Nightingale recounts bar nights

Nisha Haldankar (name changed) has closeted herself in a small flat in Dombivali for the most part of the past five months, writing sometimes twelve hours a day. She had a long and painful story to tell.

So far, she has finished over 1,200 pages in Marathi. It has been so painful that she has become irritable. Haldankar has been chronicling her life as a singer in a dance bar. She says that the book is her life story and provides glimpses into the life of professionals like her in the heyday of the dance bars.

Inevitably, the book is also an enquiry into love and the nature of men. She has never found the first, and she knows a fair bit about the second. In her 18-year career as a bar singer, Haldankar has met many men, some intimately. She was “used for sex”—in her own words—but no relationship resulted.

This began early, she writes. When still a child, she was sexually abused by an old man living near her childhood home in Dadar. In an interview with DNA, Haldankar appeared ambiguous about her feelings about the old man and the ‘friends’ she made in dance bars. She lumped them together and said that their actions were in the ‘worst nature of man’. But she did not portray herself as a victim. Instead, she described her adult sexual episodes as a kind of freedom expressed by a woman’s control over a man, and a woman’s unrestrained satisfaction of her lust.

“The hunger of the body is more intense than the hunger of the stomach,” she said, echoing a Marathi saying, “Sharirachi bhukh potacha bhukepeksha jasth ashthe.” The dance bars of Haldankar’s memories seethe with sex. Nearly 90 per cent of bar girls, she said, slept with customers. And the bar girls, Haldankar included, would usually accept money for the act. But she insists that it wasn’t prostitution. She said that a bar girl took a customer only if she liked him, unless she desperately needed money. And it would not be a one-night affair. The relationship would often involve lengthy courtships such as visits to restaurants and cinemas, though it would almost never end in marriage. Often, the bar girl would be left an unwed mother. The girls considered these relationships semi-formal: no bar girl stole another’s ‘friend’, Haldankar writes.

She has not read ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’, but the life she describes is somewhat reminiscent. Now 39, she still sings in orchestra bars when she can find work. And her encounters with men continue. Defiantly gesturing out of the window of her house, she said she had done no wrong. Her behaviour was the same as many more privileged women. “I have seen those high-society women steal others’ husbands. But we bar girls do not steal each others’ customers,” she said.

Her book is also critical of the state government’s ban on dance bars. She scoffed at the notion that the dance bars corrupted college-going youngsters. “Mostly people beyond their 40s would come (to the bars). When people get old, even speaking to young girls gives them comfort,” she says.

She says the ban was backfiring as many unemployed bar girls were turning to prostitution to make a living and pick-up joints were flourishing. She would continue to work as long as the orchestra bars still remain.

Meanwhile, she says, a reputed Marathi publisher in Pune has agreed to print her book. When her book goes to the shelves, she will be performing on a larger stage, that of public opinion.