The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  In reply to my Christmas poem Mulk Raj Anand writes: ‘Do not forget the wisdom of the heart our mothers taught us.’ He urges an autobiography so that the lyric impulse can suggest undertones. I write, in longhand, a diary in two days. The places I have passed through are places on no map.

  Hoveida: thirteen years Iran’s Prime Minister. He could have escaped as others similarly incriminated did during jailbreak on the day Tehran fell. Instead he chose to turn himself in. A dandy once, he apologized in court about his appearance. ‘These are the only clothes I possess,’ he told the revolutionary court. Salvation through suffering. A Bahai and a homosexual, an outsider. He asked for a month’s reprieve to write his memoirs. Denied. He sought martyrdom.

  Letter from father:

  ‘I owe the bank money and have paid 72,000 in interest.’

  Letter to father:

  ‘The older I grow the closer I feel towards you. However briefly, there was love between you and mother. Not something to be said lightly.’

  It is all a matter of concentration: if you concentrate on wealth, you become a rich man, if on love, a prostitute, if on beauty, a poet, if on god, a saint.

  I never sublimated. I lived out every fantasy. Sublimation is turned into work. I became an artist. We are not born with nothing, we are born with a body. I created my own life with my own body; I lived in the inferno and came back to tell what I had seen.

  Man plays only when he is truly human and he is truly human only when he is at play.

  —Schiller.

  ‘Work cannot be play’ is a formulation separating the artist’s play from the labour of life. Marx would say that labour humanizes man. The artist labours at his art in extracting what is real from what is apparent, though what is there may not be a ‘fact.’ Only in the artist’s life do work and play intermingle, and alienation ends.

  ‘The gay movement, the women’s movement are political. They have nothing to do with the reinvention of love.’

  —Octavio Paz

  Those who became celebrants (of freedom) have usually been marginal members of their own social group. Even when they were not initially, their taste for liberty tended to make them so, but usually they already were. The recipe seems to be something like this: enough experience, preferably early, of personal security to desensitize the unconscious to the threat of scarcity activated by some kind of stigma, severe enough to loosen the pledge that binds the individual to the group; but not severe enough to get him cast out of the group and thus destroy his security. Nor must the stigma be permitted to become itself the basis for a new group membership, for this destroys its effectiveness as a bond-weakener; the individual has taken a new pledge and immediately begins to promote his new group-interests at the expense of his scepticism and inner vision. Being Jewish, being black, being gay—all these used to work wonders in establishing marginality for those who were able to afford it. Today, they avail little; they are just different ways of getting into politics.

  —Fridenberg, Laing

  I have given up obsession.

  Rohinton: Through him I have connected with my people. He is a sportsman and a virgin—through him I have connected with my opposite. He is a Scorpio like myself and wears a beard over a small face much as I do. Through him I have connected with myself.

  He consistently ignores gossip: this is his virtue. He wishes to fly and cannot. He wishes to marry and cannot. He loved god once; now he has lost him, the Zoroastrian god of the Zoroastrian heaven. He is reading Aurobindo and Hafez.

  The ‘search’ for him is self-conquest: how to conquer one’s mental doubts, one’s physical limitations. He wages a constant war against luxury, softness and effeminacy by facing the cold and eating plain food. It could be consolidation of the ego merely, but his need of others saves him, love saves him.

  I am purifying my life, I am purifying my poem.

  ‘Love’s only attraction is ‘that it is evil.’

  —Baudelaire.

  ‘The Zoroastrian flower ceremony:

  An initiate faces a teacher; between them are laid three flowers on the right, for good (good deeds, words and thought), and three on the left, for evil. By the teacher are two flowers, one each for good and evil. The initiate crosses over to the teacher and picks up the evil flower, holds it for long. Then he exchanges it for the flower of truth and reaps seven flowers for experience, strikes a vase filled with the water of feeling nine times for the nine directions and returns to his place. Having known evil and reaped experience, he is ready to return to life.

  Met an Iranian Zoroastrian from Kerman. Echoes of Ken again. I was offered a teaching position at his school. I slept in his bed, ate his food. he grilled me before his friends on the issue of my homosexuality. At night in sleep he caught my hand. We shared a shower on the last day of school. We decided to live together the next term. I later learnt he was suspected of being a Savak agent. He had the habits of a spy listening to conversation to form a case. He came to me with a demand for money. I refused. I had to contact the police to recover my books and belongings from him. I had seen him as a spiritual lover prior to my sleeping with him and written him a poem-cycle in the manner of Rumi. The ghost of Ken had been laid to rest finally.

  Rohinton left wordlessly, returning all my poems.

  Behzad replaced Ken. ‘Everything is chance.’ He was involved in politics. I gave him his first ever sexual experience with a man. I took responsibility for that. He wished to sleep with my sister. He rejects Freud. He gave me the loyalty he otherwise gave politics. We decided to live together ten years (until his marriage). He brought me a silver-plated ring and recited the first phrases of the wedding rite in Arabic. I wrote a marriage vow: ‘It is possible for the beautiful person.’ I wished to support his leftist politics financially. He had been jailed for a poem once, he said. He was my opposite: a Taurus to my Scorpio. I decided to take on employment so as to be able to live on earth. I finally understood my rebellion against money as a rebellion against my father; as a perpetuation of my mother’s words: ‘Money means prostitution.’ Behzad came to me out of rebellion seeking freedom and protection and worked through his repressions. I could love a person wholly, bodily and permanently at last. We made each other many promises: the child of the future. ‘You are an idealist.’ I let him keep his idea of himself. The young boy comes to the experienced man in joy and freedom. He learns and teaches compassion.

  In Isfahan I lived in a basement room furnished with a bed on the floor oriental style, over which I threw a Kashmir shawl. My landlady gave me a rug for the floor and her hope chest served as a wardrobe. My poems I kept in a Persian box from Behzad’s family.

  My landlady’s daughter had become estranged from her fiancé and the entire family was enraged in a transatlantic brawl trying to recover stolen gifts and articles from the girl’s trousseau.

  Letter from Behzad:

  Because I did not want to show myself (an inexperienced) person, I told you about Afsaneh … I have never met Afsaneh … I made up those names. I have suffered much because I lied to you. Every time we had a fight I encountered [sic] to hit you because of that. The first body that I have seen in my life was your body. I have never been after your money. I never wanted to use you for myself. I wanted to be with you whatever you are. I am really alone. Please take my hand help me to come out of this prison, the prison that is killing me.

  Kurdestan: I took the bus to Sanandaaj. All at once the landscape became magical as were the hills around the Dead Sea or the roads of Cyprus. It was the kind of land one would die for. Summer was at midpoint, rivers full, trees lush, now and then a drongo or a kingfisher in flight. The bus road by the riverbank going onward to its source. Ten checkpoints in an hours’ drive. Women and boys were suspected as spies; the guards were hated.

  Sanandaaj was bombed completely. Hill cities built much like Rome with sepia-coloured wash on houses. The Medes are said to have reverted to Kurd. Villages lack the barest amenities. Women weave bright red an
d orange rugs in Tree of Life patterns.

  Made love to a Kurd on the night bus.

  Letter to Behzad:

  Coming upon the knowledge of another person must be deeply shaking.

  I only gave my body—I never before took or kept anyone.

  YOU ARE THE FIRST ONE WHO STAYED:

  I have become an ordinary human being, no longer poet, prostitute or saint … Early in our friendship I saw you as a fighter in life and politics. You are without many things. You are extraordinary. So you are my friend.

  I am attached to the body, relationships, earth. We are opposites. We complete each other.

  You are not divided. You are whole. You can love and befriend the same person.

  You taught me discipline: to love without destroying myself every minute, every day. Money is only a means; love is a basis. You are not in prison anymore. You are the dream child; my lost innocence and future success.

  I talked to you about the search for god. Man’s wanting the absolute, we call ‘god’. We lost god after childhood because we lost our childhood loves. To find love again will mean to find god again. But to fail in our human relationships and go to god is a mistake. Men can only love god through men and women. Sex without friendship is a mistake. Everything else besides friendship is from books. Political killing comes from lack of love. The powerful cannot answer the love of the martyrs, nor equal them, so they have killed them. As a young man you understand all this better.

  Growing mature you want power; I call you back to the child that you are. So you say I ‘lessened your loyalty.’ When the true revolution comes they will probably kill me.

  If you are motivated by love then, even when you have money and power, you give it away.

  I later learnt that the money meant for politics he had kept himself. Another ‘business deal,’ too, was probably phoney: he was to have spent that money for study abroad. My contempt for money he had used to his own advantage.

  Yet I kept with him as much out of compassion as of need.

  The last I tried living with him he talked of terrorism, a romanticized suicide. Marxism has become a superstition of the twentieth-century.

  I worked in a boys’ school under extreme humiliation and disrespect to support the two of us. His demands for the necessities and comforts of life were unending. I had to break with him.

  Behzad wrote me:

  Four times

  First by fire

  Then water, air

  Finally earth

  Who is this man?

  From where? Why?

  For whom?

  I am not I

  Loneliness

  is lonely –

  Light

  More light upon light

  Look to the contrary light

  I sleep safe as a crook in his arm

  Alone

  Today is Friday. I can sense time passing with the speed of light. I had been thinking for three hours, leaning to the wall, without knowing where I am [sic]. I was dreaming about you, about the days we had together, about the time nobody could separate us. Then I decided to alive [sic] the past. The best thing that could help me to remember you were your beautiful letters. So I selected one and copied it for you …

  I came back after seventeen days. The work is so hard. Ten hours in the desert in cold weather …

  The poem’s second stanza is my translation of impromptu poems he’d recite in bed.

  But I could not believe in him any longer.

  Boys came to me later but I had ceased to be trusting. My powers failed me in the very act of love-making.

  The effort outlasting the end is one definition of love.

  The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.

  —R.D. Laing, Politics of Experience

  The creative friend, who always has a complete world to bestow. And as the world once dispersed for him, so it comes back to him again, as the evolution of good through evil as the evolution of design from chance.

  —Nietzsche

  Letter to Freny Bhownagary:

  My book turned out to be a kaleidoscope: a few bits of glass reflected endlessly.

  The book grows slowly like life by accretions. In installing myself within my book I’m creating my life. If we wish to write the truth then there’s only one truth for each man, the truth of his own life. On examining one’s unique truth it is not surprising to find that truth touching upon the truth of unique others. Hence the writer who writes for himself is later taken up by others. Only the intellectual brings negative insights to bear upon himself.

  My sister left Iran for Bhutan and cut ties with everybody.

  Letter from Traute:

  Helmut fell down on his knees and asked me to make him the happiest man there is or else held be brokenhearted. I said ‘yes’ as I don’t like a broken-hearted man. I expect my baby in three months.

  Tehran School for Foreign Residents: I was to have taught Taiwanese who refused to speak Chinese. Their fathers were third-world frontmen for an American aeronautics company. An American woman ran the school much as a personal fief, reminding me of my American bosses in Heidelberg. Women in business usually learn their officemanner from men.

  Letter from sister:

  ‘David earns $ 13000 yearly and is still broke.’

  I say the monk in him is pining for recognition.

  Letter to sister:

  You say human nature is beyond you. I understood even the child I have been seeing lately. Yesterday he came to my city for the first time in a year, since I abandoned him. I took a hotel room and began talking. He finally confessed that he wanted the ‘experience of trickery’—a child’s greed for experience. ‘An act is pure if no turn of reason judges it’—he was pure in trickery! I, for my part, wanted the experience of being ‘taken’. There was an unspoken understanding between us. This experience is now lived out, understood, liquidated. His wanting to borrow the amount to repay me touched me. In the morning I said ‘Happy Birthday’: My travail had finally made him honest; I had taught something.

  ‘Possession—where the possessor possesses nothing.’

  —Proust

  I planned a dream-trip to Turkey: the dancing dervishes, Istanbul, the Orient Express.

  Saw Nagshe-Jehan Square through a morning mist. Isfahan’s palace, mosque, marketplace: old friends weeping.

  Behzad dissuaded me from going; I stayed though unemployed.

  Manfred asked to show my poems in Germany.

  Behzad gave me a false address of a business when I asked for the return of my loan. Driving to my hotel during a blackout he killed a cyclist; was jailed a day. I trod incessantly between his home, my hotel and the police station. Via Dolorosa, streets of sorrow, the same streets of sorrow I walked early mornings on my weekly visits to Isfahan. I would call at his bedroom window, he’d let me into his parents’ home.

  Now he returned from jail, head shaved, irate and ordered me out of his life. I phoned, wrote letters, sent him Gandhi, the Gita, Nietzsche, Castro, Victor Jara.

  He warmed to me. Took me to his grandmother’s house recently vacated by tenants. In that empty house prevailed an unbearable sense of life being, a prison. An odd eroticism flowered.

  We walked through narrow alleys, a covered bazaar and came out again on Naqshe-Jahan. I could not look into his eyes as he wore sun-shades: mosques, minarets reflected therein.

  He told me he kept dynamite hidden in his house. It could explode any moment.

  He told me he had spent all my money on an automatic revolver. This was the secret for which he had so consistently lied. Loyalty to confused po
litics had taken precedence over even human considerations.

  With my own hand I drowned his anger, the dynamite, in a stream running past his house.

  The moon rose, golden, round and full.

  He promised to renounce terrorism.

  From jail he brought back a painting of Leily and Majnu, in exchange for the gift of his watch.

  I will translate his poems and send them to Germany. I write him daily. I promised to work to pay his enormous fine.

  What was to be beautiful became a sacrifice.

  Unposted letter to Rex:

  I cannot tell this to anyone.

  My friends here, older American homosexuals in hiding, condemn me. My own friend is a young Persian.

  I went for a job interview with a government-run Persian daily. The front page carried a news item of the death by shooting of two boys twenty-four and thirty. I read and reread the story until I fell into a trance-like state compounded of nausea and fear. I hinted to the American secretary that I was gay. I could not work for such people. I did not get the job. Tell me, Rex, there is a place for honesty in a world of prostitutes and lackeys. Absolve me Rex, with your friendship …

  I wrote to Behzad:

  God is nothing but oneself.

  Man has to bow to someone: so I bow to you.

  If you are too proud you can bow to yourself …

  At prayer, we bow to the earth because we all live,

  or really want to live, here.

  But he told me he hated himself and considered himself a failure.

  To be young means being nobody, so being everybody, being everybody is an act; playing at being womanizer, lover, sodomite, terrorist, fatalist, materialist, criminal, bourgeois. It means the last luxury of remaining passive, of remaining a child. The world impinges upon the child; men impinge on the world. The child’s world of irresponsibility. It means being a thing, so as to become a being one stirs up events: chance encounters, dream escapades, real accidents, adventurous holidays, forbidden loves, hard work, prison, heartbreak. It means unspeakable cruelty because the young have no allegiance and are willing to risk everything since they stand to lose nothing not ever having owned anything including their own names. It means unspeakable love because being always outside they embrace with tenderness the lover, the jailed, the underdog, the criminal, the outcast. It means a willingness, an ever-readiness to die, to immolate oneself for a cause larger than oneself. It means being vigilant against the hypocrites who hold on to their shameful lives by the commerce of deceit. It means not accepting anything that is warped, broken, unwhole, unidealistic, and wanting to make, madly, the beautiful on earth. It means deep, dark despair, without words, in a jail without exit because nothing is as it can be. It means not ever feeling guilt at having subdued every relationship, friendship, love, to the mad ideal of blowing up the world to make it new. It means immolating another. The horror of immolating another wakes up the child, the dreaming angel, the slumbering god, and casts him into the hell that most men call their lives.