by Benjamin Law
For the thirty-hour ride to Bangalore, I decided it was important to book an air-conditioned sleeper carriage. Once on board, I found the toilets were relatively clean and unexpectedly fun. You could choose from either an Indian squat-style or a Western toilet, but both had the same wonderful capacity of emptying directly onto the railroad tracks. You sat down, let the wind caress your naked butt and then happily watched as everything flew out into the open air. Whee! I squealed. Perhaps I’d incurred brain damage from Delhi’s cold, but I felt like a kid again.
My carriage companion was a young guy in his early twenties with a sunny face and a chubby body, his hair and beard clippered like peach fuzz. After I forcefully shoved my backpack under the seat facing his, we smiled at each other and I extended my hand.
‘I’m Benjamin.’
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Harsh.’
Harsh actually introduced himself by his real name, but later asked me to change it to the moniker he used in online chatrooms. Harsh was an only child, had never left India and was desperate to get out. He was studying French so he could visit Paris. He knew everything about the Netherlands because he wanted to live in Holland. When he asked to see my passport, the look on his face as he scanned the stamps was a mixture of awe and grief. He passed it around to our neighbouring passengers and people whistled.
Harsh was too enthusiastic and talkative not to be gay. During the train ride, he also displayed a catty streak that could momentarily stun me into silence.
‘You don’t take very good pictures,’ he said, flicking through my digital photos. ‘You don’t plan ahead very well,’ he said, after I explained my itinerary. ‘Your wallet is ugly,’ he said, looking at my leather billfold.
Struggling to find some common ground, I looked at his stack of magazines, including the Indian edition of GQ. Harsh was studying to be an engineer, but he had zero interest in the field. His dream was to work in fashion.
‘Would your father have preferred you be an average engineer or an incredibly successful fashion designer?’
Harsh didn’t blink. ‘Average engineer,’ he said, still smiling.
The names that obsessed Harsh were those of the block-buster designers showcased in Vogue and by labels such as Versace and Burberry.
‘Tom Ford,’ he said, almost sighing. ‘He is a very good designer.’ Harsh cut eye contact and spoke very softly. ‘He is gay, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘A lot of male fashion designers tend to be.’
‘Marc Jacobs,’ he said, lowering his voice again. ‘He is gay too.’
I nodded, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you have any gay friends, Harsh?’
That was all it took. Harsh leaped out of his seat like he’d been burned, his eyes wild and bulging. He shook his hands wildly around his mouth, a clear gesture for me to shut the fuck up. He turned around to see if the passengers across from us had heard.
‘You!’ he said, whispering violently, leaning back in his seat so he couldn’t be seen. ‘You are also …’ He mouthed the word: gay?
I nodded.
Harsh snapped the curtains to our alcove shut. He looked as if he were about to explode. At first, I thought he was angry, but when I examined his face properly, he had an odd expression: as if he’d just won a lottery but couldn’t tell anyone in the room in case they stole the money from him. What were the chances? Of all the people on the train, we had found each other.
‘You,’ he said again, whispering, ‘are gay.’
‘Yes,’ I said, grinning. ‘You too?’
Harsh remained silent. Instead of speaking, he balled his hand into a fist and bit it, looking outside the window, as if he’d found himself, finally, in another country.
Over the next thirty hours, Harsh and I spoke in hushed tones, taking our meals behind closed curtains. He asked me when I came out, whether my family knew about me and what my boyfriend was like. He then found a modest stash of porn on my laptop and asked if he could copy it onto his hard drive. He told me about his robust sex life and how he would go cruising online all the time – every gay man in India had a Planet-Romeo profile – or engage in mutual groping with strangers up the back of buses. Barely anyone in his life knew he was gay, though. I’d known guys like Harsh and they always made me sad. They had heaps of sex with many different men but not one platonic gay friend.
