The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  ‘Many religious men are, by their nature, hypocrites. Marriage pressures are so strong in India that if you don’t want to marry, the only way out is to renounce the world. So, many gay men become religious ascetics to conceal their sexual preferences … And this is not just in India. I know this because many religious men have made a pass at me: Western Catholic priests and archbishops I have met and won’t name.

  ‘So the bigger problem, as I see it, comes from the pressure in India to marry: 85 per cent of MSMs [men who have sex with men] will be married.’

  Dimple interjects, ‘That’s not just in rural India either, you know. I have a good girlfriend who had an arranged marriage to a gay man when she was aged 20. She’s 32 now and her life is in pieces. Her husband rapes her from his hatred: for himself and his situation.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Singh Gohil, ‘it ruined my wife’s life too, which I deeply regret. I married at 26, to a girl from a good family in Madhya Pradesh. I thought after marriage that I would be all right because I never knew – and nobody told me – that I was gay, and [that] this was OK. So the marriage never got consummated, and I quickly realised I had done something very wrong. We divorced when I confided to my wife that I was gay. But it was only when I was hospitalised aged 37 with a nervous breakdown that my family found out.

  ‘Yet I was lucky, in a way,’ he continues. ‘The real tragedies can come when a man marries and continues to have MSM sex, discreetly. If he manages to have sex with his wife too, she will never imagine he’s gay, so it’s the perfect alibi. The problem, of course, comes when he infects his wife with HIV; this is not uncommon. Maybe he knows he’s infected, but why would she want to use a condom? She also has her pressure from society, to bear a child.’

  It’s some of the men who are among the 15 per cent who didn’t succumb to societal pressure to marry, or, like Singh Gohil, escaped unhappy marriages, that we’re off to meet now.

  In 2011, Singh Gohil inaugurated his latest project under the auspices of the Lakshya Trust: a retirement home for gay men and third genders that he’s named, somewhat awkwardly, Janet, after the late American donor who made the project possible.

  Cutting through a green counterpane of farmed fields, we arrive in Hanmenteshwar village, a sleepy commune on the banks of the Narmada river a couple of hours out of Rajpipla. It is here that Janet can accommodate 50 retired gay men and hijras.

  We walk through the door into a whitewashed space with a river view, where a handful of men sit around, some talking, some staring at the river with rheumy eyes, some sipping tea. Heads crane inquisitively as our group walks in.

  ‘Old-age care in India is centred round the traditional family,’ explains Singh Gohil as we take a seat next to one man, who’s dressed neatly in white pyjamas. ‘There’s little state retirement support in our country, so children are an Indians’ insurance against old age. But gays and third genders are often ostracised by their families, like this man next to us. He has had no family for over 40 years. So where is his safety net? Where does he go when he’s old and weak? The guranas have been broken. I saw a desperate need for something like this.’

  Deepak asks the man to recount his story. He’s perhaps in his late 70s, his cropped and hennaed haircut giving him more than a passing resemblance to a young Audrey Hepburn.

  Deepak translates. ‘His name is Rahul. He was the son, he says, of a rich Bengali family. But he doesn’t talk to anyone in his family. He hasn’t for 40 years.’

  ‘Because they discovered he was gay?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ says Deepak. ‘It was found that he had slept with a servant boy, so he was shunned. He joined the army for a while, moving from city to city; he was always running, he says. Now he is old and tired. He says he has no energy to run.’

  How many men does Singh Gohil expect to take up residence at Janet? As a conservative and undeveloped state, Gujarat is an interesting choice for such a project.

  ‘At the moment we have as many Western men showing interest, which surprises me,’ he says. ‘We have two men coming to join us from France soon. I don’t think the location is a problem, if we are a family.’

  Singh Gohil lets the word ‘family’ play across his lips. He smiles.

  ‘Yes, I’ve created my own gay and third-sex family. This gay family keeps me alive because of the amount of love I’ve received. They’ve always supported me during my bad times, through emotional turmoil, and through happy times. This motivates me to work more for the community and welfare of our people. I have no family now. We – the hijras, homosexuals, whatever we are – are my family now.’

