Beautiful Thing

When journalist Sonia Faleiro met Leela, a dancer in one of Bombay's dance bars, she knew she had a story here. What she probably didn't expect was a relationship with someone that gave her the most startling all-access insight into the seedy world of Bombay dance bars. Leela is a star on the Bombay dance bar scene (a dance bar is where men pay to watch women dance to Bollywood songs and perhaps their services afterwards) and this is her story. It's also the story of a lot of women in Bombay, where affection can be bought as can most of everything else.

Through Leela, we meet a host of characters, long-term boyfriends who are like employers, nasty gangsters and jealous rivals. Faleiro's writing is so visceral that this reads like a piece of semi-narrative fiction in places. Faleiro is never judgemental, never scathing, always honest in her portrayal, remaining neutral, like the best documentarians. The book is short and packed with insight, characters and sad stories of a hidden scene that is not talked about often outside of India. Hinted at in books like Shantaram and Maximum City, this portrayal here is one of the best books about Bombay, about the sex trade and about the lure of the big city.