His parents, he said, had always impressed on him the importance of good grades at university. But his college grades slipped dangerously when he started cruising for more and more gay sex. Harsh was obsessed; his sexual appetite was huge. He found it hard to concentrate on his studies and kept flunking a subject called Network Analysis. In his view, gay sex was destroying his life. He sought out a psychiatrist.
‘What were you looking for the psychiatrist to do?’ I asked.
‘Some kind of magic,’ Harsh said, smiling sadly.
Harsh would travel twelve hours on a bus from his engineering college to Bangalore. After the psychiatric appointments, he would sleep in cheap hotels by himself before catching a bus back to college the next day. His first psychiatrist prescribed him a fifteen-day trial course of pills, the name of which Harsh didn’t remember. When he didn’t notice any change, he went to a younger doctor. That doctor suggested nothing was actually wrong with Harsh, that he was perfectly normal, adding that he believed most people were bisexual, to some extent.
Emboldened by the idea, Harsh came out to a select group of friends, who were straight but promised to be discreet with Harsh’s secret. But there was no way Harsh could come out to his parents, and he suspected he never would.
‘I’m telling you the truth,’ he said. ‘If society changes, particularly towards gay men, I’ll be the first one to come out. I’ll come out immediately.’
‘Section 377 was all over the news,’ I said. ‘Did that trigger any conversations with your parents?’
‘No!’ he said. ‘You can’t talk about that sort of stuff. Everyone saw it on the news, everyone knows about it, but no one talks about it. You can’t. I tried talking to my masi, my mother’s sister, who’s like my next mother. But I know even she would never support me on this.’
Harsh put down his cutlery and started talking passionately.
‘People should start talking about this,’ he said. ‘People should have this in their mind. It should not be a new thing for them.’
‘But don’t things like the repeal of Section 377 make people talk about it?’
‘You tell me,’ Harsh said, leaning in. ‘In the train, have you ever said the “G” word?’
‘No,’ I said, taken aback. ‘You told me not to.’
‘Because I know the reaction of other people!’ he said, turning around. ‘You don’t know the culture of India. Like pride parades. Who goes for pride parades? No one! Pride organisers go. Who else goes there? You tell me one.’
‘You wouldn’t go, then.’
‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘If my parents see me on the TV, what am I going to do? You have to be very rational in this.’
‘So what else needs to change?’
‘The thinking. The mentality. People need to be educated!’
Harsh spoke with the fervour of someone who had a lot of ideas but had never been able to share them with anyone. But he was confusing me too: if he wanted Indian people to be educated about gay and lesbian rights, didn’t the fight against Section 377 do just that?
‘For a time. For a time,’ he said. ‘But it was just a moment. It just fluctuated. The news came, and then …’ He flicked out his fingers into the air: Then nothing. ‘Those organisers organising these gay parties? They should organise it on a larger scale. And all these parties, they charge you, like, 350 rupees per person, right?’
‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘More, actually.’
‘So this money should be given to newspaper societies and magazines to publish articles.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Wait: you want to pay magazines to publish articles abou
t gay people?’
‘Yes! Who would publish a gay article otherwise? These rainbow flags, it won’t do any good. You have to be revolutionary.’
‘Paying people to write stories about you isn’t revolutionary,’ I said.
‘Yes!’ he said.
Harsh and I disagreed a lot, but he had the big mouth of someone who would make a good activist. When I told him this, he laughed darkly.
‘No way. Because to be an activist, you have to have guts and can’t have anyone you can disappoint. You need to be very brave. And I have many people that I cannot let down. My parents come first. Not all this bullshit.’
Later, in the north-west city of Pune, I had dinner with a friend and talked about what Harsh had said. I partly understood his frustration, but mostly I felt he was being a dismissive prick, especially when it came to gay organisations and pride marches. Then I remembered that I had never been to a pride march myself.
‘You’ve never been to a gay pride parade?’ my friend Mario said across the table, laughing. ‘Ever?’
I realised how this looked. Here I was, an openly gay guy who came from Australia – home to one of the most celebrated gay events in the world – and I’d never attended a pride march. I wanted to tell Mario that I wasn’t one of those self-hating gays who avoided all public demonstrations of gayness, but maybe that wasn’t entirely true.
