Mumbai bar girl hits Pondy dance floor

Men queue up eagerly for the last show of the night before the counter of a “culture” parlour in a sleazy Pondicherry hotel. Busin...

Men queue up eagerly for the last show of the night before the counter of a “culture” parlour in a sleazy Pondicherry hotel. Business has been particularly brisk for the last month, owing perhaps to the presence of Suparna (name changed), who has sought refuge here after the Maharashtra government cracked down on dance bars in March.

Suparna has been nicknamed on the bar circuit as “Mumbai Express” after the Kamal Hasan bi-lingual film. The 21-year-old “dancer” first headed home to Chennai after the Mumbai bars shut down before seeking refuge in this former French colony. “I am the only one who came here to Pondy. Many others fled to Kolkata and even Bangalore,” Suparna says during a brief break. An alcoholic father and several siblings drove her into the Mumbai flesh trade.

An agent introduced her to the dance bars and soon Suparna picked up the tricks of the trade. And now, this Tamil girl from Mumbai is setting Pondicherry on fire. “I know how to dance to Hindi, Marathi and Tamil songs. I can speak all these languages too,” she adds.

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Pondicherry’s four illegal dance parlours are doing thriving business. The parlours claim the woman are merely “dancers” who are not allowed to ‘‘service’’ customers — the eight-odd girls in each parlour are locked up in a room the whole day and are only let out in the evening for dances.

Thus it is that at 9.30 on a humid Saturday night in the heart of Pondicherry that men, already a little tipsy, queue up for the last show of the day driven there by Suparna’s presence. “They say there is a new Mumbai girl in there. I came to see her,’’ says Sivaram, a native of Villupuram, 50 km from here. Owner of a provision shop, he sneaks away from his family on weekends.

Inside the bar, blue plastic chairs are scattered around a small round dance floor. A mural of period-dancing men and women dominates the walls. Psychedelic lights throw colourful but weird patterns on the walls and ceiling. A live orchestra belts out a popular raunchy Tamil number. But the men, scrambling for vantage positions, barely seem to notice the interiors for they are intent on seeing Suparna, the bar’s star addition.