Memories of Mumbai's melancholy whores

One of the first friends I made in Mumbai was a poet who claimed his pen was between his legs. "That's where real poetry comes from." When he would say: "Nothing to write about", it usually implied a female body. Ironically, he found fornication futile.

Like David Foster Wallace and Khushwant Singh, my friend believed in ogling. "When I see a lady dance, the pen moves on its own," he would mutter, on our way to an underground brothel in Bandra or Juhu. It sounded like a religious verse: a half hidden truth, demanding near silent repetition.

I was battling high-octane double depression, for a little more than a year after I came to Mumbai. When we first met in the middle of July of 2008, my friend was angry: a government order had seen the shut down of dance bars. But for a brothel, he had nowhere left to go. "One evil stroke of the bureaucratic ballpoint pen/ transformed courtesans into chicken feed for men."

There's something so banal, I am told, about visiting a dance bar that most men would dare not even imagine being asked why they visit. Women dance, you throw money at them. Everyone apparently goes back home happy. Some people get to f*ck. They pay more. And they get refused all the time. Like everything else around, pain crisscrossing the poetic soul at the capillary level was alien to me. But him being there helped.

Once you know good poetry you know where to find courage. My friend in his weakest hour showed me the light. Every night we would go to a brothel, he would show me how nostalgia mixed with moral indignation made for some sweet spiritual poison. "Dance baby, dance," he would cry, and the woman, sometimes two or three of them, would start dancing. Just like that. Upon seeing him, whores giggled like adolescent girls. "Babu, this is what it has come down to. Nanga karke kapde pehnane padte hain." There is no sadness like the melancholia that accompanies a poet's loss of voice.

Confronted with such artistic valour, as my friend would display, I would, in the sincere corner of my heart, be left with no choice: I must swim out of the morass, fishnets and all.

One afternoon, my friend took me to a pakdu bar in Chembur. From the outside, pakdu bars betray a facade much like any other permit room. The pakdu aspect of the permit room is revealed instantly upon entry: every table is occupied by a prostitute who expects the customer to buy her drinks, and for that stipulated time he can grope her, as much as he pleases from under the table, without abandoning his seat.

The distance between the two seats, I measured, was two and a half feet.

As soon as we entered, my friend's favourite girl, seated at the far end of the room, greeted him. I settled on a table next to his, opposite a woman who could have been easily in her mid '30s. Every now and then, when my friend's and my eyes would meet, he would say, "pakad lo, pakad lo", but the two of us merely drank.

My friend wasn't groping either. He was plying the girl with some free Urdu verse. His girl, dressed in a white salwar kameez, looked jaded, but listened with considerable interest. She used to be a bar dancer once.

Every time and place we went whoring, we would find unemployed dance bar girls. My friend would just ask them to dance. "Magar yaar, how many like me are there?"

I still don't know how I tolerated my friend's high moral ground. The truth was laid bare. His cool countenance betrayed a soul shuttling between shame and pride. Bloody bipolar. Perhaps, I was more needy than him. But his analysis was bang on. Shutting down the bars hit the girls where it hurts the most: between the legs.

After spending almost a year with him, overwhelmed by the sheer energy of his enthusiasm and work, his power to relate so much with so little, his understated genius, owing to his constant refusal to get published, I finally began crawling out of the hole I had dug for myself.

One night I crashed at the brothel. I woke up and found myself in Pali Hill. The poet and I walked past a white bungalow.

"This is where Gulzar lives."

The sound of it, the way he pointed at the building, the glint of peer perspective in his eyes, the stillness in the air, everything conspired to convince me that a poem looks like a woman dancing with wild abandon.