Indians are divided fourteen times into fourteen languages. I studied my mother tongue first. English was taught under the rubric of ‘General Knowledge’ in the vernacular schools. Hindi is spoken in Bombay’s film world. The school syllabuses were heavy with Victorian poetry. Babu English was the norm for daily intercourse. The Western-educated Indian of my age has no memory of any language other than English. If ‘Black’ expression is now the rage, India’s foreign-educated elite lacks a language for it. It is true that I curse in Gujarati but it is equally true that I dream in English. Literary prose is more of a drawback to the Indian writer in English than his lack of Indian languages.
One day a little misshapen old lady followed my father into the house. Mother was hospitalized. A younger woman followed. They were my paternal grandmother and aunt. I had seen them for the first time at eighteen. They had forgiven father now that his marriage was irretrievably broken. My grandmother, an educated young widow, had become a small bent shape harbouring a twenty-five-year unforgiveness based on her ‘principles’. I saw her one other time: ‘To America! To America! To study English,’ said my father’s mother. It was the second time I had seen her. She was a devotee of the Meher Baba. When father fell ill in his childhood, his mother, a physician’s widow, took him to the Baba for faith healing. Only an emergency operation saved his life. I was fearful of the mysterious Baba in childhood, dreaming of him before falling off to sleep. I had seen the barred cave where he meditated. My grandmother, a jeweller’s daughter, was to leave her legacy to Baba. Father would not be forgiven.
The trial started. I accompanied mother to the Bombay High court: dark stone buildings full of pigeon droppings fallen from the rafters, with post-Raj liveried doormen, cloaked lawyers and their devils. Accusations of influence peddling, deception in marriage and divorce. All the old hurts and wounds photographed, catalogued, filed away, now played upon in the hands of paid lawyers. Mother refused an out-of-court settlement. She wanted ‘justice’, a public validation of the worth of her tribulations; he, a public absolution of his guilt, a public statement of male power. My old grandfather, weeping silently, sent away. They had certified my maternal grandmother insane, had her beaten with chains to drive out the devil in her. These forces once before judged my mother guilty of deserting a man she was forced to marry in an arranged marriage and whom she had the courage to leave. The same forces now called her a man-wrecker, an insane person, an undutiful wife, a thief of her husband’s wealth, guilty of beating back a man who assaulted her. I testified on mother’s behalf. We had become too poor to eat amid plenty. My parents who were married in seventy-five rupees spent thousands on their divorce. The trial had become mother’s raison d’être: she spent years writing brief upon brief. A year later she was dead.
Minoo from the Drama Club wished to write a play on mother.
I gave language and history lessons. My students had interesting mothers: one loved her brother-in-law; another, an ex-baronet’s wife, paid up her losses at the races by selling off inherited Chinese ivory—her house was full of pedestals on which statues once stood; a third, a Jew married to a Hindu film director, had a daughter from a previous marriage who dreamed of a career in the movies; yet another, the workless wife of a successful executive, concocted a life for herself as a stewardess.
Mother reprimanded both my girlfriends and the men, if they called me on the phone at home.
At nineteen I met Placid, twenty-five, bronze-complexioned, of middle build but athletic, with light eyes and a prominent mole on his cheek. He was a nuclear physicist. We met in a train and kept trysts each Tuesday morning. Sounds of children outside would waft into the room. He would await me wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, open the door to his one-room dwelling a crack to let me in. I wrote him poems; the scent of his sandalwood oil stayed with me days. Once, while he was visiting his family in South India, I turned up at his door and was seen by a cousin of his. I was severely admonished later by Placid.
I met a chef. The monsoons had set in. My friend wore a raincoat and dangled a cigarette from the corner of his rather full mouth, like Bogart. We took a cab to the sea and awaited nightfall. We made love: throat, chest, navel, thigh. The sky grew dizzy: ‘What happened?’ The cabbie watched the whole scene from a parapet. I was twenty; I had met the man in the train at fourteen.
Mother offered me a holiday in Kashmir. A Kashmiri curiodealer had me locked into his offices and beaten, calling me an ‘Indian’ all the while because I had accidentally scratched one of his curios while handling it. I did not realize it then but I had internalized the pleasure of being beaten while watching all my mother’s suffering.
