowed to worship her again. No one was willing to take that risk.
Kohinoor moved slowly with the music and, as it sped up, so did she. She wore a fitted sequined miniskirt in electric red—the color of a bride on her wedding night—the bra top held in place by crisscross, beaded straps in the same color. With her every move, she matched the flash of the strobes, until the bar manager turned down the lights and her movements became the strobes, the dim lights reflecting off the glitter on her costume.
We sat mesmerized by the spectacle, clutching our drinks because we needed to hold on to something or fall to our knees. Light and sound and motion swirled around us, enveloped us, in the form of this devi, Rati, the goddess of love.
When the stage was no longer big enough to contain her, she danced around the room, the music struggling to keep up, until it became irrelevant. She moved in a blur, and the room filled with her. When it was over, she glistened onstage, and the rest of us panted in our spots. The silence lasted for only seconds, before the bar guards swept the rupee notes off the stage and the floor. The rest of us collapsed into our seats, remembering to breathe and trying to lock away the memory of what we had just experienced.
I returned to the Maharajah for the first time since that night to learn more about the dancer that had captured Mumbai—first as an enigma, then as an icon, now as a martyr.
The route I took to get there hadn’t changed, but the bar itself had transformed into a three-star pub. The narrow passageway that once separated the chosen from the hopefuls had been expanded and lit, its walls now displaying oversize pictures of Limca bottles and Bollywood starlets. I couldn’t help noticing the skimpiness of the outfits on the actresses—much less than any dancer had worn before the ban. The stage had been replaced by a polished oak bar and oak-and-wicker stools. The strobe lights remained in their tracks on the ceiling and floor, but were turned off.
When I called to let Manmohan Singh, the owner, know that I was coming to talk to him about Kohinoor, he cleared his schedule. “Anything to help my Kabutar,” he said, calling her by his pet name for her, Pigeon. He used to have the hottest bar dancer in Mumbai, and she had made him a wealthy man.
“Arre, they are bekaar, only, these rubbish politicians!” He needed little provocation to complain. “They shut down the dance bars, but still they are taking their haftas. Every week, they come, asking for their cut. Fifty thousand rupees per month, just to give us permits...for parking, pest control, playing music—one for live music and one for recorded. For everything. Such a dhanda, a racket. If we don’t pay the haftas, they delay our permits or cancel them. Then we have to pay more to get them back and, without our dancers, we are barely making enough. What bloody rot!”
He stopped for air, then asked, “How is my Kabutar?”
I told him she seemed to be holding up well, but left out the part about her living conditions. Since he couldn’t do anything about them anyway, there was no reason to upset him further.
We were joined by three women dressed as waitresses. Singh made the introductions, then left. I motioned them to sit with me and offered to buy them the drinks they now served. Everyone I met from the dance bars was eager to talk, eager to get the bar ban repealed, eager to return to their former lives. Their ardor wouldn’t be enough to take on the morality police, but I didn’t know what would be.
“There were so many bars, and to close them all down at once, what else was there for us to do?” the first waitress, Rosy, said.
I asked them about their lives since the ban. Two had turned to the flesh trade, it being the only place they could make the kind of money they had made as bar dancers. The third danced at a five-star hotel on Peddar Road and sometimes at private parties.
“Customers are there, you know?” the second one, Sarita, added. “If I don’t send money home, then how will my parents survive? My father is sick and my mother is old. They have come to expect the money. They even bought a satellite dish. I can’t quit. Shetty Sahib does not understand this. He has always had a satellite dish.”
“My daughter goes to an English-medium school. I can’t take her out. What will she do? Become like me?” Rosy asked. Then, as if feeling the need to defend herself, she said, “I made fifteen thousand rupees per month when I danced. That is more than my parents can make in one year. Why else did I come to Mumbai?”
The stark nature of their world was becoming disturbingly clear: without the dance bars, it was either prostitution or destitution.
“Shetty Sahib and Jalan Sahib think all our money goes into drinking or having parties. But so much of the money is needed for our work, you know,” Meera the hotel dancer said. “Costumes are there, and rent and makeup and props. What can I do with waitress pay? It is only one hundred to two hundred rupees per day.”
