The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE QUEEN

  Hoshang Merchant inherits his moralism from his Zoroastrian grandfathers, his aestheticism from a neurotic mother and his hedonism from his father—a young widow’s heir. Trained in the West, Merchant chose to study Eastern religions during his travels; a democrat by education, he is aristocratic by instinct; an intuitive poet, he is a professor by profession. He has published many collections of poetry and is the editor of Yaarana: Gay Writing from South Asia. He lives alone in Hyderabad in a home he has made for himself where he fathers his books, his students and a young friend.

  The Man Who Would

  Be Queen

  Autobiographical Fictions

  HOSHANG MERCHANT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT

  No Man’s Land

  The Dead Sea

  The Sea of Fertility

  CIRCLE OF HELL

  Nablus

  Jerusalem (1983–84)

  GARDEN OF BLISS

  How I Write

  Why I Write

  I AM NOT IN

  Garden Delight

  I

  No Man’s Land

  Youth: India, 1947–1968

  We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral or mature, one takes oneself to be.

  —R.D. Laing

  Politics of Experience

  These two then (which Avicen calleth the Corascene bitch and the Armenian dogge) … being put together in the vessel of the sepulcher, doe bit one another cruelly, and by their great poyson and furious rage, they never leave one another … till both of them by their slavering venom and mortall hurts, be all of a goarebloud, over all the parts of their bodies; and finally killing one another after their death, changeth before which time, they loose in their corruption and putrification, their first natural formes, to take afterwards one onely new, more noble, and better forme.

  —An Alchemic Text

  Do you wish to go naked before your friend? … He who makes no secret of himself excites anger in others: That is how much reason you have to fear nakedness! If you were gods you could then be ashamed of your clothes!

  —Nietzsche

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  My first impression of my mother is her moving around my sickroom. Her hair was down to her waist. She wore a green kimono.

  My first photo shows me seated in the lap of ‘granny,’ an elderly neighbour. I am frowning, my hands cup my face. The yellow print dress was my favourite. (My grandparents disapproved of my parents’ marriage since mother was a divorcee.) Father took the photograph in the late afternoon sun. I sat in grandfather’s lap and pulled his beard. Once I wore his priest’s cap as he napped.

  The barred window is still there to which I clung before being sent off to school. I would sit in class with elder sister. Father was remote: a young face in dark glasses looking over my crib during malaria fevers. I had ‘incurable’ eczema. At birth I bled hours from the severed umbilicus. Once an insect bite on the penis: mother beat a ‘confession’ out of me, father carried me to a doctor. During haircuts I wept and was given caraway seed-candies. I hated boarding school and was brought home in days.

  Arrival of a new baby: father placed collyrium, rose water, rice, a silver rupee, a vigil lamp, a portrait of Zoroaster, pen, ink and paper in a ‘puja’ tray. The goddess of good fortune would write the newborn’s future. I would sit in my sister’s crib and feed her milk out of a bottle. Mother lay in a hospital room amid a scent of phlox. As we left her with the tiny new baby she pined.

  I was the only boy at school. Mother had decided I wouldn’t swear or be rough. I sang, danced, cooked and sewed. I could not thread needles. I hated English but loved history. At home I dressed in a sari and sang and danced under the cherry tree with sister. My parents did not like this. One day a man came with a tin box strapped to his neck. Atop the box was a rag doll whose hands he manipulated with a string tied to his toe. For an anna each, children could press an eye to one of the two windows of this magic box and see views:

  Delhi ka Durbar dekho

  Agra ka Taj Mahal dekho

  Kathputli ka nautch dekho

  Vyjanthimala dekho

  Dekho bacche dekho

  Only his commentary did not have anything to do with the images in the magic lantern.

  At seven I became a Zoroastrian. My grandfather, an aunt of mother’s (her mother died insane), god’s 101 names. I addressed fervent prayers to a rosy-cheeked man whose blond locks coiled around him like snakes. His turban was like grandfather’s. I went to school, returned and after dinner prayed and fell asleep instantly. In Zoroaster’s huge fire temple portrait I saw only his feet. I wore a sacred girdle round my waist, ‘to separate the lofty from the gross.’

