India (47 page)

One of the workmen, Prithiviraj, began to sing what he said was a film song. When he was finished, he said, “It’s in honour of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar.” What did he think of the monumental park he was building? “Before it’s all greenery, now it’s all stone, stone, stone. It’s something like the Taj Mahal, but the first one in Lucknow. In this country, you have to give respect to everyone now. Other countries have their regulations, but we have democracy. Nobody can come and trouble us.”

A supervisor came over, and they returned to work. As I walked away and looked through the heat haze, the men appeared small and desiccated as they banged away with their hammers. The creation of the monument was a physical aspect of what they saw as their struggle. The first half-century after independence, with its dependence on borrowed economic theories and English-speaking politicians, was a continuation of the colonial experience by other means, which was now being undone in unpredictable ways. The workmen had different reasons for liking the monument and the chief minister, but the explanation Dinesh Tiwari had given for his admiration was the one that stuck with me: “I like Mayawati because she has power.” This was true, although Mayawati would in time be swept away. The park would go on.

W
ITH ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION
, old structures were breaking down. Sometimes, people had to leap between social settings which had no imaginable connection to each other. The difference between communities and between the village and the city was altering very fast in some parts of India. Socially acceptable behaviour was adjusting in this still traditional country. A friend mentioned that a male stripper had come to a hen party she was attending, even while older members of the joint family were in the house. Another acquaintance told me he had recently turned up to a large family wedding in Delhi and realized it was staffed by Ukrainian escorts, who had apparently been arranged by the groom’s uncles. Many worlds lived in parallel.

Satish was a pimp, at the top end of the market, supplying prostitutes and strippers for parties. I went to see him with Sushmita, an irreverent Delhi journalist, thinking he was more likely to be open about his work in her presence. Satish was twenty-nine years old, slim and watchful with a black long-sleeve T-shirt and dark-blue jeans, his wet-look hair brushed forward to make him seem younger. We met at the United Coffee House, a hemmed-in, old-fashioned place with a balcony filled by talkative diners. Satish asked for tea, with milk and one sugar, while Sushmita and I drank red wine. He spoke freely, in English, once he had dropped his guard.

He told us he had taken a degree in commerce at Allahabad University, and worked as ground staff for an airline while stripping and having sex for money on the side. Now, as he put it, “I only do management.” He had around forty men and ten women on his books. “All the guys are in their late teens or twenties. Often people will require someone aged sixteen or seventeen, but I don’t represent them. The guys who work for me need physique, looks and height. Physique is a must. Most are from Punjab or Haryana, or anyway from the north. They look like Greek gods, but they don’t even know English. My clients are hi-fi people.” He named several, including a chief minister.

“Either they can’t get sex, or they have so much money they can make people do whatever they want. I keep the girls on my list in case the clients are bisexual and want one of each. I don’t allow bargaining. The rates go from Rs5,000 [$110] to Rs25,000 [$550] for two hours. The rate for models and actors is higher. We have one of the best models in Asia, and for him it’s Rs2.5 lakhs [$5,500] for two hours.”

Satish’s operation was virtual: it worked via phone and the Internet. He moved from club to party, making links with people and arranging the meetings. Images of the prostitutes were displayed on a photographer’s website, very respectably. You reached them by clicking through to a particular part of the site, but many of the models on the main page were available too. With the actors, it was necessary to be more discreet. Most of the male models had the fair, gym-toned “Greek god” look, but others were thin and willowy. Their physical appearance, which was almost certainly the consequence of generations of malnourishment, dovetailed with the present, imported vogue for super-skinny men and women. So the idea of being extremely slim, which in a rich culture was taken as a sign of fashionable affluence, had been imported to a land where most people had never had the opportunity to become fat.

