I wished to post my negative AIDS report on the hostel notice board. Kant asked I forgive the ignorant Andhra village boys. He soon asked me for sex. I refused. Kant had to forgive me then. Married later to a Moslem girl in a love marriage gone sour he asked me to mediate between them. I refused.
I was offered a one-year, temporary, pool officer’s job at Hyderabad. I would not go as I had a bad experience with reappointment at Pune. I was also deeply in love with Sharad who would meet me most evenings. I could not return to father’s.
The Last Scene at Father’s: After losing my Pune job father had kept me on in the vain hope I would join his business. I was a thorn in his second wife’s side who called me ‘an enemy’ to my face! When he left for eye surgery in America leaving me with her, she moved against me. (He had given her power-of-attorney over the factory.) He called me to ask me to go help at the factory. My instincts told me not to. As it turned out his assistant, behind his back, had stolen not only his business but also much equipment. So father had turned sour towards me. Stepmother, sensing a kill, accused me of theft, of Rs 40,000. Three days I heard her out with her threatening to call the police on the last day. I flung the Rs 2000 in 100-rupees notes father had left for me on her face and spat in her eye, for good measure.
‘I never asked you why you entered our house, nor did I ever ask you how much you took. If I have taken Rs 40,000—which I have not—then it is my father’s money I have taken and not yours,’ I told her.
She phoned father and wept.
Your children are cruel to me.
Later she said she found the missing money in the car’s glove compartment.
But her endgame succeeded. The day father returned from America he ordered me out of the house. I took a small bag of clothes, leaving my books and writing behind, and left immediately for Pune to my friends.’
Stepmother had learnt drama from Hindi films, an education for illiterate Indian women. Later, when I visited father’s factory for the Diwali New Year he threw me out. I never stepped into his home again.
III (1989–2009)
After six months of holding on to Sharad and Pune I had to leave for Hyderabad. Makarand Paranjape was intensely jealous of me. Sudhakar Marathe did not want an openly gay instructor in ‘his’ department. Prof. Bh. Krishnamurti, vice chancellor, supported me throughout. Prof. S Viswanathan, then Head, told me not to worry so much about my sexuality.
—There but for the grace of God go I! he said. (A Victorian solecism I did not understand.) He also warned me of future exploitation.
Meenakshi Mukherjee and her elite feminist friends took umbrage because I did not subscribe to their brand of feminism or ‘activism’. She remained an unrelenting enemy to the end. Even so, out of decency I attended her husband’s funeral though I had not gone to my own father’s.
I became Viswanathan’s friend over poetry and Shaivism. (He cast my horoscope for me.) The painter Laxma Goud and I became friends over art. The ignorant could not understand what both men had in common with me. I still visit Viswanathan regularly in Madras. I still send him Siva poems. Laxma, in his eccentricity, has chosen to listen to his jealous associates and distanced himself from me though he did recently tell his Madras patron, a friend of mine:
‘Hoshang is a great man. Hyderabad is too small to understand him.’
Knives were being sharpened for me and at the opportune moment they struck. A tale carrier found me in a student’s bed at the Men’s Hostel one night. My students occasionally invited me to stay overnight with them in a city wracked by riots or rains. They would vacate their room, go study and sleep in another room; I would leave the door unlocked so that they could access their things and I would sleep naked, as is my habit, in one of the students’ beds.
‘I found Hoshang sleeping naked in Saibaba’s bed at midnight,’ ran the written complaint. It forgot to mention Saibaba was not in the room and I slept alone. Everyone gloated at my imminent dismissal but I was let off with a warning. I had written a four-page ‘confession’ to my kindly boss on confirmation—I had to lie to get appointed—but I had neglected to mention that I would keep off my own students.
‘Go seek friends in another university!’ counselled the kindly boss.
Now everyone’s got what he wanted, including me, and everyone is everyone’s friend.
I still feel that if a gay university-student wishes to sleep with a gay teacher it is no one else’s business. Also, all teachers are open to seduction by seductive students of any age: something the law cannot deal with. Political correctness based on American Puritanism does not apply here. Otherwise, Plato would have been jailed! Teachers are human and vulnerable. Child sexuality is still not understood well enough.
The same Saibaba had a friend whose gay father fellated him. The mother, having read the son’s diary then demanded sex from him too. The boy fled to medical school.
Most students are helpful. Kathy Malone showed her Mother Hoshang (on me) at the MoMA, N.Y.
IV
My dad had to die someday.
All Bombay called sister in America to announce the death but would not phone me in India. Sister called a friend of mine to announce the news to me and he called me.
What are you going to do?
Nothing, I said.
I did not shed a single tear.
