Beautiful Thing
Portrait of a Bombay Bar Dancer
When Sonia Faleiro set out to report on Bombay’s bar dancers, she thought she knew what she would find: downtrodden, voiceless 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. Leela 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, Priya – the most beautiful woman she has ever seen.
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.
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Praise
‘A small masterpiece of observation and intimate reportage.’—William Dalrymple
‘A magnificent book.’—Kiran Desai
‘Unforgettable’—Gregory David Roberts
“an engaging, colourful story” - the Herald Sun
“Faleiro’s sharp observational prose and novelistic characterisation makes this a gripping read, as well as an enlightening one” - The Big Issue
‘[An] intimate and valuable book of literary reportage.' – The New York Times
Awards
The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2011
A Guardian, Observer, and Economist Best Book of the Year, 2011
Sonia Faleiro is an award-winning reporter and writer. She is the author of a book of fiction, The Girl, and a contributor to several anthologies. Beautiful Thing is her first full-length work of non-fiction. It was Time Out’s Subcontinental Book of the Year, and CNN’s Mumbai Book of the Year 2010. Sonia was born in Goa, studied in Edinburgh, worked in Bombay, and lives in San Francisco.