It was then that I resolved to study my orientation as objectively as possible; this attitude helped me immensely in my career as a journalist. Though perfect objectivity is a myth, the effort to be objective is the hallmark of a professional journalist. But it is a quality that made it difficult for a person to operate in a profession swarming with ideological hacks of all kinds, as it was in the mid-eighties.
*
After high school, it was college; from the tight discipline of Bombay Scottish, it was to the scandalous open-mindedness of St. Xavier’s. The first thing one noticed as a child of the Inquisition in Goa was the way we Hindus turned a Nelson’s eye to blatantly bigoted minorities. The college, known for its alleged liberal education, was a clever Venus’s fly-trap where ‘modernization’ was a synonym for Westernization.
Two incidents made me grow up very fast. V was a stunning woman of mixed parentage doing an arts course while I was in the science stream. It was V who took me under her wing and I learnt what it was to be a ‘man’. Football and hockey took up most of my evenings while gossiping with V and M took up the recess time. Both women gave me the run-down on ‘men’ and I learnt to be the subversive in the male fraternity.
V is now a top banking official and is known for her savvy and ruthless ways with men. And yet, the woman has never hurt anybody intentionally. ‘You’ll reap what you sow,’ she used to repeat ad nauseam. Both girls were beautiful, buxom battleaxes whom men lusted after with frantic feverishness. All three of us would go to the Metro cinema nearby, bunking classes to catch the matinee shows at eleven in the morning.
V and M discovered new ways to hassle men—like throwing empty popcorn bags filled with pee on the front rows and then pretending to be the paragons of virtue. They taught me how to lie with a straight face and face bullies head on.
A frightening incident took place on our visit to Elephanta. It taught me that men could always be cowed down by strong women. Our infamous trio (V, M and I) were taking a Sunday outing on the island of Elephanta in the Bombay harbour when I discovered that I was supposedly very privileged to have two girls with me. A bunch of boys started hassling us on our climb to the caves. It started with the line: ‘Ai, battery. Do ladkion sey kya karte ho?’ (Hey spectac-wearing guy. What are you doing with two women?) Before it could get out of hand, V had gone up to the leader, caught him by the collar and given him a backhand whack. Meanwhile, M started a torrent of Punjabi abuse saying uncomplimentary things about their mothers. The boys took to their heels. That’s when I learnt that men are essentially bullies and never stand up except in groups.
*
This would help me later on in the faction fighting in the gay community. The leanings of the ‘society queens’ in Bombay were mostly towards ‘cadillac communism’, as I cryptically called it. Tackling them was half the fun.
It started as the usual party gup-shup at K’s place. The protagonist was a high-flying Oxbridge executive typical of the ruling political class: Mr A was an admirer of a proto-Pakistani columnist masquerading as a secularist, who was, in turn, a camp-follower of Ms Rana Kabbani, a Syrian feminist who appeared homophobic in her writings.
Ms Kabbani lashed out at the adventurer-Orientalists, like Sir Richard Burton and Lawrence of Arabia, for being ‘deviants’, read ‘homosexuals’. Ms Kabbani’s grouse was that these ‘deviants’ had been rather callous about the alleged ‘unbridled sexuality’ of the Orient; it reflected their own sexual orientation. Mr A accepted this vapid anti-Occidentalism and homophobia. But A did not challenge the fact that both pederasty and paedophilia were inherent to Arab cultures.
In fact, Kabbani herself in her ‘research’ refuses to even acknowledge the high-tension male-male sexuality present in Arab/Muslim cultures.
It was K, the host, who tried to bring all the factions together whereas the cadillac-communist brigade never let that hinder their tirade against Bombay Dost.* This conversation should suffice.
Ashok: We need a lesbian and gay newsletter now.
Cadillac-communist (CC): But why? There are more urgent priorities. Like the poor in India; eliminating poverty is the first priority. We homos are doing quite well, thank you.
Ashok: Sure, you’re doing well in your Gymkhana where you suck off the chokra-boys and pay them off. But what about the guys out there who need support networks?
CC: Who needs those vernacular creeps? They are just good for bad fucks!
Ashok: Oh really . . . That is terrific commitment towards democracy and equality.
CC: Look, if I want to show solidarity, I do it at the India Day Parade in New York. I was there in my sari-drag last year. Here, it’s different.
Ashok: Why?
CC: Gay Lib is no priority here. Remember that dialogue from Chakra where the hero says: Pehle pet ka sawal aur phir pet ke nichey ka sawal (First consider the matters concerning your stomach and then think about what is below your stomach: meaning sexuality).