I brought her back to her current line of dancing, asking how parties differed from dancing at the Maharajah or at the five-star hotel.
“There we can do the same things, but because it is in someone’s house, it is called dancing and not prostitution.” She looked at the other two and bobbled her head. “We are careful and always use condoms,” she added proudly, as if she had broken the code.
“My parents don’t know what I do,” Rosy said. “They think I am a maid to a rich family. I have to tell them that, or they will be shamed in their village. Maybe they know. We don’t talk about it.” She looked away.
“What can I do, it’s a majboori, na? A weakness. I have to get my sister married, so she doesn’t end up like Tejal,” Satellite Dish said.
“Arre, Tejal was stupid, only. She could have made a lot of money—she was a virgin. She could have sold it for at least two lakhs.”
“That’s two years’ rent in Harmony House,” Sarita said.
“That much money will pay for the rest of my daughter’s tuition till the tenth standard,” Rosy added.
“I could buy two really nice saris at Benzer’s,” Meera said. “So sweet I would look, na?”
“Idiot girl. She thought she was in love!” Rosy came back, as if that possibility for a bar dancer was just a pipe dream. “Tejal could dance, but inside, she was still a villager. She played games with the man, telling him she did only some things, not all things. She didn’t give him what he wanted, so he took it. She could have made so much money.”
The shame wasn’t in her rape; it was in her not profiting from it. Not one of the three women mentioned Tejal’s suicide.
I had heard enough. I thanked the girls for talking to me and headed over to Harmony House, where Kohinoor and her sister used to live, and where some other bar girls made their homes.
Inside, many of the flats kept their doors open. Music blared, and girls in various stages of undress sprawled on the floor, eating samosas and chikkis and giggling about the new man in their lives. In other flats, large groups sat in front of a TV, watching Love U Zindagi or Pratigya or some other Indian serial. There seemed to be no secrets in Harmony House.
I sat inside the flat of Tejal’s neighbors, four former bar dancers named Begum, Chimka, Reena and Reshmi. Just one mention of Kohinoor’s name and of the article I was writing granted me easy access to the girls. None asked for anonymity, since none had ever danced under their real names.
“Mostly I was dancing, but sometimes, to make extra, I let men drive me home.” Begum examined her nails, freshly painted in a flaming orange, while talking to me. She looked up and continued. “I made 1.5 lakhs in a single month. That is not money I can make being a maidservant to some rich woman.” She scoffed, then added with a self-satisfied smirk, “I have my own maidservant.”
“It’s not prostitution if all they do is discharge on you, is it, Sunilji?” Chimka asked, convinced she had set firm boundaries.
“Did you try to find work?” I asked Reena.
“When the ban happened, all the money stopped, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I tried to find domestic work, but getting a full-time servant’s job is impossible unless you know someone. They don’t trust just anyone in their house, near their children. And who did I know? Huh? No one. We are not convent-educated rich girls. It is dancing or selling ourselves or thieving,” she explained.
The fourth woman, Reshmi, joined our conversation. “I’m not a prostitute like the others. I get paid to travel with men—rich men, powerful men. They give me clothes and jewelry.” Reshmi held up her hands and made the gold bangles on her wrists chime. “One Crime Branch inspector makes me pretend I am his wife at parties, and for that he pays me forty thousand rupees, minimum. There is one client, he lets me keep my clothes. Even sweets are there.”
She stopped for a minute to let me write down her words. Then, she continued.
“I have been everywhere—Delhi, Goa, Jaipur. I have stayed in only fancy places, five stars. I am not angry with the morality police. I want to touch their feet. They have made me even richer. You can close the dance bars, but you cannot change men,” she said with all her twenty-three years of wisdom.
“Why didn’t Tejal do this escort business?” I asked, thinking that may have saved her life.
“Tejal didn’t know English, only Marathi, and even that was simple Marathi. She looked like a Mumbai girl, but acted like a village girl. You can’t make a wife out of that,” Reshmi said.