During a famine, after waiting hours in a ration queue, I was charged the black market price. ‘Ask your father how he got rich,’ said the grain dealer.
I asked mother to leave me her papers. She refused: ‘You will malign me.’
I read about a liberation movement among American homosexuals, the Mattachine Society. ‘Mattachine’ in Spanish means ‘puppet’. After securing admission to a California college, father and I struck a bargain: I was to sign over to him everything in return for a year’s fees. I signed transfers for half an hour. I felt free; I thought of never returning again.
I reported a boy-servant to the police for petty theft. I sat there listening to his cries as they tried to beat a confession out of him at the police station.
Mother appeared in the doorway on crutches: ‘Do not leave. I’m about to die.’
Love is a constant terror of loss
The first loss of earth is loss of home.
II
The Dead Sea
Education: America, Germany, 1968–1976
The birds of paradise on campus were beautiful. The smog was sickening. Sister on long-distance line daily from Michigan. Food came in trays on a receiving line. Everything was antiseptic. Ravi Shankar, marijuana and male sex were considered liberating. A footballer in a bed sheet for a toga asked me to bed. An Indian bedecked his girlfriend as a Bengali bride in sandalwood paste and asked her to share a bath.
‘Californication’ he called it. Father wrote a letter a day inquiring about the identity of sister’s lovers. I finally replied. Tom Bradley lost his first race to become a Black mayor. The Mazdaists of California turned out to be Christians in magian dress. Dr Bode of Westwood promised to convert sister’s friend to father’s satisfaction.
The friend sister was escaping decided to follow her to California. David had once been a priest. My sister lay curled up like a foetus when once I saw them in bed through a glass window.
At Christmas sister in India shot herself. Would elder sister leave everything and be by father? Younger sister had concealed the weapon from father when he threatened suicide and had used it against herself in a moment of complete isolation. ‘I dragged her out of death’s mouth,’ mother wrote.
David and I went to San Francisco. It rained throughout the holiday season. Being suburb-bound I tried to connect with the sea again but lost my way. David tried looking up a father he had never seen in a phonebook. His mother said he was a trombonist with the Symphony. David did not find him. One night in bed I felt attracted to my sister’s lover.
Carmela: Unlike mother she divorced the man she married young and deeply loved rather than suffer his negativities. She had eloped a week before high-school graduation. She displayed Italian verve. John stood by her through her mother’s death, about whom she seemed to have guilt. They had a beautiful split-level home in Pasadena which she gave up. She received no alimony. She saw her children through their difficult adolescence: Tony had difficulty finding himself; Alex, a child genius, created a world of translucence around him with fluorescent paints when placed in a home for distressed children; Lisa had taught in Venezuela and lived then with a Harvard-law-school graduate; little Victoria grew up to be a lady. She was liberal and brought Alex to a showing of Rosemary’s Baby: a film about selling one’s wife to the devil for worldly success. When I aske
d her gruffly to type for me she countered that she wouldn’t. Blood drained to my feet Carmela remembers. But we became friends.
I sought a homosexual roommate as I needed a guide. The first day we made love all day on the floor, moving from the parlour to the study, then to the kitchen and finally the bedroom. Michael had fallen in love with me. He took me to my first Hollywood gay bar. A ‘girl’ on the dance floor lost a ping-pong ball, that was serving for a breast, during a fast dance. Michael liked Black men. They liked me but I felt threatened by them. It was chic to have a Black friend then. I had my first experience of waiting mutely in a gay bar for hours. Michael himself had been first brought here on a religious anti-vice tour.
Scottie’s: Scottie collected fees from a window; $1.50 then. I was introduced. We went to a locker room and changed into towels. Corridors were designed as a labyrinth to add excitement to the chase, and lined with cubicles holding planks nailed wall to wall serving as beds. Some had mirrors to separate the actor from the act or to double the pleasure. No names are ever exchanged. Scottie’s clientele was young. The man with the shaved chest was from Antioch College and told me Christ’s twelve disciples were his lovers. I spent the night fully dressed in the television room. The next morning I had my first quarrel with Michael.