  We moved from our two-room apartment to a vast bungalow by the sea, with a fernery and a wild bamboo garden. The house was green and built athwart a hill. At ebb tide I saw rocks come up from the water. I dreamed of lost continents. It rained days. The brain-fever bird. Jasmine. The old chandelier dropped crystals we collected.

  Dropping us off at school each morning father tarried at the shopping centre exchanging compliments with the pharmacist, the laundry girls, the storekeepers. He was known by his six-cylinder Morris with a Great Britain license plate. Doors were opened for him as he arrived late for work, at his traditional hour. As he went through the mills’ printing, sizing or dyeing departments he hauled up idling workers, his fits of temper and abuses ringing from the tin-roofs. Then he was served breakfast: eggs in butter, without peppers. Lunch from the mess was rounded off by a nap in a low chair. A masseur suspended him six inches from the earth daily. He walked better when let down again.

  Then a shower in the specially installed shower stall and fresh hankies and cologne to beat the heat. Then holding of court for labour problems with slaps meted out to offenders. Then came flowers from the company gardens: carnations, cannas, roses, which mother arranged for evening tea. But father had come up the hard way. After repudiating an inheritance he started off again washing dyestuff drums for Rs 75 a month. Now he received pay-offs from dyestuff dealers for business favours.

  During summer vacations in Poona we saw the ex-Maharani Chimnabai Gaekwar of Baroda drive by on the Bund in a ’30s Rolls-Royce. She wore chiffon and pearls and, as the car rolled by at 5 mph, we saw the old face impassive and white, laced with wrinkles. Her equally impassive Indian chauffeur tooled her home around sunset. Mother told us she had poisoned the Gaekwar’s heir to further the chances of her own son.

  On a visit to an old palace we saw the royal bed, where a dog had littered.

  My parents quarrelled. A policeman stationed to ward off bootleggers often intervened. Grandfather sided with father, menfolk with menfolk.

  A court-clerk arrived with a paper for my mother to sign. She wept. Father wasn’t home. He’d sued for divorce. Eden fled. We were herded in the six-cylinder Morris and taken to a lawyer. Could we choose between our parents? Our parents reconciled. Mother bought an emerald and crystal for her roses, father, a gramophone and waltzes.

  I went to a boys’ school. I didn’t play cricket. The lady teacher liked me, so did the Jesuit. A phone call for me: ‘Why did you volunteer to go to a boarding school?’ Father had sued for divorce a second time. That recess I was particularly alone. When father came to fetch me for boarding school I refused to go. I started taking the suburban train 14 kms to school. I recited a prepared speech before a judge: ‘If I’m separated from mother, I’d die.’

  My parents were reconciled again. I saw them kissing. He was in trou
ble at work.

  On a train a stranger ‘protected’ me in the rush. He didn’t let go of me even when crowds lessened. I didn’t believe my friend who told me the stranger’s intent.

  A group of boys gathered around a Playboy centrefold of a nude in a red veil. I was uninterested. The big boy of our class displayed his member. The Jesuit broke up our gathering. I confessed to mother. I had wet dreams. I learnt the word ‘overflow’. Mother was disbelieving.

  Every Saturday afternoon father took me out to lunch: fruit salad, and ice cream. A girl joined us. I liked her as I was always alone. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents I knew none, nor playmates. Mother questioned me: Was she young? Was she fair? I fabulated, played to my mother’s worst expectations of the girl, pitiful and indignant that mother should have a rival. We never saw the girl again.

  At school I was shy. I hated mathematics. I liked memorydrawing. The art master touched me once but I moved away. I took up dramatics. All the female roles came to me: Martha in a Christmas pageant, the mother in Amahl and the Night-visitors, the wife in These Cornfields, played as if she were Lady Macbeth in a veil since wigs and falsies were taboo. I won a prize for my portrayal of a hen pecked husband. I had a beard coming.