“Ay, your Hindi is also just Bumbai-ya Hindi, but you get clients,” one of the girls teased her.
“That’s because with her, they don’t want any talking,” another said, and fell backward on the bed, laughing.
I left them in their new reality, at least their version of it, and headed to my car. When I was almost out of the building, I thought I heard Manmohan Singh’s voice coming from behind an open door. He must have come to Harmony House just before my arrival. I heard two more voices coming from the same flat. They spoke in whispers.
“How much longer do we do this, Singhji? So dirty it is with these old women.”
“Kabutar said only one more week, then we finish them,” Singh replied.
“Still one more week?” a different voice said.
“We have to wait until the High Court is getting ready to vote, Amit. If we come out too early, they will conveniently forget everything.”
I pulled myself closer to the wall outside the open door.
“Vikas, who is left?” Amit asked.
“It is only Mrs. Bhatt and Mrs. Jalan. Then we are done.”
“This week, you have two visits scheduled at Jalan’s and one at Bhatt’s. Patel and Gankar are finished,” Singh’s voice came in. “That will make five of the seven Ring members complete. That should be enough.”
I heard them get up to leave and moved quickly past the open door. Vikas and Amit nodded to each other and said, “Phir milenge. We’ll meet later.” Vikas moved toward the staircase leading out, and Amit stepped back inside the flat and closed the door.
I stood there for several seconds and let their words settle. It sounded like they were planning to carry out Kohinoor’s threats against the home minister and his cronies. I remembered these same men outside the prison yesterday, and the schedule they were discussing. Had they just come from seeing her? Had she given them the schedule for killing the ministers? Or was this about something else?
I thought about calling the police but didn’t have anything concrete to give them. I didn’t know when Vikas and Amit would strike, or how. I wasn’t even sure what their plan was.
I had to see Kohinoor again.
“Sunilji!” she greeted me. “Thank you for coming back.”
What choice do I have after what I heard at Harmony House? I thought.
“You are seeming troubled today, is it?” she asked, as if we weren’t standing in a large, metal cage in the middle of a prison compound, with fifty or so women and young girls hanging on our every word.
“Kohinoor...ji.” I stumbled over the honorific, no longer feeling like it applied. “Will you tell me who are Vikas and Amit?” I didn’t feel like wasting any more time.
Kohinoor smiled. “Vikas and Amit? They are coworkers...former coworkers from the Maharajah.”
Her response sounded scripted, rehearsed, as if she already knew about my run-ins with them—at the prison the day before, with the open door at Harmony House. Kohinoor had invited me to tell her story, but I felt like she was writing it, and I was merely one of the characters.
“Tell me, do you know what they do at the houses of the deputy home minister and the other Ring members?”
“I imagine they must have found work there. After all, we all have had to.”
I thought about asking her what type of work they were doing, but assumed she wouldn’t tell me.
“You know, Kohinoor,” I said, “there are options.”
She turned to watch the Indian ringnecks in the tree behind the Jali Mulaqat.
I continued anyway. “There are NGOs set up to help migrants, to teach them a new trade. You could learn how to—”
Before I could finish my thought, she turned to me and smiled. I was amusing her. “How to what, Sunilji? Make candles or bead jewelry?”
I could see that she was trying not to laugh in my face. After the money she had made as a dancer, dipping cotton wicks into colored waxes wasn’t going to do anything for her.
“It may not give you the same money as dancing in a bar, but it would give you legitimacy.”
“There was nothing illegitimate about what we were doing before,” she countered. “Only because of the Morality Ring do we have to justify our actions.” She lowered her head and wiped away a tear.
I didn’t know how to ask my next question. She had threatened to kill the home minister and his cabinet. Even if she didn’t do it herself, had she arranged for her friends to do it? In the undertrial section of Govandi Road Jail, the purgatory between a lifetime of imprisonment and a future of freedom, I knew she couldn’t, wouldn’t answer truthfully. I would have to find my own answers at the ministers’ houses.