I visited Scottie’s three nights a week; it was life within the whale-belly. He had moved into a huge new place with a sauna, showers, game rooms and a restaurant. It might have been a bordello that went out of style. The orgy room had a vast bed: I was a prostitute soliciting clients. Someone kissed me feverishly. One could barely discern faces in the lightless room. I tried to satisfy everybody. A blonde boy patiently awaiting his turn brought a warm mouth upon me. It was over in minutes. I reached for him, but he fled. The metaphor for the gay life had been established. Once two sumo wrestlers in bed: unbearable stench of excreta and Vaseline.
At Easter we visited Michael’s parents. Michel was ill with syphilis and I was sworn to secrecy. His father took us communal bathing. I felt strange that fathers should want to appear before their sons in uncovered nakedness.
When I touched Jane’s breast she repulsed me. Later she was to sunbathe naked before me but I didn’t respond. Her parents were John Birchians. They detested Communism since they had ‘made it’ on their own. They had built their house literally with their own hands. Their friends in Pebble Beach tried to indoctrinate me. They were against the Grape Boycott, Cesar Chavez’s crusade for better pay for migrant workers. Eat the forbidden fruit, they said. When her mother read Jane’s diary she sent her to a psychiatrist and found solace herself in politics. One morning I found her sitting on the toilet devouring Portnoy and bonbons, orating on obscenity to her husband in the bathtub.
Embarcadero Y: last night in California. All night riding elevators to new floors, new rooms, toilets, showers; new boys, nameless. After the morning shower I made love to a young sailor. A retired army man bent again and again to kiss a herpes sore on my inner thigh. Young soldiers maimed in Vietnam were a delicacy at Scottie’s.
Topless/Bottomless: a nude on a reflecting glass-top table, with older men looking up at her. My first view of a mature woman.
Carmela, in a goodbye gesture, bent low as Hindus do. I noticed the airport concrete painted green to simulate grass. The last night in California I dreamed an irate landlady demanding payment. Her husband held up to me a handful of hailstones. ‘Glass!’ I’d said.
Mother died. Her last letter reached after news of her death; I burnt the rest. ‘He’d have been happy had I died’ said father of me in a letter to sister. Sister told me mother was pregnant before marriage; this was the child that died.
They laid my mother on a stone. Birds in the well ate her.
At P.U. I had to properly delouse myself; my friends went into a frenzy of laundering.
A character in a novel described as ‘drooling in her panties each time a man passed her’ reminded me of mother. I held one should prove the love read about in Shakespeare.
Virgil had a no-nonsense approach to literature. He was a navy man, jazz trombonist, and a mathematician. He had written on Hollywood in literature. To him I was a son.
Nightly from ten to two I walked the streets, round and round the courthouse across the river. Chrome and glass living was too clean, the night walk was pain, suffering, work, time-killing self-denial, ecstasy. Someone screamed an obscenity; I was hardened in the pursuit of a night’s lover. I wouldn’t patronize the bar by the railroad track for fear of discovery. I counselled divorced men, drunks, bums I picked up, and received obscene phone calls.
Jal and Zenobia gave me food, shelter, advice, good music, love, but they could not keep me from the streets. He was quiet, she, vivacious. She was growing with his support. She knew no other men. She never threatened him. After the traumatic death of a wealthy father she had found stability again in marriage. Hers was a protected world and she wished for her friends what she most valued. I babysat their son, then four years old. Both father and son were Cancerians; they worshiped their mothers. What I wanted, however, was bliss; and bliss is antisocial.
At school Neville was taken to be an Eskimo. He refused to speak Gujarati or relish curry. He refused to sleep each night as it meant separation from his mother. His first separation came when his friend Chris moved to another town. He threatened to run away from home once when curry fumes got to him. He loved animals. Once he asked his mother if she would marry me since I alone of all men was allowed into her bedroom. Once he came back from Sunday school terrified by tales of brimstone and hell-fire.