Ashok: And who is to determine this priority?
CC: The party leadership, of course. You will have to be educated for this, you know.
Ashok: So the party [in this case the Communist Party (Marxist)] will tell us how large a slice of cake we can have of freedom? But they say it is a bourgeoise decadence. So . . .
CC: The party will decide someday that it is not.
Ashok: What do we do in the meantime, arsehole? Vegetate and grow our cherries back, you prick!
CC: Oh dear, don’t start your abuses.
That was the beginning of a long and bitter war within the gay community which I won hands down. And it was thanks to V and her ways that I had learnt to tackle this sinecure class.
The argument in K’s house was interesting in the sense that it exposed the arrogance of India’s ruling class. It was K, a systems manager in one of the world’s largest multinationals, who created space for Bombay Dost in his company house.
*
Coming out to V and M was an uneasy experience though it taught me that if people really loved you, they wouldn’t care about your sexuality. When V decided to explore what sexual possibilities existed between us, it was a disaster. She dismissed the whole episode with the line: ‘Ashok, I always knew it but that’s what makes you what you are: a gentle, understanding guy!’ It was the most touching thing V had done for a long time. After that, we grew closer than ever before.
It was around that time that Khushwant Singh took over the Illustrated Weekly of India, then India’s premier periodical. I was barely eighteen but the subject kept cropping up in my mind. How was it possible to reach out to a scattered, invisible community? I thought it was best to write about the history of homosexuality in Europe and then connect it up with the scene in India.
Surprisingly, Khushwant published the article. I received over 350 letters and that got me entry into an incredible gay circuit. B was a top advertising executive who ran an ‘illegal’ gay bar in his digs on Marine Drive. B would start slapping on make-up at four in the afternoon. He would then traipse over to Chowpatty to pick up a malishwala (masseur). B had one kink—his dressing-table had a small collection of injection vials filled with yellow-coloured liquid. B’s kink was collecting the pee of all his ‘tricks’ (the men he slept with). It was weird to see those vials resting cheek by jowl with Elizabeth Arden and Christian Dior. But a big battle was on the cards.
The usual procedure at B’s bar was to get your own bottle and keep it in the cabinet. The servant measured out the drinks and marked the level with a wax pencil. Soon, Tony (my boss) and I discovered that we never felt even a bit high despite three stiff pegs. Guess what? B used to drain our bottles and pour in doctored gin. Tony was so furious that he threw the pee-collection on to the roof of Talk-of-the-Town, the restaurant directly below the apartment. We have called the place ‘Pee-of-the-Town’ since then. As for B, he sat down in front of his opulent dressing-table with tears streaming down his face, making deep furrows in the Max Factor. ‘Oh dear, dear me, I’ll have to collect their
pee all over again,’ he screeched in a high soprano.
That was the next lesson: never be taken for granted in the gay world or they’ll take advantage of you. B was such a selfish bitch that when he got into trouble, all his friends deserted him and he died on the pavement outside Stev George Hospital in downtown Bombay.
*
Tony started Debonair as a lark. The owner, Susheel Somani, was one of those rich industrialists who liked what is called ‘social-gup-shup’ (society gossip), and Tony was very good at it. He taught me how male models needed to have kerchieves wrapped round their penises to make their crotches look gargantuan, most of them being rather small in that department. We used to leave the selection of the woman for the centrespread to Moinuddin, our technical director, while we concentrated on the main readership of Debonair—MEN.
Tony taught me how shallow sophistication was. He pulled off some pretty silly capers in a south Bombay bar which used to be a great cruising place in those days when pink gins were just five chips. But he also taught me something else; you never get men through perseverance. Manipulation and constantly shifting grounds were the war zones of the sexual battles between men and men. It was amazing how petty and puerile men could be. In many cases, I discovered that men could be more bitchy and gossipy than women. In most cases, gays always had the upper hand. It was precisely for that reason that heterosexual men feared homos. Insecure women, not very confident of their sexuality, were the other enemies of gay men. But that was again brought home to me in an incident at work.
Ms A was a top-heavy woman reporter transferred from the Delhi office to the Indian Express in Bombay. She was an instant hit with my seniors—R and his coterie. Soon, she was playing one person off against another with transparent sexuality. One day, she tried the ‘let-my-palloo-fall-so-you-can-see-my-cleavage’ with me and it failed. When she heard about my being gay, she lost her shirt. We were enemies from that instant and I saw the ancient evil one in her eye; the curse of a woman rejected! There is nothing more contemptible and homophobic than a woman who uses her sexuality to advance her cause. And homosexuals through history have known exactly such women and used them to advantage. The way Alexander used his Persian queen and his mother to conquer the world is a reminder of gay men’s understanding of insecure women.