For Satish, the practice of religion enabled him to hold himself together while taking part in a profession that was by its nature dangerous and destabilizing. “My family is very traditional, very religious. We’re from UP. My sisters wear salwar kameez. I am also most traditional and religious. I can become very …”—here he searched for the right word, before settling on “emotional. I more and more believe in my god. Every day I go to the temple.” It was a Lord Krishna temple, close to his home. “I usually wake at five and go there at seven. I take a mark on my forehead. I attend the aarti two or three days a week. Afterwards I go to the park and close my eyes and pray to god.”

I asked him about the world he moved in, the people he met and their new social expectations. Satish saw the question in terms of those he recruited. “Many of the Delhi strippers are straight, and at a lot of parties the client will prefer a straight stripper—even sometimes if the guests are gay. They think it’s more exciting if they know it’s a straight guy. The boys arrive to work for me with a strong male ego, and come from families where such behaviour would never be allowed. I have a new guy coming tomorrow on the train from Patna. It’s his first time in Delhi. He is twenty-two years old, his family are very poor and he comes from a village near to Patna.” How did he contact new recruits? “This one met me through a dating website. He was looking at the Internet in his village.” Most villages near Patna in Bihar are dusty and desperate, though in this case they must at least have had electricity for the Internet.

“I have to make them learn a new mindset. I take them to clubs where there are male strippers. I send them to parties. I usually start by showing them DVDs of films like
Page 3
and
Oops!
” The first was about a journalist who moves to Mumbai, covers celebrity parties and gets caught up in the lifestyle; the second was about male strippers and dancers, and was considered shocking when released in 2003. “The men who work for me come from a different mindset. Everything is about their mindset. They don’t understand this life. Indian guys get caught up, they fall in love-shove. They come to Delhi because they want money and they want the life, more than anything because they want what they have heard about or seen on the screen. They hope someone will fall in love with them. When they get here, they find they can’t deal with it. They think they can do it, but they can’t do it because of the ego of the Indian male. They have never been naked in front of another person, and now they are having to strip off all their clothes.

“Most of the people in my agency are Punjabi farmers, and their families don’t have any idea what they are doing. I might have to send them to a party where the people are completely different from them, I might send them to Mumbai or to Dubai for one party. Indian guys are very in demand in Gulf countries. Last week I sent someone to Bangalore for a party.” Satish said Bangalore was India’s most “modern” city, and had a strong demand for “fair” strippers from the north.

“The first time I did stripping was with a woman I met in McDonald’s in Connaught Place. She was thirty-two, a Malayali. She picked me up and I asked for Rs10,000 [$220]. We went to her home in South-Ex. She put me on to others. I brought four or five guys to a party she held, we all stripped
and then some of the women wanted sex. No servants were in the house; she must have sent them all home. Only women came to the party, about twenty of them, and I think most were NRIs.” Non-Resident Indians—people who lived out of the country. “They were posh people, wearing designer clothes. Most of them were the kind of women who have ‘busy husbands.’ It was a good atmosphere.”

The conversation had begun with Satish trying to scope us out, wondering why he was really being asked about his life and career, but now when Sushmita asked him a different sort of question, he revealed another, new aspect of himself. Did he “send money home” to his family? “Yes, I do. I am very close to my parents, but I couldn’t say what I do. For my family, knowing I am gay would be worse than knowing about the agency.” Homosexual life in the capital was open in a way it could not be outside the big cities. In 2009 the Delhi high court, invoking the Constitution’s emphasis on “inclusiveness,” had overturned a 150-year-old British law punishing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal.” The atmosphere had become easier since then, and men from the middle class were now able to be more open about their sexuality. “Until 2004, when one of the TV channels did a hidden film and busted them, you had strip clubs in Delhi with women-only entry and male strippers. It’s become a little easier since the change in the law. You used to have the risk of ten years in jail. If the police caught gay men, they would either try to get money or sex from them. The Indian police are very, very bad.”