I did not have money to fly to the funeral (to be held within seven hours of death, according to Parsi custom). I did not wish to see my Bombay sister who had ordered me out of our house, nor the hordes of stepmother’s beggarly relatives. (It turned out she had fourteen half-brothers and sisters by three fathers, all of whom predeceased the mother.)
My father’s body was picked clean by vultures within minutes. (So was his wealth, five and a half crores of it, by stepmother’s relatives.) Having no rituals to deal with grief I visited the Dalai Lama who blessed me. (At mother’s death I grieved for three years.)
My friend Yunus had a dream of a death within my family. He insisted we visit Bombay. I was reluctant to go to my father and we slept away half the next day in the cheap Parsi hotel at Grant Road, where I am forced to stay when in Bombay.
I dreamed a black stallion ran full tilt at me. I rolled over onto the side of the dirt road to avoid being hit. Instead of hitting me the horsed stopped where I had stood and backtracked.
I knew Dad’s death would leave me unharmed.
After phoning both his office and home to no avail, we decided to return to Hyderabad when I saw my father, blind and limping, running towards his car at Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, before a cop ticketed him. I ran after him and cried: Daddy!
Who are you?
Your child! I said.
Which one? he asked. (My voice resembles sister’s and he was partially blind.) He took me by hand, away from the traffic, to the side of the road and began observing sadly my eyes and my smile, my mother’s!
Cut your hair! You look like Rip Van Winkle.
His last words to me. A week later he died. I had met my father in a city of forty million souls, by accident, a week before his death.
Six months later I visited stepmother. ‘How sweet!’ exclaims the witch in the story. Father had had a heart attack six months earlier. I was not informed. He had called me at office asking me to resign my teaching job. I had refused. His wife gave me my half of the studio photo I had taken with dad at college graduation; dad’s half she kept!
I left wordlessly.
He had earlier come to Hyderabad to bribe me with money (my inheritance). I turned down his offer. He asked to see my lodgings: an attic room newly built, rented at Rs 700 monthly. A mattress on the floor with a handloom bed sheet given by Laxma Goud, a pot of water, a Walkman (bought from my severance pay at Pune), a valise of clothes, my textbooks. He later made much mockery of my poverty. My sister encouraged him in this. (She still repeats the story to me at every American visit of mine.) Actually, he was embittered that his only son could not be bought in a lifetime of buying people.
I
could not weep for six months. I was on sabbatical and dumbly watched the TV all day as a cat does its reflection in a mirror. At a midnight rerun of Raj Kapoor’s Aawara (1953), which for me epitomizes my parents’ ill-fated romance, the dam burst. I wept for a full hour. And then wept no more.
Yunus died two years later, at twenty-seven, under the wheels of a bus. He was inebriated. Our love has been catalogued in my four books of poems for him. His father was emotionally illiterate though his teacher mother was kind to me. He drank all of us out of hearth and home: an uneducated, unprincipled manipulator, a drug addict and a whoremonger. The government hospital eviscerated his body of all internal organs and sent the body home after four days. His mother turned mad at the sight. The body had stitches from belly to throat, a dark bloody bruise on the left side of the head on which he had fallen from his bike. He looked as if he was asleep, I was told. I was in South Africa, returning from a very squally safari on a dark night. ‘Someone will die tonight!’ I had told myself in the skidding tourist taxi. It was Yunus, the love of my life, who was fated to die that day. (Like Siva he could continue the sex act even after being spent. He was everyone’s sex target.) His father drank himself to death four years later.
Siva’s dance of death: He wears skulls and a moon in his hair. He dances at new moon in a graveyard which is the barren and bereft heart of his lovers. With each turning he births night and light, a new aeon.
My sister called me to say she was dying of emphysema. Death’s long list:
Mother
Father
Yunus
My teachers. Virgil Lokke/Mr Bache (my Shakespeare teacher), Anaïs Nin
now, Sister …
Everyone I ever loved, dead. Those who do not love me, thriving! Life’s supreme trick on us.
Sister has been a long time dying, thirteen years on an oxygen machine. Her lungs turned into scar tissue by three tuberculosis attacks: each time one-third of the lung goes. Now her left lung is colonised by an airborne spore. She cannot beat it as she is allergic to penicillin. (Father overmedicated us in childhood). Her first childhood attack was in boarding school, infected by an old woman caretaker. My mother, then pregnant with middle sister, dreamed a child’s coffin was carried by nuns to the Panchgani graveyard. Father refused to bring home our sister. Mother braved a mountain journey by state transport bus and brought her home. The second attack occurred in Chicago, washing shop windows on Michigan Avenue in the snow to get even with father who refused to recognise her first ‘marriage’ (actually a long-lasting live-in relationship) and who cut off funds. To repay a Chicago University scholarship she drove forty miles each way in winter to paraplegics she taught. She was found to be allergic to thirty-six out of a possible forty-two substances! Indiana Steel Mills, Gary, belched smoke into her beautiful lakeside home at four each afternoon. On my visits to her my eyes would smart and we would huddle in her air-conditioned bedroom. My sister had a business renovating ghetto homes she bought cheap, renting them out until the resale price was profitable. Both the men in her life helped her out with manual labour in her business. She herself used to strip paint off old walls, inhaling lethal fumes of industrial-strength paint-strippers. The final attack occurred when her second love left her for a twenty-year-old Chinese student, a sixty-year-old professor. A late romance with a young Mexican gardener also soured. She lay exhausted and bedridden, a millionaire.
