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thighs with a lathi!
    ‘What luck I got saved!’
    It wasn’t mere luck, it was written, and that’s why Leela was unperturbed by the startling welcome Bombay had given her. It was the start of a new life as jyotishji had described it when he read her palm just before she fled Meerut. Even though it was understood he was meant to lie and prophesy only a peaceful marriage and a fertile womb, he couldn’t help himself. ‘ Kathin ,’ he had mumbled through a mouthful ofpaan, juice slip-sliding out as he spoke. ‘It will always be kathin.’ Difficult.
    Leela had smiled at jyotishji, even tipped him an ek sau , a one hundred. At thirteen she had the self-awareness to see and to accept the truth.
    And the truth was this—she was no virgin, not even in the way some girls had sex with their first couple of boyfriends and when dissatisfied with the results, shrugged the young men off as mistakes and pronounced themselves pure. She didn’t come from a good family: her father didn’t have the upbringing to beat her mother behind closed doors and then, too, only after he’d gagged her mouth with his hand. Even his daughter’s bijniss he couldn’t keep quiet about, gaandu -maderchod. Wasn’t it true everyone in the cantonment knew how Singh had upgraded to a twenty-six-inch TV? Fucking chutmaar !
    And the truth was that although she wanted to better herself she wouldn’t always be up to the task.
    She was just a girl. No match for destiny.
    In any case, she knew this too—you didn’t fight destiny like destiny was your mother and you could win. Destiny, Leela knew, like she thought she knew who she was, was an unbreakable promise. An infallible prayer.
    She embraced it.
    Leela had worked at Night Lovers ever since and she never did return to Meerut. She warned Apsara: ‘If you give Manohar a paisa of the money I have earned, I will come to Meerut and pry out every one of your teeth.’ Even Apsara, who many in the cantonment believed was mentally challenged, could understand that her daughter might harbour ill feelings towards Manohar. She took Leela’s threat seriously and until the time she could cash them in hid her daughter’s money orders in her underwear.
    Manohar believed Leela’s whereabouts were unknown to his family. He tried to file a Missing Persons report with the police, but they were after all the same men he had rented Leela outto. Believing he was temporarily hiding his daughter, as a way to increase their lust and extract more money, they paid him no heed.
    ‘Your little whore did not go to school alone,’ one of them informed him.

{ 3 }
    ‘A bar dancer’s game is to rob, to fool a kustomer’
    I met Leela six years after she had left home, those six years later she was only nineteen. Unlike many of the nineteen-year-olds in Mira Road—still studying and still living with their parents—Leela had a job, had bills, had sex. Her confidence in the sexually charged environment of the dance bar confused me. She was surrounded by men night after night and these weren’t just any men, they were often drunk and aggressively lustful. I asked Leela how she did it and shrugging she said, ‘Otherwise?’ She meant she had no option.
    But she thought about my question and she answered, not that night, or the night after, but later. ‘When you look at my life,’ she taught me, ‘don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road. If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin, she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face, feel his fists against her breasts. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk I say, “Get lost oye !” And they do. And if I want a gift or feel like “non wedge” I just have to tell them and they give me what I want, no questions. They thank me . Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my