Gursimran Khamba: One night at a strip club

It’s my final week in Canada and now that we’ve spoken about my failed attempts at clubbing and having an identity crisis amidst white people, I want to end this mini-series by talking about the best place I visited — a local strip club.

A strip club in Toronto is exactly like the Niagara Falls except inside your pants. It is easy to locate a strip club in most big cities because they’re the only establishments that still use neon lights besides American style diners to attract customers. My feet automatically dragged the rest of my body towards a purple neon sign flashing ‘Tits Tits Tits’, it’s probably what a fly feels like in an Indian restaurant.

The first thing I did was to scope out the rest of the establishment for other Indians. Even though one can justify contributing to the continuing objectification of women being subjected to the male gaze through macroeconomics, it is impossible to come to terms with another Indian judging you for being in a ‘dirty’ place. This is partly because even though you’re halfway across the world you’re afraid that person is going to turn out to be your chacha’s cousin’s bhatija whose masi your third cousin once married and divorced but your family won’t shut up about because he went to a very good university and became ‘settled’.

The other thing you end up concerned about is how much money he is stuffing in a girls garter. It doesn’t feel morally right to be the cheapest guy in the room when a girl is spinning around on a brass pole without applying Boro Plus or Lactocalamine on her thighs. It also felt strange to generally stuff money without putting it inside a wedding envelope with an extra rupee coin stuck on top and not being allowed to wave it around her head with blessings. My friend decided that he was not impressed and didn’t give any of the girls money. His logic? Why should I give real money when what I’m getting to see is fake? If I want silicon I’ll go to the beach. It was at this point that I realised I need better friends and proceeded to the nearest gun shop to buy a weapon to shoot myself.

The sad thing about the experience, however, was how quickly it got extremely boring. There was no acrobatic fervour of Thailand where women use their private parts as launchers for ping-pong balls. No shady morality of a Mumbai dance bar where men in gold-rimmed aviators and safari suits drink Old Monk alone. It was almost too sanitised and that defeats the purpose of a strip club existing to begin with, of being a place of vice you’re not allowed or supposed to go to. Therein lies the rub.

A closing note: Don’t ever eat the food. You have no idea which body parts might have touched it in the kitchen.