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mother never had. Azaadi . Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.’
    And so Leela chose azaadi, and she chose also to curtailit, by defining the parameters of her life as the area from her flat to Night Lovers, a place whose rhythm and cadences she lived by. Anything outside these self-imposed boundaries, even if it was an adjoining suburb, she firmly referred to as ‘Bombay’, as though Bombay was elsewhere and distantly so. Bombay was also bahar gaon , out of the village, abroad. ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would tell me and I would gently rib her saying, would you like a lift to the airport? ‘I’m going abroad,’ she would say to me, and in her wistfulness she revealed her hidden yearning. Leela knew what it meant to go abroad, and for all her talk of freedom, she didn’t always believe she enjoyed it.
    Leela reached Night Lovers before the other dancers because she wanted to help Shetty. But she was also determined to make her presence felt. Maar-peet or nakabandi , gangvar or encounters—he would always be around. ‘God willing,’ so would she. To show she wasn’t one of them she referred to Shetty not as seth, boss, as they did, but PS. She snitched on those who poked fun of his ‘pregnant’ belly or his ‘outing problem’.
    Leela explained this ‘outing problem’ to me: ‘He pushes and pushes and pushes,’ she whispered, concern writhing on her face. ‘But nothing comes out! So what can he do poor durrling? Of course he has to put his fingers in! Take it out himself! But it’s so stubborn, it takes so long, once he’s done he just runs out, no flush, nothing. I’ve told him a hundred times, “How can you greet kustomers with that hand? Run it over my face even? And don’t you slap my buttocks!”’
    ‘I want to take him to medical,’ said Leela. ‘But if his outing problem stops, his wife will wonder how and then she will find out about me.’
    How would she know? I asked curiously.
    ‘Sometimes,’ Leela reddened, ‘he soils his pants. If we fix him, he says, his Mrs won’t have any pants to clean.’
    About an hour after Leela arrived, around 3 p.m. that is, Shetty would send off a fleet of auto-rickshaws to pick up his heere moti , jewels—the bar dancers so skilled their dancing paid for his ‘electric-paani’.
    If one of them phoned to whine about her bruised knee or aching back, he would cajole and calm her and immediately send her the spotless white van he kept on standby. Inside, the dancer would find a box of her favourite mithai, a bouquet of flowers and more often than not, attached to a stem with the tender fragility of a love letter, a rolled up five hundred rupee note.
    ‘My chokris are high maintenance,’ boasted Shetty.
    ‘Some are quite fair-skinned,’ he added, as though in explanation. ‘Not fair like a heroine! But more fair than kustomers. And they have to be kept happy. If I don’t treat them well, they will run off. And if I lose my best girls, I’ll lose my biggest collections. So any time one of them does nautanki , I throw notes at her. No worries then! Why no worries then? Because money is music. Yes or no? Yes! One note, two note, three note, four note . . . and they dance like it’s a sone ki barsaat !’ A shower of gold.
    The bar dancers arrived in groups of three, even five, for they shared auto-rickshaws and taxis and with them came the fragrance of Jovan Musk and Revlon Charlie, and if they’d recently been sent to Dubai or had lovers who’d been there, of Armani and Versace. Because they were freshly bathed their hair was wet, combed through and tightly pulled back, and perhaps their skin glowed beneath all that make-up. The chiffon of their saris and the sequins of their lehenga-cholis created a dazzling, blinding effect and when they stood before the altar it appeared as though they had gathered not in prayer, but in celebration.
    The altar wasn’t easy to spot, but it was there,