  8 | PA’S SIX-PACK, Amritsar

  Indian police are being paid to grow moustaches because bosses believe it makes them command more respect. Ten policemen in the northern state are already receiving 30 rupees every month for their efforts. The district police told BBC News: ‘Moustaches are improving the personalities of our constables. They are acquiring an aura of their own. They are creating a positive impression on the local people and getting a lot of respect. It takes time to keep a proper moustache. A good one has to take a turn near the angle of the upper lip,’ he added. Men in rural India have traditionally sported impressive moustaches to assert their masculinity.

  —BBC News

  It’s 5 o’clock in the morning, as I bundle aboard an Express train headed north, packed with well-to-do Sikhs en route to the Sikh religion’s holiest religious site, the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

  My journey to this Punjabi city that’s an hour across the border from the Pakistani second city of Lahore (and thus secondarily famous for the bloodiest events of Indian Partition) apparently coincides with a festival relating to Guru Nanak, the founder member of Sikhism, that youngest of the subcontinent’s major religions. This, I realise, accounts for the obscene crush of bodies in every train carriage. Yet festival crowds are a common encounter in this nation of daily festivals and – unfazed – I’d settled into a pleasant six-hour elbow-to-elbow journey beside a family of Sikhs on weekend pilgrimage.

  The family, three teenagers and their middle-aged parents, were in the company of their nephew, a software engineer based in San Francisco. Plump and wired into pocketsful of techie gadgets, he had picked up the American affectation of hygiene obsession during his years on the West Coast and, as a wallah handed around thermoses of coffee and biscuits in envelopes embossed with an Indian rail logo, had muttered loudly about ‘improved sanitary requirements’.

  I’d decided to add Amritsar to my itinerary as I’d heard so much about its men. Having touched on the world of the gay man and the hijra, I wanted to investigate the supposed apogee of Indian manhood, the Punjabi male. My Delhi friend Akshaya hadn’t been the first to lionise the majesties of this creature: I knew that the Victorian British felt an affinity with the Sikh and Muslim ‘warrior races’, focusing their distaste on the ‘mild’ Hindu and ‘effeminate and degenerate’ Bengali. A photographer acquaintance honed the focus. ‘It’s not all Punjabi men. It’s Punjabi Sikhs,’ he’d said, plying me with brandies and Marlboro Lights, and making no secret of the fact he was exploring his own Punjabi Sikh potency by staring at my legs.

  ‘It’s our broad chests and warrior bloodline. It’s our swords and turbans too. I know for a fact that Scandinavian women find Sikh turbans erotic. Most white women do. Look at Punjab, that strapping Sikh Sardar who saves Annie in Annie: fantasy man!’ he added.

  The Punjab’s rich soils supply the subcontinent’s tallest soldiers, its toughest Kabaddi wrestlers and its long-distance truckers, who famously ply the old Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar to Delhi in painted trucks bearing the legend ‘Jat on Prowl’ (thanks to such stunts the Jats are often, perhaps unfairly, blamed by Delhiites for backward male attitudes impinging on that city from the rural north).

  Punjab is also the cradle of Indian bodybuilding, one of the most visible expressions of Punjabi machismo. Everywhere in Amritsar posters of rippling bodybuilders vie with those of movie stars, advertising t
he highest number of gyms per capita in India, with names such as Big Guns!, Wow! and King’s.

  I’m without Dimple and have enlisted Gobind as my guide. Five years ago, he was a young bodybuilder hotly tipped for fame, but he was forced to stop working out after an episode of ‘roid rage’, the nickname for the bouts of outof-the-blue aggression that are the side effect of hormone doping. Still, 28-year-old Gobind remains well connected in the bodybuilding world, and we now find ourselves heading off in a black-and-yellow cab to an appointment at an under-the-counter supplements and steroids store belonging to one of his contacts.

