Reportage with heart

Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro Canongate

£12.99; Kindle, £6.36

Review: Val Nolan

THE cover of Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing does the author a gross disservice. Adopting the visual shorthand of commercial fiction with the aim of chasing sales is all well and good, but Faleiro’s extraordinary work deserves to be marketed for what it is: a stunning journalistic accomplishment and a tremendously moving example of the non-fiction genre.

The product of years spent in the sleazy demimonde which coexists alongside modern India, Beautiful Thing seeks the grim truths of exploited dancers and sex workers in Bombay’s sordid shadow city. At its core though, it is an utterly human story.

Befriending a 19-year-old named Leela, a girl “of the winning sort”, Faleiro enters a hierarchical, often horrific world where women survive only by their wits. As a “barwali”, a bar dancer, Leela operates at the intermediate level of Bombay’s sexual netherworld. She beguiles customers every night but consents to sleep only with those who have “humiliated” themselves for her. “They think I dance for them,” she says of the men who frequent the club where she works, “but really, they dance for me”.

Until the government banned them in 2006, an estimated one-and-a-half thousand of these dance bars comprised the “open wound” of Bombay’s Maharashtra state. Attracting rural girls, such establishments transcended the demarcations of prostitution as understood here in the west. Indeed, Faleiro paints the bars as something of a cultural institution, one with complex rules and castes of its own. Dancers such as Leela demanded respect, for instance, while the bar’s waitresses are “pitied as much as the floating sex workers who sold themselves anywhere they could stand”.

Yet Beautiful Thing is more than a sensationalist dissection of prostitution in Bombay; it is reportage with genuine heart. Gathering the threads of Leela’s life into a compelling if bleak narrative, Faleiro interrogates exactly how young Indian girls find themselves in such a life. In Leela’s case, it began with her prepubescent refusal to make pornographic movies. In retaliation, her father sold her virginity to local police officers in exchange for the price of a new TV. Leela was 13 before she escaped to Bombay and attained a status of sorts in the dance bar.

Conveying all this and more in a non-judgmental voice, Faleiro utilises the tools of a novelist to both horrify the reader and exalt the real-life spirit and resilience of Leela and her friends. It is a remarkable book, evoking the tenuous, illusory satisfactions of all those eking out a living in the dark corners of India’s most crowded metropolis. An uncompromising achievement from an exceptional writer.