India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  THE PARTY

  The description of America’s first public swingers’ club—Plato’s in New York, which opened in 1977—by Jon Hart, who interviewed owner and promoter Larry Levenson, gives us an idea of what the first Western swingers’ clubs looked like:

  At Plato’s, clothing was strictly optional, Levenson told me that first day in the cab. There was a buffet, a game room, a dance floor, an enormous Jacuzzi, and a mammoth swimming pool. In the back, there were private rooms for intimate acts. And right off the dance floor, sectioned off with plants, was Plato’s piece de resistance: the mat room, where exhibitionistic couples engaged in group activity... Once inside, couples participated in an unspoken tango. “If you wanted to make it with somebody, you reached over and caressed their leg. If your hand was not removed and the leg did not move away, you knew you were in… Once you take your clothes off, everyone’s the same. Nudity is the great equalizer,” said Levenson. “Bus drivers were partying with doctors and Wall Street people. No one cared about materialistic things or how much money you made. It was all about having a good time and making each other feel good.” 257

  Though I didn’t expect anything as outrageous as this description, I wondered how India’s swingers’ clubs would compare.

  Seated on a lick chair, poor Isha is terrified as her husband clumsily tries to undo her sari. She stands in just her petticoat and blouse, her arms clutched over her chest. Vishal is the perfect picture of authority, dressed smartly in a white kurta pajama. There is a visible confidence in his demeanour, a new swagger in his step. He walks over to the couple and says something to Dilip, who is practically jumping with nervous energy. With some hesitation, Isha sits down and slowly lifts her petticoat. Vishal then instructs Dilip to slide underneath the chair, but Isha continues to look highly uncomfortable.

  There are three other couples in the small living room—Couple Number 1 from the coffee shop; Couple Number 2—a young, trendy couple in their early twenties whom I haven’t met before, and Couple Number 3—the older couple from the interview whom Vishal had decided to include after all. Couple Number 2 is hanging around in the ‘play area’ sipping on Bacardi Breezers waiting for Vishal to set up a porn film on the laptop.

  Couple Number 3 stands in the corner staring intently at the other couples in the room. I am technically Vishal’s partner for the night, since his wife does not participate in these activities, though according to our terms and conditions, I would not actually take part, but just hang around. I busy myself serving drinks and the snacks I had brought.

  Vishal is demonstrating the grope wall to Isha and Dilip. He encourages Dilip to take off his pants and stand behind the wall, while Isha closes her eyes and reaches out through the holes to touch Dilip. Vishal is urging the older couple to join Isha and Dilip, but they just look on with disdain. Suddenly, I notice them looking in my direction. At one point ‘Tom’, as the man introduced himself, unfurls a glowing smile at me, inviting me to join him at the lick chair. I quickly excuse myself and go into the kitchen. The older couple have two beers each and then leave the party prematurely.

  The rest of the evening goes off rather uneventfully. Both young couples snuggle with their partners in the play area watching porn. Isha and Dilip are like capering young children in a toyshop, and they are back at the lick chair, Isha much happier now with her canary-yellow sari abandoned on the dusty, stained, tiled floors.

  Vishal ends the party abruptly at 10 p.m. He turns on the lights leaving poor Isha cowering in the corner behind her husband, suddenly shy. He aggressively asks for donations, the young couples hand out a few hundred rupees, Isha and Dilip, a hundred. The dour older couple have left 500.

  The party has been somewhat anti-climactic for me. I had expected prodigious amounts of booze, posturing, flirtation and maybe even sex. Although Vishal’s club is a far cry from Plato’s, he is not disheartened and explains to me that it is a step-by-step process. First couples experiment with each other, only when they are comfortable doing so in a public setting can they experiment with other couples. People are shy, and a bit wary, and he has to make them comfortable.

  ‘This is India, after all. It isn’t Texas, no matter how hard I try. These guys will get to the Texan standard, but at the moment they have absolutely no idea about anything. They don’t know anything about sex, they have never seen a sex toy or quality porn,’ says Vishal with authority.