As a response to Death, I foreswore everything dear to me:
My books, left at sister’s in America (400 of them) I asked her to donate to the Black Chicago Junior College she taught at.
Likewise, my 400 Western classical records were sold $1 apiece at her garage sales. I foreswore luxuries: no big home, servants, car or expensive holidays.
My books I give away now to people after reading them.
My old clothes I give to indigent boys. My own clothes are gifted to me. I do not shop. Anaïs Nin’s letters to me I gifted to Hyderabad’s American Library.
My letters to sister, preserved by her, I gave away to Michael Feini, an ex-student and my future editor.
I foreswore love. Sex, I still have in plenty. Sex is what makes me feel completely alive.
When stepmother called me I told her:
You are no one to me. Please do not call. Next time, I will insult you. I cannot even spend all I earn. I certainly do not want anything from my father.
And I disconnected the call. She repeated my words before a Judge and, to prejudice him told him, I was gay. The Judge let her keep all the gifts my father gave her but she had to share with us all the property in father’s sole possession at his death.
Sister in Bombay dragged her to court for ten years, and now sister is almost penniless. I had written twenty books in twenty years. I had made pain into poetry. The dream of Dad’s death not harming me came true. I signed over everything to sister in India.
At sixty I wrote the 266-page Forbidden Sex/Text for Routledge, London.
Ardhanareeshwara is nothing but a combination of Shiva and Vishnu. An avatar is an ardhanareeshwara. I am both male and female. The combination of Shiva and Vishnu together is the Dakshinamurthy roopam (form).
The avatar lies in the middle because He or She must know you both from the outside (mind) and the inside (body). I am feminine inside and masculine outside. I can understand and communicate with the male and female only when I am distanced from both and beyond both.
After forty years of writing I was invited to read at Bombay’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (run on the lines of the one in New York). Bombay’s poets, some of them closet gays, did not show up. But my high school English teacher, old, blind, toothless and widowed showed up to dub me ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’ as usual. (She changed the last epithet to ‘sensitive’ and took me to the very British Bombay Gymkhana for dinner.) So did my college classmate whom I had not seen for forty years and who introduced me in the absence of anyone else: ‘Even in college Hoshang had a following,’ she said. That was news to me. So did the sister of another classmate who informed me my friend, her sister, had died ten years earlier of cancer, and who asked intelligent questions. So did the critic Homi Bhabha’s mother, who declared herself to be eighty-two and me to be ‘charming’. The sound system was perfect, the intimate room filled to capacity and the help kindly put in half an hour overtime as the reading went beyond its stipulated hour. A student of mine sat beside my teacher: So forty years were nicely spanned in forty minutes. What do they call my poetry? Postcolonial and postmodern. Or, World Poetry or New Age Poetry (a name I like best). I had come home.
Placid came back into my life: on crutches! I wept to see him thus. A life of overindulgence had led to this. He had built the Kalpakam nuclear power plant for India. We had set a Christmas date for our rebonding. I spent the vacation writing my love nostalgia (in Bombay My Bombay!). He was the handsomest man I ever knew. He died at sixty-five of complications from a heart surgery.
The final holocaust: of fame. Posthumous fame has been predicted for me. Yaraana made me a celebrity: reviews, interviews, speaking invitations, book launches, documentary films on me. I went along for a while. Deccan Chronicle made me into a page-3 person. Horrors! I have thrown out my TV, disconnected my phone. I do not own a cell phone. I do not answer the doorbell. Few, who know it, reach me at my email address. I do not care for publicity. I visit sister yearly in America. I love the few friends I have. Erotic love was not in my fate.
When Laura Riding, poet, had uninvited visitors she would yell out of an upstairs window: ‘I am not in.’
Anaïs Nin too does not live here anymore.
Nor does ‘Hoshang Merchant’.
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin…
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinIndia
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinindia
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/PenguinIndia
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.in
PENGUIN BOOKS
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Books India 2011
This Collection Published by 2018
Copyright © Hoshang Merchant 2011
Cover Designer: by Zahedul I. Khan
ISBN 978-0-143-06486-2
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05250-8
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The Man Who Would Be Queen Page 13
