A dancer’s progress

In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was ten and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond, and had ‘tea business’ to attend downtown. First we checked into the Taj Hotel. On the waterfront, beggar children with lurid wounds and deformities were shaking tins at passers-by. The poverty unsettled me. The Taj was swank, I could see that, but outside all was dirt and destitution. (At a cinema nearby, jarringly, Carry on Loving was being advertised as the comedy ‘fillum’ sensation of the year.) Over dinner, my parents explained that Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, was under attack. Bombay seemed strange enough to me.

I was reminded of my schoolboy visit to Bombay while reading Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro’s bleak investigation into the city’s underworld of bar dancers and sex industry workers. Born in India in 1977, Faleiro does not flinch from addressing her country’s social inequalities.