  On my way home, I give Isha and Dilip a lift. They are thrilled by their experience, shocked that they have landed upon something so genuine. They wax eloquent about ‘Vishal Guru’. They hope they are invited next time, and before getting out of the car, Isha in her untidily draped sari and freshly applied plum-red lipstick, asks me, joining her hands in obeisance, if I could put in a word with Vishal to make sure they are called back.

  Though the Delhi version of ‘The Swing’ was less brazen than the Texan version, it seemed to be at some level successful. Vishal’s efforts at mimicry had given way to something organic and self-indulgent, an American concept but uniquely Indian in its execution. At some level, the couples were being educated about sexual experimentation. It would be a while before they got to the level of Plato’s, but Vishal’s club revealed that people across the board—students, and middle-aged couples alike were open to experimentation.

  A week after the swingers’ party, I visit Vishal. He suggests that we go out for coffee. Over all the days that I have been visiting, he has not suggested this, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to me, but I agree. In the small coffee joint named Blah Blah, a dim aqueous light fills the room. The air is hot and wheels of smoke whirl around the room. The crowd is young—high school and college students. Vishal and I are definitely out of place—the portly, balding Vishal more so than I. Vishal leads me upstairs to what he says is the ‘private area’, which is basically little bamboo huts, where young couples snuggle, most of them staring into laptops and expertly sucking at hookahs. I glimpse on all the screens the ubiquitous blue and white colours of Facebook. It is a muggy day, and I am breaking into a sweat. Vishal is sweating profusely, and he takes out a small towel from his pocket to rub his face dry. I suggest we move to the downstairs area, but a waiter brings a small, noisy cooler blasting out welcome spurts of cool air. Vishal is not his normal, self-assured, loquacious self. He seems shifty and nervous, shaking his legs, and cracking his fingers.

  We sit down and Vishal edges closer to me. I begin to back off when Vishal squeaks, ‘Please don’t move away.’ I get a whiff of something and I realize that Vishal is drunk. I chastise myself for not noticing the smell earlier on the motorbike, but that said, I had been wearing a gigantic, suffocating helmet.

  I quickly scoot away.

  ‘I love you,’ says Vishal in a small voice. He adds. ‘I think you love me too.’

  ‘Um, no, Vishal, I don’t love you,’ I say.

  He looks crestfallen. ‘Then why are you spending so much time with me?’

  ‘I told you, Vishal. I’m a writer, I write books. I’m writing a book on all of the stuff that you are doing with your club,’ I say sternly.

  ‘I guess,’ he mutters softly.

  He edges closer, till I feel his leg brushing against mine. I quickly move away.

  ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I don’t like my wife much. She troubles me a lot. She is complaining about my club business. I thought maybe you and I…because you understand me.’

  I am shocked that Vishal has misunderstood my friendliness for romance. I figured that, of all people, Vishal, with his swingers’ club, would be open-minded, especially since I had made my intentions so clear. Then again, I suppose poor Vishal is a confused man living in a perplexing, changing society. Though Vishal wants to re-enact his brief stint in Texas here in India, and hankers to live with the same openness, that seems impossible for the moment. Indian society is changing, but there is some way to go before people can do as they please, and until then there will be a whole lot of turbulence with people like Vishal b
earing the brunt of it.

  Vishal stands up, wavering unsteadily. I tell him that maybe he should sit down.

  My first instinct is to be scared, but then, I’m not sure what I should be scared of—this strange, funny man, half a foot shorter than me, who I am sure if push came to shove, I could take down? I decide that I should be calm and understanding. I couldn’t hit Vishal. No, I simply couldn’t do anything to poor Vishal, except feel sorry for him.

  ‘Vishal,’ I say as firmly as I can. ‘I think you have the wrong impression. Maybe we shouldn’t be meeting anymore.’

  Vishal blanches and looks as if he is about to be sick, or worse, start to cry. Before anything disastrous happens, I quickly thank him for all his help, and rush out of the coffee shop. Before I go I turn around to take a look at Vishal, just to make sure he hasn’t fallen. He is sitting calmly, staring with a particular curiosity at the young couple in the booth next door.