‘I guess it’s just not my thing,’ I said weakly.
Mario nodded non-judgementally, which made me feel worse.
I remembered watching footage of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on TV as a teenager. This was before I’d come out as gay myself. Part of me was fascinated, but mainly I was cringing inside. These parades were all about flaunting muscles, leather, speedos, glitter and waxed arses in chaps, shoulders draped in feather boas; whereas my thing was more about staying indoors, reading quietly in bed and not marching in public. I clearly remembered thinking at the time, If this is what it means to be gay, kill me now. It probably wasn’t the healthiest mindset, I now realised.
Mario told me about the pride march in Mumbai he’d attended back in August 2008. The atmosphere had been electric. It was the first such march ever held in Mumbai, and – a year before the repeal of Section 377 – gay sex was still technically illegal. Mario looked skywards, grinning as he thought about it now.
‘You get to a point in the march where you’re standing on this bridge, looking out over the water, across the ocean and over all the marchers,’ Mario said, ‘and it’s just about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.’
That was enough for me. A few days later, I boarded a train headed for Mumbai.
Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City – his sprawling memoir and portrait of Mumbai – starts off with this: ‘There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia.’ Take those 21 million people, my country’s entire population, and cram them into a city geographically smaller than Hobart and you have the population density of Mumbai. As I hauled my gear from the train in the syrupy heat, I could feel it immediately. Bunches of smiling, dirty-footed kids almost ran into me, flying makeshift kites of plastic bags attached to thread. Families of homeless women, aunts and kids huddled on traffic islands, all of them wearing brightly coloured clothes dusted with what appeared to be cocoa, but was actually grime and soot. Endless traffic pushed past, oblivious to their existence, while the giant shadows of shopping malls they’d never enter loomed over them.
This was a city of hustle and dogged enterprise. Tied-up barn animals watched blankly as their four-legged comrades were slaughtered and sold in hut-like stalls. Hijras tapped the windows of taxis and the sides of rickshaws, asking for money from passengers with dry expressions on their faces that said, Give a lady a break. Shoeless teenagers sold helium balloons to passing pedestrians, as men crossed the road holding hands – a sign of platonic friendship and respect. At Goregaon train station, I gave money to an old lady who’d had the fingers on both hands sliced clean off. Her paddle-like palms were stained with muck. In some ways, Mumbai was a grim city, but there was also a jolt of energy to the place, an underlying optimism. Things could only get better, after all.
I’d already been in touch with the organisers of the upcoming Queer Azaadi Mumbai Pride Parade (QAM). This year, it was going to be big. In 2008 – the march Mario had attended – they’d had 500 marchers. The next year there’d been 2000. This year, QAM expected roughly 3500 people, and there would be a new week-long festival leading up to it. QAM was going to be the biggest queer event ever held in the world’s most populous democracy.
To organise an event like that, you had to field a vast volume of emails every day without losing your cool. Messages were constant and came at all hours: questions, responses, confirmations, costings, budgets, schedules, agendas, minutes, congratulations, encouragement, thinly veiled passive-aggressive remarks, squabbles, reprimands about the number of thinly veiled passive-aggressive remarks being distributed.
On a Saturday night, exactly a week before the march, QAM called one of its final meetings at Mumbai’s Humsafar Trust headquarters. Humsafar was the organisation Ashok Row Kavi had started. In fact, Ashok had lived at the headquarters years earlier. It was modest, even cosy: a storage space, a pantry-sized bathroom, a tiny kitchenette, an office with two desks and a living room for gatherings. I tagged along to the meeting with Srini Satya, a smart guy in his late twenties who worked full-time and volunteered the rest of his waking hours to QAM. He was one of those gung-ho volunteers who made himself heard at meetings, winning people over by virtue of an easy confidence that came from being slightly too handsome for his own good.