  Rajesh, the proprietor of Pumped, is running me through his daily diet. ‘Glutamine, five grams in water at 7 a.m.; whey supplement at eight; three slices of brown bread; one black coffee with no sugar; then protein powder in milk. At 11 a.m. I get my breakfast: three boiled potatoes and a little bit of paneer. Then at 12 o’clock a scoop and a half of protein shake; two o’clock five eggs, plus five brown bread and two bananas. Then, before I work out, two energiser powders dissolved in water, then, after workout, five sweet potatoes, and 1 kg of boiled chicken…’

  I look around his small store. It’s stacked with row upon row of imported supplement powders in black 10 kg packs, like a film noir Manhattan skyline, though the supporting cast is more Miami Beach: four strapping men in muscle vests and micro T-shirts, ranged around the small floor space like abandoned inflatables at high tide. I wonder what the room’s aroma will be like later on, in the full-wattage heat of mid-afternoon; it’s noon and already pungent.

  ‘Is all of this expensive?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, lakhs of rupees in a year to do it right,’ says Rajesh. ‘And the government gives no financial support. In the UK and US they give money to bodybuilders. And the injections are expensive: 80 to 90 thousand rupees for two mil that you need two times a week.’

  As in most countries, steroid use is banned in India. Still, the hormones integral to the bodybuilding habit are readily had, albeit as inflated in price as their users’ pecs. After a sidelong glance out the window, Rajesh produces a box of vials the size of a carry-on suitcase.

  Gobind talks me through them. There are esters of testosterone with various uses: for bulking cycles, or for cutting cycles, the latter when you’re preparing for competition and want to keep muscle mass while shedding fat. There’s Winistrol, the king of steroids that promises muscle mass, stamina and ‘great pumps’, but also leads to acne and stiff joints; and Dianabol, a perennial favourite on the US scene that boosts users’ weight-lifting prowess, but also leads to body bloating. Then the most notorious of all anabolics, Deca Durabolin, an injectable steroid first popularised in the 1970s. It’s the bulker par excellence, promoting the ‘Schwarzenegger look’ of 40 lb of muscle gain over a few months, but also the unwelcome side effect of ‘Deca Dick’.

  ‘Basically, you get a limpy,’ says Gobind. ‘That’s why you have to balance it with the testosterone.’

  Rajesh is beginning to look woebegone, so I ask him and his neighbour Vish, a bulked-out 5 ft 4 in with a cuboid look, who first inspired them to take to the weights.

  ‘Salman Khan,’ they growl in unison.

  Khan is Hindi cinema’s self-appointed ‘bad boy’. The veteran of 80 Bollywood movies, he first ripped his shirt off in 1989’s smash Maine Pyar Kiya, or ‘I Fell in Love’, a tale of desire across the class divide in which millionaire’s son Prem (Khan) falls for Suman, the daughter of a poor mechanic. In the signal sequence, a mullet-haired Khan peels off his shirt as Suman simpers at his ankles, exposing an exotic landscape of gleaming muscles above the high waist of snow-washed jeans. Maine Pyar Kiya was a landmark in Bollywood, giving wings to the current weightlifting trend and inspiring a recursive conceit.

  Indeed, shirt loss became such a staple of Khan’s oeuvre that directors were driven to ever-camper plot mechanisms to liberate him from his outer garments. In Wanted (2009) fire burns the offending item to a crisp; in 2010’s Dabaang a rogue gust does the job; whereas in Bodyguard from 2011 a spurt of water renders Khan topless and beaded with droplets.

  In the two decades since the first film’s release many Bollywood actors have followed Khan’s lead, including SRK, who got buff for 2007 smash Om Shanti Om, and a flurry of musclemen who achieved fame purely on the strength of their chiselled assets, such as Prateik Babbar and Guatam Rode. The trend also inspired salivating Bollywood blog ShirtlessBollywoodMen.

  ‘The best one was where Salman’s a rock star and he rips off his shirt on stage when he’s playing guitar,’ muses Rajesh.

  Ten minutes later we’re en route to a gym on the outskirts of town that’s run by one of Rajesh’s friends – Onkar, a local who, like many successful Punjabi businessmen, juggles multiple business ventures, from gyms to hotels and the staging of beauty contests.

  Sitting on the back seat of a cab between two bodybuilders, I suddenly feel like I did when, aged 7, I was trapped in a Spanish elevator with a man grappling a large lilo. I’m relieved when we pull up in a suburb 45 minutes’ drive from downtown Amritsar. Visually, it’s a sleepy city enclave: dogs spreading out on the warm pavement, occasionally batting off a tick; housewives lumbering home under bags of channa flour; groups of young men standing around cleaning their teeth with pocket knives, spitting between their feet, shooting the breeze.

