Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars [Paperback]

"Beautiful Thing" reaches us as an acclaimed book of journalism, illuminating one of the darker corners---the world of Bombay's bar dancing girls--of that immense, dynamic Indian city of light and dark, where rich and poor may live hard by each other but never ever touch; no more than will its high and low castes. This remarkable book has been written by the young, award-winning reporter Sonia Faleiro, born in Goa, previously author of The Girl, a novel.

Faleiro was working on a story when she met nineteen-year old Leela, beautiful bar dancer with heart-breaking back story. Faleiro allowed Leela to bring her, as a reporter, into her bar dancer's world, and kept her eyes, ears, and mind open. For five years the journalist met glamorous women, their lovers, their mothers, gangsters, cops, prostitutes and pimps, and, seemingly she recorded and/or wrote down everything she saw and heard. The result is an astonishingly vivid, intimate and immediate work that can put many novels to shame.

The writer now divides her time between Mumbai ( to which Bombay's name has now been changed), and San Francisco. She writes The Other India column on India's marginalized communities and sub-cultures for The New York Times' India site, India Ink. She has spoken about India's marginalized on the American NPR's "All Things Considered." Upon its 2011 publication in the U.K., BEAUTIFUL THING was named an "Economist," "Observer," and "Guardian" book of the year, and The "Sunday Times" Travel Book of the Year 2011. At its American publication, The New York Times called it "an intimate and valuable piece of reportage" that "will break your heart many times over." And most surprisingly, the book has even been greatly praised in India, where GQ India called it "One of the most compelling works of non-fiction from India in recent years," and "Time Out" named it "Subcontinental Book of the Year." Of course, all this critical praise means nothing if the reader is not able to connect with the book, but I sure did, and think it a "don't miss" for those interested in India. And think a reader can double its impact by reading it with Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, another piece of resonant journalism on rich and poor in Mumbai. The city is lucky in these two scribes.

Beautiful Thing - Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro is a remarkable documentary account of a few years in the life of Leela, a dancer in a Mumbai dance bar, her friends, her clients and her co-workers. It's a life set firmly on the wrong side of the tracks which reveals the power of friendship, honour and companionship which often belies the sordid surroundings. Even more remarkable is the friendship between Leela and the writer which offers Faleiro an opportunity to go where few writers would be able to and at considerable risk to her own health and personal safety.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover but when that cover carries endorsements by William Dalrymple, Kiran Desai and Gregory David Roberts, Indiaphiles will realise that this is something very special and readers should sit up and take notice. I read a lot of books about Indian and have clocked up a lot of non-fiction about the country recently and whilst it's almost always interesting, some of the books can be heavy going and can take some determination to get through. The only hard thing about 'Beautiful Thing' will be putting it down once you've started. For a difficult story in a bleak setting which deals with exploitation of many kinds it's a remarkably easy read that flows like a novel rather than non-fiction.

We learn that life in the dance bars gives the most beautiful and popular girls a wealth that's beyond the dreams of the prostitutes out in the slums and a relative respectability that enables them to be courted by clients who spoil them rotten in return (initially) for little more than a bit of flirting and hand holding. A girl can exploit a lovesick married man who's never known beauty and exoticism in his sedate arranged marriage every bit as much as she herself is being exploited. There's nothing modern about these arrangements - India has a long history of courtesan-ship - women providing entertainment and romantic distraction for men with money. Dancing girls are dancing girls - regardless of the time in history and the story is thus simultaneously very modern and somewhat timeless.

The money brings the girls little benefit though because they can only live in certain areas of the city where the neighbours will accept their career choices and they spend like crazy. One might suppose they'd earn to send money back to their families - until you remember what those families did to drive them to the city. When the looks start to fade and the reliance on cheap drugs to keep them slender takes away their looks, there's only one direction the girls will be heading and that's downhill towards running or working in the brothels. The top girls dream of an assignment in the Middle East, of being sent to Dubai to dance for wealthy Arabs and take on the status of `temporary wife' which allows their clients to stay within the letter, if not the spirit, of Sharia Law.

Beautiful Thing is not entirely and unrelentingly miserable. There are moments - few and far between - when the story lifts your spirits. There's the story of one of Leela's friends, a hijra (transsexual) whose parents realised their only way to keep the son they love was to accept his choices. He and his parents seem to represent the only family in the book who are not utterly dysfunctional. The bar dancers and the less fortunate hijras take great comfort from this tiny evidence that family relationships can work and love can conquer even the most extreme of life choices. The book is an eye-opener of the most fascinating type - a rare and privileged opportunity to take a tour of not just the demi-monde of Mumbai but, after the bars close down and times get hard, the real hard graft of the unsafe streets and brothels of the city.

I am absolutely awestruck by the research that went into this book which is Sonia Faleiro's first full length work of non-fiction. To throw yourself into the underworld, court the friendship of fascinating but dangerous people, follow them wherever they go without apparent concern for your safety, and to do all that as a young woman from out of town, is nothing short of remarkable. Even more so, to do it by choice makes me say "Hats off to Faleiro"- she's an astonishingly brave woman. I really hope that we don't have to wait five years for her next book. I fear that the market for non-fiction of this type outside India is surely rather small and the use of a lot of local language (often but not always) translated or explained, will alienate many readers, but I hope that enough will accept that it's a small price to pay for a book that's truly one of a kind.

This book works on two levels; the direct, narrative one, with the bar dancer Leela at its center, and the deeper, more thought-provoking and analytic one, where I, the reader, wonder about all the abused women and children in the world, in my own world, and wonder what kind of society I live in, where the continued inhumane treatment of vulnerable and weak people is not only tolerated but actively encouraged, for monetary profit as well as for power and influence.
The author's straight and honest approach to her subject, her deep empathy, and her direct and humorous language draws me into Leela's world. Even after finishing the book, I continued to think of Leela, and all the thousands of young people, both girls and boys, like her; maybe even in my very own neighborhood. It is an eye-opening book, deeply researched and felt, and it left me thinking deeply, of trafficking, of incest and of the abuse of those most in need of protection, the young and vulnerable.
I recommend it highly!