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    Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer
    Ebook261 pages3 hours

    Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer

    By Sonia Faleiro

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When Sonia Faleiro set out to report on Bombay’s bar dancers, she thought she knew what she would find: voiceless, downtrodden women, the helpless victims of predictable poverty.

    Instead she meets Leela: nineteen, charismatic and fearlessly outspoken, Leela has been dancing in Bombay’s bars since she was thirteen. With her sharp wit and stubborn optimism, she is the best-paid dancer in a bar on the notorious Mira Road, where she dances to Bollywood film music. She has a ‘husband’ (who is already married), a few lovers whose names she can’t remember, an insufferable mother camping out in her flat, and an adored best friend. But when an ambitious politician shuts down the city’s dance bars, Leela is forced into the most precarious kind of sex work – and must trade her proud independence for mere survival.

    Beautiful Thing is the vivid, intimate portrait of a young woman fleeing abuse and poverty to build a life on her own terms, in a city equally bent on reinventing itself. And it is the compelling story of an unlikely friendship, as two young women from different worlds pit their wits against the whims of mercurial Bombay.

    The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2011
    A Guardian, Observer, and Economist Best Book of the Year, 2011

    ‘Faleiro’s sharp observational prose and novelistic characterisation makes this a gripping read, as well as an enlightening one’ —The Big Issue

    ‘I sat and read it in two sittings, transfixed. Sparkly as a sequin, sharp as a knife, Beautiful Thing is extraordinary.’ —Kate Holden

    ‘[An] intimate and valuable book of literary reportage.' —New York Times

    ‘A small masterpiece of observation and intimate reportage.’ —William Dalrymple

    ‘An engaging, colourful story’ —Herald Sun

    ‘A magnificent book.’ —Kiran Desai
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateApr 30, 2011
    ISBN9781921870132
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Thing: Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer
    Author

    Sonia Faleiro

    Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, which was named a book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist and Time Out and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a cooperative of award-winning writers that created narrative journalism about the world. Her writing and photographs appear in the New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, 1843, Harper's and MIT Technology Review. She lives in London.

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    Reviews for Beautiful Thing

    4/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is an interesting character portrait, and it does feed my India fetish, but the setup felt too long and repetitive. Might have worked better as a Kindle Single than as a whole book. Still worth reading if you are as obsessed with India as I am.
    • 5/5
      l liked this book. But do not know much is false information present in it. Hope most of the information is fictious else can not able to think that one has to go through this kind of hell on earth. Author has a great job with this book. Recommend adults to read this book.
    • 3/5
      Beautiful Thing is a fascinating read, opening a window into a world I suspect most of us never knew about, much less imagined. The women of Bombay's dance bars sell themselves in every way imaginable - through dancing, through sex, through their involvement in the criminal underground. These women proudly wear the hallmark of survivors.

      Whether or not you find it in yourself to admire these women, once you've read this book you will at least understand what extreme poverty, gender discrimination, and pure desperation will drive people to do. I thought often throughout this book of many Americans who aren't willing to clean their own homes and can hire this out because of their privilege. This is a great book for taking you outside of your cushy world and into doing what is necessary.
      Faleiro writes honestly and without judgement of these women and their stories. Much of this book is brutal and shocking and Faleiro doesn't shelter her reader from this. She also doesn't pretend that any of these lives are dignified, even though through her empathy she draws the reader in. There are no cliched happy endings here.
      I liked the first part of the book very much, but found myself becoming a bit disengaged during the second half as the focus turned from the lives of these women to political concerns. Despite this, Beautiful Thing is a rich and well-written glimpse into a world I'm very glad I don't have to live in.
    • 5/5
      Unputdownable, unforgettable, heartbreaking story of a young's woman's life in Bombay touched by prostitution and politics.