The organisers were a diverse lot. There was a young male journalist from the Times of India, a beautiful and alarmingly thin transgender woman named Urmi from a dance troupe, and a shaggy-haired twenty-something entrepreneur who’d just opened a gay men’s clothing shop nearby. Over thirty people crammed into the living room with its red-carpeted floor, sitting around in a circle as a leonine man named Pallav drove the meeting forward.
One of the major points agreed on was that everyone should feel welcome, including families and kids. One guy raised the issue of face-painting, and whether marchers should come to the parade already decorated.
‘It is handy if someone wants to hide their face,’ someone said cynically.
‘It can be beautiful as well,’ Srini offered.
As QAM’s week-long program unfolded, I went to film screenings in restaurants and an indoor fete where you could buy books and have your tarot read. Groups of us went to dinner afterwards and introduced ourselves by offering both our name (someone else’s idea) and a graphic description of our penis (my idea), which set off an evening of drunken laughter and foul jokes. One evening, everyone walked to the beach and settled into tiered seats to watch transgender women and hijras lip-sync, dance and rumble to classic Bollywood songs as the sun went down. In stark contrast to the throbbing, sexually suggestive songs I’d heard at Japanese drag queen shows, these were the most heartbreakingly mournful melodies I’d ever heard, based on epic Urdu poetry. Throngs of big-toothed kids – some of them homeless – drifted in, bunched up alongside me and wriggled in their seats, dancing. They knew all the words and sang along, even to the sad ones. Especially to the sad ones.
When you’ve been in India for a month without contracting food poisoning, you become cocky and complacent. You break the rules. You drink water from carafes, order garden salads and start going to the toilet like everyone else: no toilet paper, just water and your left hand. Staying at Srini’s place, I would leave my toothbrush on his windowsill and gargle with water from his shower. I did pretty much everything travellers are told not to do. And so it transpired that the night before the QAM pride march, I spent the evening rushing to the toilet every hour, close to tears, leaking what felt like hot soup. It was as if my guts had become a faucet of horror, passionately rejecting something evil inside me.
I didn’t sleep. The next morning, the bags under my eyes made me look as if I’d been assaulted. I felt frail and dehydrated, as though I’d been out in the unblinking sun for an entire day without water. Srini was already awake and dressing for the parade in a grey polo top and bright orange wrap with a rainbow trim.
‘Are you getting into costume?’ he asked.
I wondered if a diaper constituted a costume. Already, the day’s heat was seeping through the walls and the thought of taking a bumpy rickshaw to the parade made me nauseous. My guts clenched horribly. Avoiding eye contact with Srini like a shame-ridden dog, I rushed to the toilet again and closed the door behind me.
‘Ben?’ Srini said through the toilet door. ‘I’m going to order a taxi so we don’t have to take a rick.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll pay.’
We arrived early, landing at a large public sports oval of red dirt. Teenagers played cricket while bleary-eyed shift workers slept on benches around the gates. Sleep-deprived, I followed the workers’ lead, finding a space on a park bench and falling asleep. When I woke an hour later, throngs of people had arrived for the march. Most were local Indians, but there were also men from the United States and England, and women from Australia and Germany. I made friends with a bunch of teenage American exchange students, rude with good looks and youth.
Just past midday, the crowd grew and stretched across the oval until there was barely room to move. Thousands of people had gathered around a stage on the far side of the oval. Middle-aged, middle-class women carried placards that said, ‘I’m Proud of My Gay Son,’ while hijras arrived in hordes, holding hands and wearing elaborate pots on their heads, decked out in saris of every imaginable colour. People led call-and-response chants in Hindi, carrying banners and flags, and I didn’t see one painted face in the crowd. These people didn’t care if they were recognised. On the oval, the hijras danced the Karakattam, a Tamil Nadu folk dance, shrieking and whooping as an American exchange student joined in and the drumming grew more frenetic. Newspaper photographers, sensing an opportunity to convey the international flavour of this event, pounced on the hijras and the American girl as they squealed and laughed.
