The moment I asked people where do I find her, I got varied responses. Some said "I don't do such things", some said "are you mad !" , some said " You have to pay 5 grands to meet her", while some others just ignored my question.
When I took upon this task I didn't think it would be so difficult. Every person knew that she existed, but nobody was ready to accept her existence. So much for the pretentious world we are a part of !
But they say where there is a will, there is always a way and my way led me to a dark and dingy bylane cutting right through one of the posh areas of Bangalore. I was accompanied in my task by a friend whose name I would not like to give out here on request of "his identity and his actions thereof being kept a secret".
When we reached there we were greeted with strange looks. Afterall they don't get to see a girl in such a place everyday. My gender turned out to be more of a liability than an asset that day.
I was asked to wait outside while my friend was taken inside to choose from among the 'girls' there. 'Girls'; well my vocabulary fails me to find another word for them for they appeared to me to belong to the same species of which I was a part of but they had long ago been forsaken by this identity; so I was a girl , they were not, but what were they I still cannot figure out because my sameness to them was more overbearing than the difference.
On our way upstairs to our room, my friend said something which I wanted to avoid mentioning here but i just can't stop myself....' I have never seen a girl naked !'
These words were still echoing in my ears when Munni entered our room. 5 feet tall, slightly towards the heavier side, dressed in her denim capris and t-shirt, Munni was just like any other girl.
The situation was awkward. One guy , two girls locked up in a two bedroom apartment - each unsure about the other's motive of being there.
The conversation started with a Hi and Hello. We had to cook up some story to appear as genuine customers while Munni cooked up hers to appear as a genuine prostitute. Her narrative was straight out of a bollywood movie- poor family, inter caste marriage, husband's extra marital affair, her abandonment, her landing up in a dance bar in Mumbai and from there one brothel to another whenever the need arose, a one year child to support and a dream to have her own house one day- this was Munni to sum up!
What part of her narrative was truth and what part of it was fiction, it is very difficult to say. Perhaps Munni's narrative existed in that delicate zone where fiction and reality intermingle and co-exist.
For me as a writer and an actor, I still cannot figure out how choosing Munni as a subject was different from choosing any other girl from a small town. She was shy, liked to dress up, Hrithik Roshan was her favorite hero, was against girls smoking and drinking and liked to eat chicken.
The only thing that made her "the other", relegated her the status of a fringe element was her profession.
But the same society which gave her the status of this 'other', needed these same fringe elements in order to satisfy their desires "of seeing a girl naked" . And that is why all posh areas have these dark and dingy bylanes where people like Munni run a parallel world that keeps our world going. It is in this parallel world where many Alishas become Munnis and people like me study them as subjects so that we can proudly claim that we are trying to research the 'other'.