  Mother was arthritic. Now she was crippled and walked with crutches. At the nursing home a rat gnawed at her in her sleep. She could not afford another place. Father had left yet again: Case no. 36 of 163. Things were beyond me.

  Mother was locked out of the house. She cut her arm on the glass door. She defended herself and struck father on the forehead with a stone. For the first time I saw father weep. A servant attended to him. The servant restrained my mother from going to the sea to drown herself. There was a curse on my mother, doomed to lamentation on each auspicious occasion. Dinners were thrown on the floor. We were startled out of bed, lights went up, mother screamed all night for help from neighbours. I went to the police with my mother in nightclothes. I did not know why my parents married, nor did the school psychiatrist who asked me to be a curator.

  Younger sister and I drew blood from each other. I decided not to be a surgeon when my own blood sickened me. As children, elder sister and I had excluded younger sister from ‘Heaven’: though beautiful and lucky she was ‘tainted’, we said.

  Elder sister and I decided to play ‘house’. We partitioned the house and posted a sign ‘Hippo, stay out’ to antagonize mother, who peered through the ventilators now and then. We went out on food ‘raids’. Our house within a house did not last long. Father accused me of sleeping with sister.

  My effeminacy antagonized father. During their fights I stood square between mother and him. Disturbed by this sign of maleness he aimed at my genitals.

  It was I who touched the man on the suburban train. He came in his trousers. He took me to a carpenter’s attic. Amid sawdust he penetrated me. I felt pain and loss. He offered me a candy.

  Picking up a man for Saturday afternoons: I would be at the railway station at eight each morning at the foot of the bridge to see men descending.. I would first see feet, then groin, torso, face in that order.

  A stray lock, a weak eye, flared nostrils, a paunch—something would have to be attractive. I would follow him into the overcrowded compartment. After the initial accidental strokes and brushes I would have his genitals in my hands. This done wordlessly for days each morning, finally I would be invited home. Sometimes, from an evening train home, we would end up on the beach. I thought I was cursed with an orgasmless life. I looked up ‘homosexual’ in the dictionary. I didn’t sleep with the same man twice for fear of scandal. But my secret was out. I confessed to sister, who told mother, who complained to father, who wept by the sea, sent me to a therapist and asked me to be a man.

  Then he tried tenderness with me. I had fallen in love with a classmate in my last year of school. I kept chaste for him, started an adolescent diary, dreamed of running away with him and living with him forever. It did not happen. I tried suicide, pills. Nothing happened. Father, tired and remorseful, asked if we hadn’t heard of the ‘Chinvat’ bridge in the Zoroastrian heaven that suicides can never cross. Daena (conscience), for that was also mother’s name, would meet me and say, ‘I am ugly for your action has made me so.’ She was to be a fair maiden.

  My college friend fell in love with sister. From her I learnt how to pine, quarrel, show mock anger, lure and finally attain. The boy’s father ran a Ferris wheel at the fiesta of Mary of the Mount. Each September we would climb to Mary’s church with mother, past shops selling votive limbs, legs, arms, even babies, in wax to be offered at the altar. Mary was said to have come out of the sea. She trod on a serpent or on a moon-crescent. Ave Maria. Mother’s birthday fell then: first of the five ritual days for the dead, preceding the Zoroastrian harvest rites. Mother on losing a child had been promised many more by Mary in a dream. Now mother was legless, father was gone. We were alone. I lost god.

  Father brought us Advice to Adolescents: ‘Do not masturbate dear children, it will blind you.’

  ‘There is a river whose water may never fall on earth, a tree whose roots are above and whose fruits are to be reverted before they fall.’

  The untouchable people had washed toilets for generations. She was customarily let in through a window on which rested a small wooden ladder. Mother was the first one to let her come in to work through the front door. Now and then she chatted about her family with mother, squatting on the floor and sipping tea from a broken china cup set aside for her. Like everyone in Bombay she wanted to get rich quick in the film industry. Her favourite fantasy role was that of a drunk—she probably ran a still in her shantytown hut. Her wealth she wore: two gold earrings so heavy that they had torn the earlobes.

