In Sapphire, the customer looks at me physically, then looks at me dancing. 'Everyone wants me as a physical object,' she explains. When she sees a manthrowing money in the bar for the first time, she gives him her full attention and smiles at him (and there's power in Monalisa's smile: It makes you feel slightly less shoddy than you have become). She tells me her techniques, the courtesan's secrets. 'Behind every earner there are fifty eaters,' points out Monalisa.

Most of them are saving money to send to their parents in the village, to buy a house with their earnings. They all have mobile phones and some of them drive their own cars. Three or four girls might share a room, an airconditioned one. They live in the areas around Foras Road or in Congress House, where the rent for a shoddy little room is an exorbitant ten thousand rupees and the deposit 750,000, but there is safety in numbers. They are brought into the bar line when they're thirteen or fourteen by their parents, an older sister, or an agent by the time they are in their mid-twenties, they're too old for it. Most of the bar line girls come from the villages there are very few native Bombayites. Sapphire has the best girls in the city, good sexy dancers, with good figures and height, fair, with long hair. We recognized each other as soon as I came in.' She tells me about the bar she works in and its dancers. They are sitting on the same side of the table, scanning the menus. 'Do you see the man with her?' He is much older, plump and dark, with a moustache.

Look at her.' I casually glance to the right.

She says, 'There is a girl wearing brown on your right. 'I've just oiled it.' She woke up only fifteen minutes ago. Her hair is up and in a ponytail behind her head she apologizes for it.

Her chest looks tanned actually it has been reddened from playing Holi the previous day. She is wearing a red Ralph Lauren tank top, jeans and platform shoes a lacy black bra peeps out from the straps of the top. Monalisa walks into the coffee shop of the Sea Princess in Juhu a few days later, and as she comes toward me every head turns to look at her, the men with lust, the women with hate. She pushes away the money- the first time a bar girl has ever refused my money-writes down her number on a piece of paper, and gives it to me. I lean forward, a hundred-rupee note in my hand, and tell her I am writing a script with Vinod and would like to talk to her. 'If she were from Malabar Hill, she'd be at the top of the film world,' he says. But Monalisa's dancing rises out of the heat of her own body she learned dancing by watching herself in the mirror.

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta