The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  Well, how does one write?

  I write very quickly. And if it gels so much the better. If it doesn’t tant pis. ‘First said, best said,’ Ginsberg believed. I rewrite a trauma over many, many years until it crystallizes. This is how I could finally write about my parents’ divorce or a sister’s abortion. Nothing is laboured, everything is spontaneous. ‘Poems come like leaves to trees.’

  I’m fifty, and the nation is fifty and we have to make sense of each other. What is a gay poet saying to a half-starved nation where rape occurs every ten minutes and a child is born every minute? Perhaps that sex cuts across caste and class? How do you write gayness when there is no gay culture? How you create a gay aesthetic for urban India?

  I found my answer in Pound, a poet’s poet. Pound said that if you can rely on high art to be really high then the tenor of popular culture wouldn’t be so low. We wouldn’t be subject to a garish TV Ramayana, which nonetheless funnels Hindu pride. Instead we would have our modern gay lives depicted with all the abandon that characterizes any true epic.

  I’ve always spoken in rhymes. Still do I rely on my blood’s rhythm, which is the rhythm of our spoken Indian English, the sea-rhythms of my births, of the tides and the moonphases … the rhythm I first heard in my mother’s belly.

  Epilogue

  ‘Do not forget the wisdom of our mothers,’ Mulk Raj Anand wrote a young Hoshang in Tehran. ‘Is Hoshang a gay poet or a Sufi Poet?’ people now ask.

  Think of the gay Jesuit who wrote ‘Windhover’, think of the Divan-i-Shams-i-Tabrizi, think of mad Sarmad followed by his boy from Sind to Golconda to Delhi, think of Amir Khusro making the Mogul prince Dara Shikoh so mad that Aurangzeb had to kill Dara, think of St John of the Cross on that dark and lonely night when a stranger pursues him up the narrow steps of his house, think of Takahashi dying of hunger in opulent modern Japan, think of the last poems of Ginsberg gone over to Elizabethan love-lyrics and the sweet Lord Buddha.

  So the Urdu ghazal has crept into my Indian English poems. At the end of his life, Ghalib writes:

  Apart from Allah all is vague

  And nonexistent. There is no

  Poetry and no poet, no ode and

  No ode writer. Nothing exists

  except God.

  It seems to me the only god in my books and books of poems is the poem, i.e., it is the poem itself.

  Ghalib also writes: Whatever happens to the mystic is good for his soul.

  A comment on this is that madness is but the last stage of longing, be it for justice (the rage for it turning into violence) or for love, as with the beloved and blessed Sufi, Majnun.

  In Hindu Bhakti literature we have a term ‘Radha-bhava.’ It assumes, like all mysticism, that the divine principle is male, all others are female souls yearning for divine union. The Radha-bhava suits the spiritually inclined modern gay writer. It is not an accident that Winston Leyland of the Gay Press, San Francisco, is interested in the Iranian mysticism of Jalal-ud-din Rumi who is currently very fashionable in America in Coleman Bark’s translation or mistranslation. This is not feminism: the story of Mirabai comes to mind. Tulsi Goswami refused to see her in Brindaban on the grounds that she was a woman. She sent word right back that she thought the only man in Brindaban was Lord Krishna and everyone else was only a woman. She was promptly granted an audience.

  There is a well known thumri:

  Tum Radha bano/Main banoo Shyam

  (You be Radha/I Krishna)

  When a man, Bhimsen Joshi, sings this, it is all very well. But when women like Parveen Sultana or Begum Akhtar sing it we get a special thrill. The same thrill when we recognize the beauty and terror of the Pichwai painting of Radhaji with Krishna’s crown and Krishnaji in Radha’s sari. It is the eunuch in my friend Bhupen Khakhar’s painting: always naked, always an outcast, but with a sky-blue sari sewn with tinsel stars! Krishna is not ‘bhogi’ (sensualist), he is India’s greatest yogi (ascetic). At first poetry is transgressive; ultimately it is transcendent:

  Bairam Khan was sent on a pilgrimage by Akbar

  Then set upon/So was Shams by Rumi’s son

  No wonder they never returned

  But myths grow around madmen not kings

  They’re said to become one with god

  Their blood waters the Martyr’s Tree

  Its leaves turn books

  Boys become poets/Lovers become ascetics

  Yet people say: Love accomplishes nothing

  Sacrifice accomplishes nothing

  Politics is all/Ambition is all

  A benediction does not stop a gun

  But it shames the assassin for centuries

  What arms accomplish is immediate

  Ashes are for the whole world for aeons

  The pelican feeds its young with its blood

  Some call him Christ/Others, Mother

  When Hindu killed Moslem I made love to a Moslem

  Listen to me. Do not call me names

  Now I’ve stopped speaking. There is nothing more

  to hear.

  I Am not in

  Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action; and till action, lust

  Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame.

  Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

  Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;

  Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,

  Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,

  On purpose laid to make the taker mad—

  Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

  A bliss in proof, and prov’d, a very woe;

  Before, a joy propos’d; behind, a dream.

  All this the world knows; yet none knows well

  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129

  Remember, you are a Karamazov—

  from your father’s side, you are all lechers;

  and from your mother’s, fools for Christ

  —Fr Zossima to Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov

  Sex is a way to sainthood.

  —Anaïs Nin

  I

  It is time to fill in the gaps in my autobiography: Especially what I did between the time I returned from Palestine and the time I got the teaching job in Hyderabad (1982–89): The seven-year Saturn transit.

  I returned to Pali Hill. It is painful. But I must tell it. Pali Hill was crumbling. My middle sister had attempted suicide a second time (unbeknownst to me). All the floors were dug up. The hexagonal red beehive tiles gone. During bouts of megalomania my sister thought to pave the bungalow with marble. ‘A mausoleum!’ I thought. A mausoleum to a family that was dead. Our family. I slept on the Rexine sofa, the old leather now replaced. The chandeliers long since gone, replaced by modern light-fixtures. The leaking roof of a huge bungalow repaired by sister on borrowed money. I paid her debt from the last money left from Israel: $1000 (then Rs 40,000). No money even to eat. Sister sparring with father over rights to the bungalow. I, caught in-between.

  I would spend time cooking simple dishes of my childhood: eggs spread on sautéed okra, potato or sweet and sour tomato. Father came one day: ‘This is woman’s work, Come to the factory!’ I hated it. People warring over my loyalties, my soul.

  Sister would be gone all day. She did not trust me with the house keys. Once I had to break into the house. Her lawyer phoned me and warned me I would be charged with ‘trespass’. She had gone to court against father. I had refused to join her. Once she came home and started throwing casseroles of leftover food at me as I slept. Another night she stalked me to the bathroom, a heavy metal padlock in her hand concealed behind her, wishing to assault me so I would flee the house. All the tricks father had used against mother. Father assaulted her. I left the house on ‘Bhai Dooj’, day for brother–sister bonds.

  I went to father’s seashore apartment. Almost as soon as I entered stepmother�
��s nagging started.

  You want to live off your father’s money!

  I, who would not tolerate a wrong word against me from my own mother, listened to the stepmother’s harangue for months.

  She would cook for me, though.

  ‘Treat her as a servant!’ said my aunt who hated her brother’s second wife more than she did the first. I was polite, even friendly, with stepmother.

  It was time to get a job.

  The great Indian job hunt:

  Waiting in an anteroom with scores of poseurs.

  One came with a suitcase full of his publications.

  Another intoned there was an applicant from Heidelberg! (Me.)

  A third tried to read the letter I was writing Yasmin:

  ‘The long, snake-like train entered the dark tunnel … etc.’ describing the journey from Bombay to Hyderabad through the Western Ghats as sexily as I could.

  An arrogant professor dismissed me. A lady professor (a British woman married to a Bengali) on the recruiting committee kindly asked if I would come to her University in Calcutta. I said, ‘No’. I had to be nearer to Bombay, to my dying father (the few years left to me to make amends). Of course, I did not get the job, nor did I get back my father!

  Who should be in the berth opposite me on the return journey but the Peeping Tom! There was no avoiding him. He was Raj, going to Pune to inquire about a temporary vacancy at the University. Would I accompany him? Of course, I would! The Head of English, gave me the job, unasked, instead of to Raj! Our rivalry had started.

  He accused me of eccentricity. He put it down to the fact of my being gay! (He was then in the closet.)

  He took me to Bombay’s Victoria Terminus to cruise the toilets. Mostly porters. I told stepmother. She told father.

  ‘Drop him like a hot potato!’ said father, of Raj.

  I did.

  The next time Raj called, father slammed down the receiver.

  (We later became literary friends.)

  I stumbled on my sister Whabiz’s unpublished papers on mother’s first miscarriage with father. Father had kicked dead the child growing within mother because they were then not yet married. Father asked her not to publish it. Good writing. I wept to read it. I would henceforth forgive my sister any offence she gave me or to anyone else in the world. I have kept this promise to myself.

  At Pune University I had to get back into the closet. This resulted in nightmares. A detective in a raincoat and fedora would follow me around the house in my dream. Each time the phone in my father’s house rang, the detective would reach for it first and stop me from speaking the truth to my friends.

  Mukti was an older student returning for a masters ten years into her marriage. (She had a French friend whom she subsequently married.) Mukti arranged for me to befriend one of her female classmates. (I was missing Yasmin with whom I corresponded. Sister would not forward any calls from Fayez when I lived with her at Pali Hill).

  The day we arranged our tryst was Sports Day. The playing field was the only place where lovers got some quiet. But not that day! I could not take the girl to my official guesthouse room for fear of discovery. As we made our way out of a plumeria grove some men-students saw us. The girl fled home.

  What did you two do, Sir?

  I was in a mischievous mood. So I said:

  ‘We sat under a tree. And I touched her all over!’

  The die was cast. My prank was relayed all over the University. I had lost my job. Father was in no mood to take me back.

  Mukti’s parents found a room with a friend of theirs for me and fed me a square meal a day until I found a job. Mukti and I are still friends in Goa where she has retired.

  Not that there was respect for me, ever, in Pune. The North Indian professors, among themselves, would refer to me as a ‘Nautanki’ (i.e. a cross-dresser). A colleague ratted to the Head that I had said the Head was jealous of my success with women. He was. The Head, now dead, played with young men’s emotions. He would first love you to death and then hate you till you died. His elder son had indeed committed suicide. A brilliant younger son is rumoured to be gay.

  Yet another colleague who wanted the vacancy I filled (for a PhD student of his) laid traps for me. He invited me home. The first time I did not show up sensing a trap. The second time I had to go. As he went out to bring home some beer he offered me a choice of reading material:

  Playboy or Playgirl?! (Playgirl had nude male centrefolds.)

  Playgirl! Playgirl! I clamoured. (A Bombay newsvendor had wailed: ‘I can’t get Playboys, where will I get Playgirls for you?!)

  Once I lost my job, everyone wished to be my friend.

  Just as at Hyderabad later, once everyone was promoted over my head they all sought my friendship: some for professional reasons, some for social reasons; others, out of a feeling of spiritual affinity with me.

  II

  Mrs V was another kettle of fish. She was a once beautiful Pathare Prabhu Hindu lady who had lost her husband and son on the same day. She grieved and wept even to talk of it years after the event. They were aristocrats. Her husband had not worked a single day in his life, she said. An engineer by training he was friends with the Mysore Dewan Sir Visweswarayya. An invitation to tea from him graced her showcase of memorabilia. I roomed with her. She was a very gracious host to my Pune friends. She would remember exactly which way anyone liked his tea prepared if she had once served him tea. Under duress from a mean Parsi spinster-friend of hers she upped my rent. I had to take shelter with some other Parsi friends of hers. But Mrs V was a kind, even if unforgiving, lady. She taught me the Hindu Ganesha ‘aarti’: she would bathe the idol in water, with a quick swipe even at the god’s behind just as a mother would while bathing an infant. Then she would light lamps, ring bells and offer sweets to him and to his two wives, Riddhi and Siddhi. I got to eat the sweets since Mrs V was dieting. I met her recently: she would not let me in but spoke to me through the iron door grill. She is eighty-five, she told me, and a great grandmother of a fiveyear-old girl. She would not accept my apologies for calling her names when she threw me out of her house but was genuinely glad I had made it to a professorship four years short of retirement. And she was genuinely saddened that father had written me out of his will.

  Dinyar’s family was afraid I would turn him gay. Dinyar was an heir to a Jalna cotton-fortune. Large hearted and weak minded, he was impressed by my learning. Shy by nature he enjoyed seeing the shock my outré behaviour created on his staid relatives whom he hated. The relatives had worked with the Nizam’s government and the Parsi family (like the Hyderabad Vicajees) claimed to have bailed the Nizam out of debts. A tank in Jalna from Emperor Shah Jahan’s time proclaimed on a tablet that it was built by Dinyar’s ancestors. His cousins would be amused by me. The dumb one would sing the film song from Anari (‘The Simpleton’):

  Samajhne wale samajh gaye hain

  Na samajeh woh Anari hai!

  (i.e. only fools won’t know etc.)

  The brilliant one at the Armed Forces Medical College would say to me: ‘Being homosexual is nothing but a brain’s computer being wired wrong!’ Mrs V wanted me to cook for Dinyar. But I would not as I was already in love with Sharad, a Pune University science graduate. When Dinyar went in for appendicitis surgery his mother drove down from Jalna to Pune weeping all the way. She soon died of a heart attack. She was under pressure from her in-laws to separate Dinyar from me. I had to give up Dinyar’s friendship. His family destroyed all my Pune writing (satires on Pune Parsis) when Mrs V was stupid enough to post the manuscript parcel I had left in trust with her to them.

  Dinyar married a Parsi Gujarati village girl, has one son, has moved permanently to Pune where his widower father has built him a huge villa next to the Osho Ashram, Mrs V told me. She, however, withheld any further information lest I restart a friendship none approved of.

  The last scene: I am to go to Hyderabad. I go to say my farewells to Mrs V. She is in the midst of arranging a welcome breakfast for
Dinyar and his parents after his appendicitis operation. She asks me to stay. I stay. The mother turns on me:

  When, in heaven’s name will you leave Pune for Hyderabad?

  ‘Am I a burden on you?’ I counter.

  The father joins the fray.

  Do you not have any shame shouting at ladies?!

  ‘A pox on both your houses!’ I say and leave. The chauffeur, who had overheard the fracas, giggles as I leave.

  When his son became of college age Dinyar phoned me. I told him, Dinyar, I do not consider you my friend. ‘WHY?’ was all he said!

  Each time his mother was rude to me he would defend her.

  Which mother would like her only son to turn gay?

  Actually the mother was much put upon by her in-laws in a joint family.

  An Andhra boy offered me the floor of his Pune University hostel room to sleep on. ‘Call me Kant,’ he said. He was no philosopher but a good-hearted buffoon. He knew cruelty first hand being a Dalit Christian. He would bring hostel food to the room and feed me. I worked at a banking institute trying to bring humanities into management: I had to see Iago as an image of corporate intrigue, Lear as a kindly manager gone wrong. I was paid a pittance. The other Andhra boys confronted Kant. ‘Throw Merchant out! He uses our toilets. We could catch AIDS!’

  I had to go to the Pune Virology Institute and beg the director, a Parsi lady doctor to give me a free ELISA test. (I could not afford the Rs 100 fee.) She asked me why I needed it. I pretended I had just arrived from the Middle East. (The first Asian AIDS case was reported from Dubai). The male pathologist who took my blood sample figured out I was gay. He was rude enough to ask me if I was active or passive. To frighten him I said: ‘I’m versatile’. That scared him off. But when I returned for my test-result the entire staff had turned upon the vestibule staircase leading to the upper floor—doctors on one side and nurses on the other—to gawk at a live, elite, self-confessed, passive gay, a rarity in Pune. They all snickered as I left with a negative report.