Beautiful Thing

"It is an unusual book. It’s a memoir , or really a piece of reportage, but it reads like a novel. It’s the story of Leela, who runs away from a small town in North India because she’s being rented out by her father. She ends up in Bombay, and becomes a bar dancer. The book is written very much from Leela’s perspective, although it’s also about the interaction between the author, Sonia Faleiro, and Leela. You’re seeing the sex trade from a woman’s perspective in a way that is very rarely written about. And you can’t really say it’s only about the sex trade, because it’s a lot more than that. It’s really about human relations, the interactions, the power play between individuals. Leela became a bar dancer in Bombay, and at that time a bar dancer had a particular status. You were not a prostitute, and yet that could sometimes become part of what you did for your work. The book looks at the interaction between the bar dancers and their customers, and at the borderline society they live in. The nub of the book is that in about 2005 the government in Bombay decided, as a kind of a moralistic crackdown, to close all the bars. This meant the bar dancers were left with nothing, and had very bleak options before them. Yes, it’s deeply shocking. I think any story, or social arrangement, can be shocking when you see it from the inside. The way in which some of the people in the book are treated, the things that people do to each other, the kind of betrayals between mothers and sons, or fathers and daughters or mothers and daughters. I think that’s what makes it really shocking, and makes it read like fiction. It’s a book that someone unfamiliar with India might find a bit hard at first, but it takes you right inside that world. The voice of Leela is done very well. “You’ve got one sixth of humanity crammed into one comparatively small land and, for all its problems, somehow it works.” It’s the combination of the glamour and the degradation that makes it fascinating, this book. You have the momentary glamour of the dancer in the bar, and then you have the edifice that holds up that world. You don’t know, at the end of the book, what happens to Leela. But as a bar dancer she had a certain position and status, which she was very conscious of. And you can make quite a lot of money. Your choice after that is, either you manage to move off and start a new life, or you go abroad to Dubai, or you end up in a brothel or, if you’re lucky, you end up as a madam in a brothel in Mumbai. It’s more of a glimpse into Indian society. And it’s about the human condition, the relationship between men and women."