Then without prompting Satish revealed much more about his background: his father was a politician in Uttar Pradesh, a religious man who had come in with the new wave of politics in the state. So Satish was, in his way, another contemporary manifestation of the varieties of north Indian life. “My aim is to travel abroad some more, to Dubai or to London. I want to see how the industry works. I am waiting for the right person to know me, to understand me, to know my feelings. I go home to Lucknow every month.” He mentioned his love for the world of the nawabs, the courtly north Indian culture of earlier centuries. Did he find it hard to adjust when he went home? “Old Lucknow, the traditional city, is familiar to me. Nawabi culture is gay culture.” This was quite a thought, and the more I thought about it, the more convincing it seemed.

When we left the United Coffee House and stood out on the street in Connaught Place amid the touts and the hawkers of paperback books, Satish’s demeanour changed. The intimacy of the conversation had gone, and he was back to how he had been when he arrived to meet us, a thin,
alert and vulnerable man, who noticed exactly who was watching him, and how. Afterwards, he texted me, nervous about what he had said: “But it was safe my meeting no camera and micro phone. Plz tel me truly.”
¹
There was no hidden camera or microphone, although he had watched me making notes.

As India got richer, it got glamour. At parched road junctions in cities, child workers sold sunshades, mosquito zappers, pirated paperbacks and copies of
Tehelka, Vogue
and
Beautiful People
. The disparity was inescapable in the pages of
Vogue
, and the world it reflected. The magazine had got itself into trouble by doing a fashion shoot which showed poor people with expensive things: a roadside baby in a Fendi bib, a villager holding a $200 Burberry umbrella. In 2008,
GQ
launched an Indian issue, and the editor wrote that he hoped to “empower men to break free from archaic sartorial constrictions and discover a distinctive sense of style” since “Indian men could do with a little help in this department.”
²
Soon, every Indian industrialist wanted to be featured, presenting himself as part of a world of intense glamour. So in
Hello!
, launched in India in 2007, a stocky purveyor of toiletries could be praised for his “sharp features” and “svelte athletic build,” while his wife said, “We are not into brands, please. Nor are we willing to splash fanciful luxe labels.”
³
In a Christmas issue of the same magazine, “Delhi’s swishest gal pals,” with rocks like knuckledusters on their fingers, “met for a typical X’mas brunch” of “turkey with chestnut stuffing napped in cranberry jus.” One, dressed in a “short Givenchy dress,” said she preferred to spend her festivities “with children of a lesser god.”
⁴
What did this mean? The menu, the Christian religious festival, the brands—they were all borrowed from abroad. In a return to Indian authenticity,
Hello!
took to featuring abolished royal families, covering them with a relish and reverence that would have been hard to imagine a few decades earlier, and listing them by their full, old-fashioned titles. They could be praised and photographed nostalgically in their dowdy sitting-rooms, wearing old jewels, because they held only the memory of power.

The most significant cultural difference between a professional family in India and one in the West comes from the prevalence of servants. Indians have cooks, drivers, bearers, sweepers, gardeners, maids and more maids—and often treat them callously. The gang of servants in a household may include children, and the parallel family will usually live in the most basic surroundings, without fans or air conditioning. Many Indians who come
from middle- to upper-class families will never in their lives have made a bed or had to cook or clean, and find it hard to know what to do when they go abroad. The economic boost of the last decade has engineered a propulsion in society that has changed the way people think about themselves. The relationship between families and their retainers is altering, but important ideas of self and of social status are predicated on servitude, and on the expectation of being able to ordain the lives of others in an everyday way.

For women who pursue a professional career, this can give a lattice of support that does not exist in Western countries, where acquiring and retaining staff is expensive. You can drive if you like, or tell someone else to drive you. You can cook if you like, or tell someone else to cook. Aided by the assistance of parents or parents-in-law, women are able to raise children and do a job without one making the other difficult. A business trip will not be a worry if you know your children are with a family member you trust. Maternal guilt is less of an expectation than it is in the West, where performing the role of the perfect mother is—at the higher levels of society—a definite obligation. At present in India, HSBC, RBS, JP Morgan Chase, ICICI and UBS are all run by women, and half the deputy governors of the Reserve Bank of India are women.
⁵