Bar girl blows the lid on Bhai

NEW DELHI: When a bhai leaves his number, you call back. By the time Swati Pal learnt this chilling rule, she was already too far gone.
The protagonist of a real life Chandni Bar — with many more dramatic twists thrown in — Pal was arrested last year for her connections with Aftab Ansari, the underworld don with terrorist links involved in the abduction of a famous Kolkata businessman.Today, she is back on stage, dancing to a different tune altogether.
"Having turned witness, Swati Pal had requested us last month to allow her to perform to make a living," says Partha Bhattacharya, inspector general, West Bengal CID. On Friday evening, she gave her first solo performance in a east Kolkata auditorium to earn Rs 5,000 — and a bit of respectability — amidst the tightest police security. Just before she started the evening with the title song of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, her friends requested everyone to forget her past.
Swati’s life in Kolkata’s eastern suburb Rajarhat was humdrum. Her parents were worried for her: she looked attractive, sang well and was willing to be wooed by young men. So they married her off and soon she had a baby. But Swati wanted a life less ordinary. She hit Mumbai along with her husband to break into a musical career. The plan changed a bit when her husband sold her off to a flesh trader. After being trapped in a brothel for many months she managed to escape and, with her singing talent, was able to get into the sleazy beer bar circuit.
Here she met Jamil, one of the band boys who she "married" and had a son with. Picked up by agents who "supplied" girls to bars in the Middle-East, Swati was a willing candidate for trips to Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.
"She was noticed by Abdur Rehman, Aftab Ansari’s frontman who ran a bar called Maikhana in Dubai and got involved with him," says the CID officer.
Swati had met lesser dons in Mumbai, but her brush with big time bhais began here. The kingpins of the underworld in exile gathered to listen to girls like Swati and spend their evenings with them.
Swati entertained bhais and overheard conversations about their activities and became part of their inner circles. From Abdur Rehman to Aftab Ansari (who was known to her as Farhan Malik) was but the next step.
But she got uncomfortably close. Telephone calls from Dubai were traced back to her mobile. After a long chase, the Kolkata CID team pinned her down in Mumbai in August last year. "She sang like a canary after we arrested her and told us the entire Ansari story," says Bhattacharya.
But at what price? Swati has many threats to her life already.