“It is a hard place. Watch out. Careful. It is Bombay, my love.”

Bombay dance bars have been memorably chronicled before, in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and in an award-winning Hindi film, Chandini Bar (2001) by Madhur Bhandarkar. Beautiful Thing is the first book-length treatment of the subject and it successfully explores the struggles faced by thousands of women like Leela living in the lower depths of Bombay, without turning them into passive victims.

Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing also available on Amazon