All the members of the Ring of Morality lived in Pooja Colony in Juhu. Home to Bollywood royalty, wealthy industrialists and old money, the beach area was one of the ritziest in the city. A far cry from my drives lately, through poverty, construction and filth, the drive to Juhu took me along Marine Drive—the glitter of the Queen’s Necklace on full display—and the delicious smells coming from the bhel poori and pav bhaji stalls along the beach.
I had rung Ram Shetty’s office earlier in the day to ask for an interview about the upcoming High Court deliberation on repealing the bar ban. He scoffed at the possibility that his bar ban would be overturned, but granted me an audience with him anyway. He even offered to invite some of the other members of the Morality Ring to join us. They would welcome the chance to put their rationale for the ban before the public again, he assured me.
“Are you concerned, sirs, that with the death of the bar dancer Tejal, the High Court will say the cost of the ban is too high?” I asked the assembled ministers and government leaders.
“She was a morally corrupt girl,” Shetty responded for the group. “How can we mourn her loss?”
Sachin Jalan, the finance minister, chimed in. “If our daughters did what those bar girls did, we would tell them to drink DDT also.” The man seated next to Jalan patted him on the back, and the others nodded.
Piyush Bhatt followed up with, “Let them make their living on the streets. They are already unclean.”
Mrs. Bhatt whimpered, then, realizing we had all heard her, covered her mouth with her sari and ran out of the room. Some of the other wives glared at her retreating form and made an effort not to look at each other.
“Sirs, have there been threats?” I asked, wondering about the strange reaction of the police commissioner’s wife.
They laughed heartily. “Who can touch us?” one of them asked, incredulous.
I looked at their wives pacing in small lines in the corner, alternately biting their fingernails and bunching up the paloos of their saris in their fists, and wondered: Who could touch them?
“Madam, I will come back Thursday, is it?” a male voice said from the kitchen.
I turned to see the young man named Vikas holding two balled-up cloth bags in his hands.
Mrs. Shetty, realizing he was addressing her, stumbled on her response. “What? Yes. Of course, of course. Thursday.” She bobbled her head.
Vikas nodded and strolled to the door. He looked at me as he pulled it shut; a slight smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“That one boy brings vegetables from the market on Tuesday and Thursday,” Mrs. Shetty explained to me, without my asking. “He goes from our house to the Patels.”
Mrs. Patel glared at her and turned away.
I jotted down Mrs. Shetty’s words, not sure what this had to do with the story I was writing.
“Yes,” Minister Patel confirmed. “Vikas comes two times a week with groceries. Dinesh comes once a week with clothes from the tailor.”
Mr. Gankar said, “My wife also has weekly deliveries from the tailor. Sometimes Dinesh brings them, sometimes Amit. How many clothes these women are needing, is it? I haven’t even seen them all!” He laughed at the frivolousness of his wife, and the other politicians joined him. Their wives looked at them with nervous smiles, nodding in agreement with whatever their husbands were saying.
It was then that Mrs. Bhatt came back into the room, still visibly shaken. The other wives joined her, and the five of them moved away from their husbands.
I watched them cower in the corner of the room, and Kohinoor and Manmohan Singh’s plan became clear in my mind. Did it matter that the whole thing was orchestrated by Kohinoor? Would I even include her role in my story?
That night, Manmohan Singh came to my flat. He held a large manila envelope, stuffed full. I sent the pictures to my publisher and waited for the morning paper to be delivered.
When the story broke about the wives of the Morality Ministers paying gigolos for sex, the High Court had the recourse it needed to overturn the ban. Their husbands, unable to live with the public’s reproach, hanged themselves. Ram Shetty’s words had come back to haunt him: “It is more dignified to take your life than to live with immorality.”
The Maharajah Dance Bar Grand Reopening happened within a week of the High Court’s decision. I sat in the VIP section, a guest of Manmohan Singh, and waited for midnight to come.
“And now, for the star of our show, the one, the only, Payal!” the announcer said. “Payal is a student from Goa, who is studying commerce, and hopes to open her own dance bar one day.”
The lights dimmed, the music started and I got up to leave. I wanted to ask Manmohan Singh what had happened to Kohinoor but doubted he would tell me, if he even knew.