  TANGO

  Tonight’s gig is at Tango, Shillong’s most popular pub, located in the basement of a derelict building in Police Bazaar, the commercial centre of Shillong. In this small, curious pop-up nightclub in the distant northeastern town of Shillong, the crowd is more cosmopolitan than at any of the parties that I have been to in Delhi or Mumbai. At this moment I could be in an underground New York City nightclub. Boys kiss girls, girls kiss boys, people sing and jive, moving their bodies with abandon. Everywhere there are couples—on the sofa, in the dark shadowy corners, and no one seems to heed them. In a top Delhi nightclub, where the cover charge is 5,000 per person, I have never seen, nor can I imagine this kind of pumping energy, this flagrant openness. I listen to the unfamiliar music, watching Tips perform her best on home turf, the audience cheering her on, singing and dancing, sassy, confident, and full of new hope. I haven’t listened to much Blues, and in the beginning, the music is jarring to my ears, the beat unfamiliar, the cadence unnatural. Besides, the acoustics of this club are not particularly good. For one, the shape of this decrepit, musty room is strange: I count seven or maybe eight corners. Second, we are underground, in a sort of basement, and the ceiling is low. Third, there isn’t much space. The small room is crammed with two bars and crowds of sofas and chairs. There isn’t even a stage, and the lead singers of the band, Tips and Rudy, are performing in one corner.

  I don’t usually attend concerts and do not understand the draw of live music. I grew up in the age of DJs—invisible forces, unknown faces hidden in corners of nightclubs, whose only identity is the music they blare out. Then, suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, I begin to understand the music. The change is unexpected. I start enjoying the regularity of the drums, the sound of Rudy’s guitar, and most of all, Tips’s crooning, which had previously given me a headache. I begin to understand the power of performance. Holding a red guitar, singing into a microphone decorated with butterflies, and wearing a slinky red dress with her hair pulled back tight, Tips is simply ravishing.

  Tips’s complete unconcern about elegance or show only underlines the impact of her extraordinary face, of her whole persona. Before she begins to sing, she seems to withdraw for an instant, half closing her brown eyes, turning her head away from the microphone as if she were saying a prayer. Right after a peppy track, Tips breaks into a Khasi folk song—the Peace Prayer—and suddenly the room becomes quiet, people stop dancing and stand still, their heads bowed down, the way one does during the national anthem. A lot of people here can relate to this folk song, which was an anthem during the decades of insurgency in the Northeast. And then just as suddenly, the drums break out and they start jamming, this time a Buddy Guy cover, and the room is once again alive.

  SHILLONG

  Shillong is the capital of Meghalaya, a small hill state in the northeastern part of India. During colonial times, it became the cultural capital of the Northeast after the British established it as the capital of Greater Assam in 1864, which gave birth to a bustling town. In recent times, it has made a name for itself as the rock capital of India because of the number of local music bands here.

  Shillong is the abode of three matrilineal tribes: the Khasis, Jaintias and Garos, of which the majority are Khasis. There is no written history of the tribes and much of it is still oral (the Khasi language had no script till the Christian Missionaries introduced it) so there is still some confusion about antecedents, dates and origins. It is thought that the original Khasis migrated to present-day India from Cambodia. Since Khasi men were primarily hunters with a high rate of mortality, a matrilineal system was adopted. Within the Khasi matrilineal system the khadduh or the youngest daughter is the custodian of the family wealth, rites and religion. The youngest daughter plays the role of the eldest son in patriarchal communities.

  Shillong was a Khasi hamlet before the British came and paved the way for missionaries, the first of whom, the Welsh Calvinist Methodists, set up their missions in the hills in 1841. About 70 per cent of Khasis today have converted to Christianity.258 With the spread of Christianity, the khadduh no longer plays a religious role but continues to inherit the family wealth. The children born to Khasi parents take the last name of the mother, though the father is allowed to retain his own last name. Today most Khasis, even those who practice Christianity, follow Khasi Customary Laws, which are practiced though Siems—village headmen—and District Courts.

