The Dancing Girls of Lahore by Louise Brown

Author:Louise Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Shamsa lives in the corner of the courtyard. She didn’t attend morning prayers; she didn’t even wake up until midday. She stays with a Bangladeshi woman and her husband. The woman is in her late thirties, with bad, broken teeth and weak eyes, and she’s too old and thin to make money from the business herself. Her husband is a small, round man. His hair is speckled with gray and white at the temples, but he keeps his moustache blue-black with dye and lavishes attention on it so that it’s clipped and brushed and glossed into rigid order. He devotes the same care to the gun that hangs from the ceiling in a polished leather holster.

The couple pimp girls from the house. One is the woman’s daughter.

“I had four children,” she explains looking at a pretty child playing in the room with a gang of others, “but this is the only one left. The rest died when they were babies.”

The daughter is about 12 but very small and delicate. She has the body of a 9-year-old but a sexual precociousness that could make her pass for 30. She has full lips, wears a lot of makeup, and totters around on platform shoes that raise her to about five feet tall. It’s disturbing to watch her play with the younger children because she moves so provocatively. She has been “dancing” for about a year and is the “baby” pimped by her father on the street corner. Not all the babies that the pimps offer are quite as young. They often try to pass off older girls and young women as younger than they really are. It’s good for business to say a 20-year-old is actually only 13.

Shamsa is their other source of income. First they claim that she is the woman’s sister, but half an hour later the story is different: she’s their niece. At other times she’s a friend. Despite what they say I’m sure she’s not closely related to the couple.

She bursts out of the washroom, delirious with happiness: she’s volcanic. It’s Eid Day, she sings, and we’re going for a walk.

“Where?” I ask

“The bazaar. Many, many places,” she shrieks and twirls around the room. She runs to the window and, snatching a mirror from the madam, begins to apply another coat of makeup: thick eyeliner, pink lipstick and then, bizarrely, a shiny slab of dazzling, glittering green gel to her lips and eyes.

She drags me down the spiral stairwell, chatting incessantly about how happy she is. She’s wearing dramatic jewelry, a flowery white-and-purple shalwaar kameez, and a dupatta draped over her shoulder. I shrink beside her as she links arms with me and talks about her rich men friends.

She stomps through the streets ignoring the looks of the men who are pausing to gape. For once no one is noticing me. They are looking at Shamsa—dupatta-less and in green glitter lip gloss. I’m seriously confused. She doesn’t seem to hear the comments the men are making, and she hasn’t noticed the way the bazaar is grinding to a halt around her.

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