  But aurally, it’s off kilter. The street quakes with the gurgling bass and bravura rantings of gangsta rap. The culprit’s our destination: Onka’s gym, a squat building with full-drop glass windows in which 20 or so male bodies can be seen, curling weights; pressing barbells, their faces red with exertion; admiring themselves in the mirrors that ring the room.

  Standing around the perimeter of this peculiar glass box are a handful of slight teenage males, trying to make themselves invisible in shaded corners, behind masks of acne. I’m the only woman in, or anywhere near, this testosterone-fuelled joint, and I feel self-conscious as Onka takes me on a tour of the sights. I’m glad I’ve worn a modest, mustard-coloured shalwaar kameez for the occasion.

  As we pass the more pumped-up males, Gobind enjoins them to tense their biceps, or instructs me to look at them doing their ‘craps’.

  ‘Craps? Craps? What craps?’ I say, alarmed.

  ‘You know, “craps” … “cur-raaps”.’

  ‘Curl reps?’

  ‘Yessss! Cur-raaaps!’

  We step up to the office to share bananas and sticky protein shakes with the man Gobind addresses as ‘Onks’.

  ‘What do the women think of your look?’ I ask Onka. ‘Do Punjabi women go for it?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Gobind quickly. ‘Punjabi women love men with muscles.’

  In fast Punjabi, huffing with exertion as he speaks as if he’s pressing 40 lb, Onka joins in.

  Gobind translates. ‘He says women like them. Big men make them feel, you know, like women. Punjabi women are real women and they like their Punjabi men to be real men.’

  The protein shakes are drained and everyone’s looking a little embarrassed. Gobind and I are about to leave the men to their craps when I notice something flickering on the wall. It’s the sort of mini-shrine you’d find in an Indian home, with offerings of jasmine flowers, sweets, votive candles and incense sticks arrayed around the crude figure of a black-faced deity.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s Hanuman, the monkey god,’ says Gobind. ‘He’s the deity of all bodybuilders and wrestlers.’

  ‘There’s a god of bodybuilding?’ I wonder.

  ‘Yes. Hanuman is a symbol of strength and energy. He can move mountains, seize the clouds and match Vishnu’s bird, Garuda, in his speed of flight. The Hanuman cult is getting big now because of all the bodybuilders. There’s a festival in Bihar called Hanuman Jayanti, where wrestlers and bodybuilders play games of strength. Rajesh goes this year. They fast all day and wear a tilak of orange sindoora from Hanuman’s body on their forehead, for good luck. Then they balance big rocks on their chest and pull cars –
like, a jeep, say – with their teeth.’

  I can’t help smiling at this image, though nobody else seems to be. I also can’t help wondering why, in a land so long prized for its manly males, so many of them feel the need to big themselves up.

  PART THREE: THE EAST

  9 | MA’S FIVE HUSBANDS, Meghalaya

  A man should treat a woman according to the nature of the region she comes from. The women of central India are mostly noble women with pure habits; they hate kissing, scratching and biting, and so do the women of Bahlika and Avantika, though they are fond of unusual sexual acts. Women from Malava and Abhira like embracing, kissing, scratching, biting and sucking, and although they do not like to be wounded they can be won over by slaps. The women who live in the land watered by the Indus and other five rivers like oral sex. The women of the West and Lata are capable of fierce sexual energy, and they moan softly.

  In the land where women rule, and in Kosala, the women like to be slapped hard and generally use sex tools, for their sexual energy is very rough indeed.

  —Kama Sutra, Book Two, On Sexual Union

  The state of Meghalaya is very different from the India we’ve come from. A pine-wooded outpost bordered by Bangladesh to the south and Bhutan and Myanmar to the north and east, the state owes more to the latter two than to the great teardrop of India to which it is tethered, awkwardly, by a spur of land between Kathmandu and Bangladesh. We’d seen the land unspreading from above, a voluptuous tapestry of green and snow-capped peaks, as we’d flown into the airport.