You’d look at a Mumbai girl like me, and your eyes would glaze over. Shiny clothes, cheap perfume, nearly-gone shoes. Pass, you’d think, and you’d be right. I’m Tara, and I don’t care.
This morning, my body aches from a whole night of dancing, so I welcome it, your sliding-away gaze. I’ve had one-too-many of being looked at—all I did last night—thrust and pumped to music, and watched men undress me with their eyes.
Back home in this flat I’ve called home these last four years, I’m too tired to cook, and anyway, it’s breakfast at 7 am, not dinner. The five other girls are all as drained as I am. We collapse into our beds drugged with sleep, till the youngest of us can rise and make us all tea. We drink too much tea, almost as much as sharp whiskey and moonshine.
I’m going to get out of here one of these days, watch me.
I’m seventeen, I know things. I won’t let my father win—he might’ve sold me for a few bottles of drink, but one day he’ll regret it. Mumbai will dance to Tara’s tunes, not the other way around, because this city rewards the strong, the ruthless, the ones who want to dig and claw and climb. Like me. I won’t stop.
Mumbai doesn’t stop either. It’s a fairground where the lights and the crazy show go on and on. No one walks. We all run from someone, a past, parents, grief. Or towards a goal. A bus. Fame. Payday.
An hour of sleep and I’ve taken a bath while the toilet wasn’t dirty. Now on to some exercise—I’m building my abs, you see. I know I’ll have to bathe again, and the girls say I bathe too much, but with the amount of filth I live in, all kinds, it’s only natural what. My mother said I need to stay clean: clean skin, clean hair, clean thoughts.
Workout done, I pick up the old English newspapers I scrounge daily from the shops downstairs. I’m teaching myself to read. No one wants a Bollywood actress with no English. You can be beautiful, a good actress, fine dancer, but they don’t see you if you have no connections and can’t do all that giter-piter-hello-how-do-you-do talk. I follow all the Page 3 actresses—their fashion, their quotes, the movies they sign. I’ll be one of them some day.
Don’t laugh. And don’t tell anyone, but I’m making extra on the side. Some nutjob pays Shetty—that’s my dark, potbellied hunk of a boss—insane money for a weird assignment: go to the Borivali railway station during rush hour, wrapping a shawl over the stunning blue-sequinned saree you’re given.
When someone calls you, run like your life depends on it. Because it does. Maybe. I don’t know what happens if you don’t leave the station in three minutes. I manage it in two. I’m a village girl, always been a good runner.
Enough about that. I’m getting my nails and hair done now. Soon it will be time to catch an auto-rickshaw to The Blue Bar. Shetty’s Bar, it’s famous you know. And your Tara is making a name for herself out there.
And tonight, I have a special assignment. I can bet it’s the nutjob. Shetty has already paid me as much in advance as I earn in six months of shaking my booty on the stage. It could be dangerous, I know. I’m not stupid, but what’s life without a few risks?
I’ll need to do a show for one, a private show. No one will touch me. Shetty’s guarantee. I’m off to make my life, I am, but for now, this evening, I’ll do the professional thing. Unlike all the men who tell their wives they are in office and come to see me, I’ll be honest and dance till it’s time for my night show.
You, on the other hand. You must sit with yourself, and with a question. The next time you see a girl in shiny clothes, cheap perfume, nearly-gone shoes, would you give her a second glance, or will you walk on by, trapped in the island of your own suffering?
I’m Tara, Tara Mondal, a bargirl in the city of dreams, and I’ll see you on the other side.
The Blue Bar, A Blue Mumbai Mystery #1
Genre: Thriller
Release: January 2023
Format: Print, Digital, and Audio
Purchase Link
On the dark streets of Mumbai, the paths of a missing dancer, a serial killer, and an inspector with a haunted past converge in an evocative thriller about lost love and murderous obsession.
After years of dancing in Mumbai’s bars, Tara Mondal was desperate for a new start. So when a client offered her a life-changing payout to indulge a harmless, if odd, fantasy, she accepted. The setup was simple: wear a blue-sequined saree, enter a crowded railway station, and escape from view in less than three minutes. It was the last time anyone saw Tara.
Thirteen years later, Tara’s lover, Inspector Arnav Singh Rajput, is still grappling with her disappearance as he faces a horrifying new crisis: on the city’s outskirts, women’s dismembered bodies are being unearthed from shallow graves. Very little links the murders, except a scattering of blue sequins and a decade’s worth of missing persons reports that correspond with major festivals.
Past and present blur as Arnav realizes he’s on the trail of a serial killer and that someone wants his investigation buried at any cost. Could the key to finding Tara and solving these murders be hidden in one of his cold cases? Or will the next body they recover be hers?
Meet the author
Damyanti Biswas lives in Singapore. Her short stories have been published in magazines in the US, UK, and Australia, and she helps edit the Forge Literary Magazine. Her debut crime novel You Beneath Your Skin has been optioned for screen by Endemol Shine, and her next, The Blue Bar, was published in January 2023 by Thomas & Mercer.
All comments are welcomed.