  The other servant was a Brahmin from North India. He wore a pigtail and the sacred thread—his caste marks. Though a vegetarian he helped out with the cooking of meat at home. He was a mill labourer brought home by father. Mother suspected him of being a spy; that he was mercenary there’s no doubt. But when he filled the water pots towards evening he sang loudly from the Tulsi Ramayana, old old songs that had seen him through many births, marriages and deaths.

  Towards me, mother was unforgiving. I was not to enter her room, nor use her comb, nor her chair or bed. Acne was venereal. She did not forgive father either: he was spoilt; his grandfather had given him money to visit whores; he was lust driven. ‘Homosexual’ was equivalent to ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘eunuch’ (‘hijra’). Mother called weak men ‘hijra’.

  Hijras cross-dressed, moving about in packs begging and singing. Though flat-chested, some carried infants to mimic motherhood. Their voices deep, their mannerisms slutty, they would display themselves if their performances weren’t adequately rewarded. Some were ritually castrated at a mother-goddess temple, to be able to withstand women, to be the goddess herself. They were associated with Friday, fertility rites, weddings and births.

  I’d go on long walks through Bombay. The sidewalks were jammed with hawkers. Pornography was sold wrapped in yellow cellophane and routinely titled Kama Sutra—an art and a science. I’d walk the Arcades under the office buildings around Flora Fountain, go past King George’s statue on a black steed, walk up to the water at Apollo Pier where pigeons fed from the hat of the Prince of Wales.

  A Jain taught me ‘Karma’. My patience ran out: when I once shook mother by her shoulder, losing her balance she broke a hip joint never to recover. It was then that I tried suicide.

  The trial was upon us. Father charged desertion; mother, cruelty. I stole billets-doux from my father’s cupboard: ‘I came running …’ Sister discovered them in bed. ‘To love is no sin,’ the girl wept. Later sister tried suicide rather than testify against a father she loved. The girl was unintelligent, uncultured, unbeautiful. What did father see in her?

  Mother was once vibrant and accomplished. She sang and played the sitar, among the first bourgeois girls to do so, since dance and music in old India were for temple prostitutes. During the freedom movem
ent she wore homespun. She spoke to us of the astral body and the Lord to come. Why then had she given it all up? She was once beautiful. We found her tiny swimsuit in an old trunk. She was once offered a movie-role, or so she always said. Her father castigated her vanity. A silent-movie star, a neighbour, though disfigured in an accident, had photographs from her youth. Mother was too poor to afford a wedding portrait.

  In quieter days mother would gather us around her and recite ‘The Forsaken Merman’ and weep. Among her letters we discovered a photograph of a little girl we didn’t know. Mother had abandoned this girl because of us. Years later we saw the girl, a woman now, with long hair to her waist and wide eyes. Mother was not allowed to attend her daughter’s wedding.

  The wedding ceremony: The wife is separated from her husband by a screen, man from woman, matter from spirit. They are bound for life by the strength of a thread that circles seven-fold, a charmed circle of marriage. They are showered with rice.

  Sister bowed before grandfather. Dressed in white and gold she wept.

  My mother felt guilt for forsaking her husband and child. A Zoroastrian versed in Burmese magic had been contracted by my paternal grandmother to separate father from mother. Enchantments to fight enchantment: a charm only works if the victim is first told about it.

  Since I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema in childhood I started watching all the old films I missed. I particularly remember Nargis, photographs of Monroe, the young Novak in Picnic, The Children’s Hour: ‘Look! I’m a freak with six fingers!’ Without Bengali I sat through all of Satyajit Ray. I noticed the difference between the person and the screen personality in several Bombay stars. Kalpana, a neighbour, seemed more beautiful off-screen. Our disbelieving maid announced the star’s breasts were foam rubber. I attended Kathak recitals, wrote poems.