I showed up at a party with kohl-lined eyes. Everyone thought me mad. I dreamed castration dreams. Crossing the town’s river was crossing Styx.
The artists’ fascination for homosexuality is explained by their fascination for bliss; homosexuality being blissed against the finality of reproduction. However what life seeks is pleasure and pleasure is tragic. Proust’s life best exemplifies the distance between ideals and the lived life.
A racing-car driver—‘Call me Joe’—picked me up and ordered me to mount him. He was massive, at least 200 lbs. The August moon. Five in the morning. Chill. Without a shred of clothing in the fields. I fell asleep. ‘Stars! as in Phantom comics.’
I felt myself raised and dropped. I had blacked out and awoke on a thickly carpeted floor. ‘Arabian Nights!’ My face swelling from the blows. Men were going to work, eight in the morning, stepping over me on their landing, lying there shirtless. ‘Please open the door, lady.’ GOD IS A FAIRY WHO WEARS A KIMONO AND PLUCKS HER EYEBROWS.
‘I am Sgt Flood. May I know the story?’
I made one.
Inspected for rape.
‘The lady you called on is praying for you.’
I chase a friar come to console me out of my hospital room. Anaesthetics. Silence. Darkness. Stitches. Light again. Why am I alive?
It was not my body they made love to. Everything that happened happened to another person.
Letter from a friend:
Leave the man who is mending you whole alone.
Ring down the curtain on your act. Blanche du Bois was my part.
Friends did not invite me over any more:
—If little Bobby should ask us what you are, what should we say?
—Tell him the truth, Ma’am.
Zen: The art of not going insane, committing suicide or becoming a cripple.
The therapist was sympathetic but remote. Once he was at the cinema with an older woman.
—Was that your mother?
—No, my wife.
He asked me to go straight: ‘An inexperienced woman will be paired with you at the Sexual Dysfunction Clinic. It’s expensive.’
‘Ten strokes of the bull-headed stick for lying; twenty for desecrating one’s mother; fifty for desecrating oneself.’—A Pahlavi Text.
‘I am Rimbaud, Baudelaire, I am Christ.’—Hart Crane.
Picked up a migrant Chicano labourer who robbed me and gave me a broken
nose. A therapist, a Chinese–American girl, asked me to turn myself in to the police. She later eloped with a professor who left his wife and children.
A young female therapist at a crisis centre initiated my cure: ‘You are not ill. You are free to go.’
Gay Liberation. I paid my dues. Silk scarves, overalls, tiny blouses, vests, jewellery, eye makeup, slimming diets, long hair, daily shaves, Garbo hats, heeled shoes. Protest marches, lectures, seductions: Are you a voyeur? Screaming in pain: an alien without rights. Disco dancing with Indianapolis Blacks. No one would pick up ‘a queen’.
Boys sought me out for their first sexual encounters.
A married professor with children who finally decided he was gay brought his wife to interview me and find out what homosexuals were like. I was flattered, she wasn’t.
Received my only ever love-letter from a literature major: ‘I want you to pierce my centre … I want you to make the circles dance.’ I did. The letter went on in that vein for four pages. We were all amused by it.
Len photographed me in the nude; Nancy, with ‘props’: a Jerusalem cherry in midwinter.
Len was a Southerner, from a family of tobacco-growers; in his ways were the tang of the Southern red earth, its gently lush vegetation and kindly manners.
Marty painted foggy pastels. ‘What was the pattern on his back/Its features made and pressed?’ He showed up for dinner at midnight. I chain-smoked and chain-brushed-myteeth to sweeten my breath. He would lose class among his ‘butch’ friends if he slept with me. I had to give him up. He had given up painting for a factory job. His mother blamed his girlfriend.
After walking the streets I would listen to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto till dawn. Once I had refused to listen to music. It was my father’s world. He and elder sister would stay awake in the darkness listening to Mozart. It was a world I wasn’t allowed to enter. A world father and daughter shared. Heard Boulez conduct Daphnis and Chloe, as if the spirit was brooding upon the first waters. Mahler became a passion and the opera. ‘Ah Lucia of the fountains/Walking the grass/a starling in each eye.’
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 2