  As I explore Khasi culture some more, I realize that the ‘modern love’ erupting in pockets across the country is not just a Western construct. The truth is that India too offered these experiences when our society was a more open, creative, accepting one. A few of these traditions remain today. The Khasis are not the only matrilineal tribe in the country, there are a number of other tribes—the Todas of Tamil Nadu, Nairs of Kerala and Bunts of Karnataka—who showcase the diversity of relationship paradigms that India once offered, but which have slowly deteriorated over time.

  Even today some adivasis, or tribal communities, encourage some liberal practices. Several adivasi communities have communal dormitories to encourage healthy adolescent sexual liaisons. One of the most well organized forms of communal dormitories is among the Murias of Bastar in Chhattisgarh.

  In his book The Muria and Their Ghotul Verrier Elwin describes the typical ‘ghotul’ or dormitory: ‘The typical ghotul will stand in the middle of the village inside a spacious compound surrounded by wooden stakes. There will be a large central house with a deep verandah, perhaps more than one open hut, and a number of small ones. There may be a wooden vagina carved on the central pillar of the house, or a drawing of a boy with an enormous penis and a girl in his arms.’259

  For the child, the ghotul as described by Elwin is ‘a school of sexual manners, a society of his own and in time an introduction to fulfilment of sexual life. In other words, it fills what is a remarkable gap in Western society—a community of adolescents and near-adolescents who are free to behave as they wish, enjoy sexual freedom without a sense of guilt and who invent their own disciplines’.260

  The average ghotul has twenty members, everyone abides by the strict rules and has equal sexual privileges. No boy or girl is allowed to sleep with the same partner for more than three days. If they do, they are punished and banned from the ghotul. When a girl is married she can never come back, though there may be a final ceremony during which she massages every boy for the last time. A boy continues coming to the ghotul for three to four months after his marriage, after which he throws a feast for everyone to mark the end of his ghotul days.261

  Quite remarkably, pregnancy is an infrequent problem in the ghotul. It was calculated that in 220 ghotuls there was only a low 4 per cent chance of pregnancy.262 In the Muria tribe, men and women are not segregated, there is no discrimination on the basis of gender, and there is almost no sexual harassment or violence. The Murias show us that ancient practices are stunningly modern and are finding a place for themselves in modern times.

  KONG PAT

  My first meeting in Shillong is with Patricia Mukhim, or Kong Pat as s
he is known in these parts. She is the editor-in-chief of Shillong’s largest English daily—The Shillong Times—and one of the most highly respected and well-known women of Shillong. Apart from being an award-winning journalist (she has won the Padma Shri), Kong Pat is an activist working on a variety of local issues, including marriage laws. She is also the khadduh, or youngest daughter, and has inherited the house that we sit in today.

  Kong (or ‘aunt’, a term of respect) Pat is immaculately dressed in a Jainsem, the traditional Khasi dress, and sports a stylish haircut. We sit in her office, a small, low-roofed room filled with books. I squeeze myself on to a tiny wooden chair, and feel like a burly, dishevelled giant in front of this tiny, elegant woman. I begin my conversation with Kong Pat by asking her about marriage in the Khasi culture. ‘It’s simple. We fall in love, and we start living together, this is our Khasi culture,’ says Kong Pat proudly. She continues, ‘We are a sexual and sensual people and till the Christians came we didn’t think formal marriage was so important. If people cohabit, they are considered man and wife. Many still live together without being married.’

  The traditional Khasi attitude towards marriage is a liberal one, showcasing an open mindset where live-in relationships are widely accepted, and a formal marriage doesn’t prove anything. Young people choose their own spouses, and then simply move in together if they want to declare their relationship to the world. In most cases, the man moves into the woman’s home with her family.

  Kong Pat tells me that her nuptial life has followed a typical Khasi trajectory. She has had four children from three different men. Her first marriage (in the Khasi sense, because they weren’t formally married) was at the age of sixteen, the second at twenty, and the third at twenty-eight. She has had children with all of them, though she only formally married her last partner, a Tamil pilot in the air force. She tells me that they divorced because they were culturally too far apart. She is now single and enjoys it.