*
However, it was discovering India’s homosexual heritage that made the most sense to me. By now, it was obvious that formal education was not worth the paper the degrees were printed on. India’s educational infrastructure was built by Macaulay to stuff a shelf full of books and overload a child’s neurons. A general deterioration was so obvious in the intellectual discussions one went to that it was undignified to argue with some of the leftist hacks. The general tendency was to defend the minorities regardless of what they did. For example, the defence of the government’s reservation policy was too foolish for words. Just because a certain class or caste made up twenty per cent of the populace, it was promised twenty per cent of the jobs. This Mandalization of Indian society was an extraordinary divisive method taking the reservation policy to ridiculous lengths. But that was exactly the intention of this ruling class.
I argued otherwise. If gays were ten per cent of the economically active population, did that mean that we deserved only ten per cent of the jobs in the IAS? That was ridiculous because we might have ninety per cent of the creative jobs in advertising, for example, or we might have all the jobs in the starry film world and on the stage. The world’s homosexual minority had learnt through the ages not to be marginalized. Gays everywhere had a lesson to teach other minorities on how not to be disempowered. Studying religion helped. It came with a bang one day even as my second love affair was coming to a stormy end. My ‘mother-in-law’, a Muslim, did everything but burn me for dowry, as I sarcastically recall now on hindsight. But the worst complaint she had had was that I had turned her sonny boy’s bedroom into a ‘butkhana’ (den of idols). However much I endeavoured to satisfy her, the religious question always came foremost. Finally, the relationship floundered on the reef of religion and broke up. I never looked back. I was grateful for the memories and decided that there was no room for bitterness. M, from a feudal Muslim family, still regrets it and thinks it would have worked if his mother hadn’t interfered, something impossible to achieve in India.
*
My knowledge of Islam would come in handy when I faced TV cameras on Channel Four in England. The chief mullah of a London mosque pitched Leviticus at us (‘thou shall not sleep with a man as thou sleeps with a woman’) and the gay group had its snappy answer ready. ‘We don’t sleep with men as we sleep with women. We sleep with men as we should sleep with men.’ That stumped the mullah.
When I insisted that the Prophet was a benevolent and broad-minded soul, the mullah brought out a book which he waved about. ‘This book names a hundred diseases which homosexuals carry. They are disease carriers,’ he ranted. I quickly brought out my Filofax and waved it. ‘I’ve got a book which shows that heterosexuals carry five hundred diseases,’ I retorted. That left him foaming at the mouth. The trick with religious bigots is to fight them on their own territory.
If Islam in India curbed the open sexuality of feminine eroticism—notice the disfigured Hindu temple sculptures—male homosexuality was brought out of the closet almost immediately by the Mughal emperor Babar, who built the great gardens at Agra for the Afghani man he loved. This great love affair was commented on wryly by his daughter, Gulbadan, in her autobiography spanning the lives of four Mughal emperors.
*
I had managed to rediscover much of my Hindu heritage with a stint at the Ramakrishna Mission where Swami Ganeshananda and Swami Harshananda, two extraordinary monks, managed to bestow on me the strict regimen of a monastic asceticism. Even amidst plenty, I never again felt the urge to join the rat race for the dazzling consumer materialism that epitomizes the middle class in India. It also gave me great strength during my poverty-stricken days when I was trying to put Bombay Dost on its feet and money was difficult to come by.
It was one of these two monks who first ‘unveiled’ my homosexuality through scribblings in a notebook in which scriptural questions were to be answered. I was called immediately into his study. The counselling session went like this:
Swamiji: Ashok, this is a very interesting side of your personality. Are you here to study about the spirit or are you running away from some torment of your flesh? [I just loved that line.]
Ashok: Swamiji, I really don’t know. But I must tell you that I have some very puzzling dreams . . .
Swamiji: Puzzling dreams? What does that mean?
Ashok: Confusing in the sense that I dream of men instead of women. I feel that is wrong . . . don’t you think so?
Swamiji: No, I don’t think that is wrong at all. Why do you feel so bad about it? Do you feel it is wrong?
Ashok: No, I don’t feel it is wrong but I’ve been made to think so.
Swamiji: By whom? Why?
Ashok: By society; people around me. Because what I want to do is considered wrong.
Swamiji: Look, what is wrong is relative. I don’t think many rules made by man would be liked by God. They were written by men for men. Just as an example: it is considered good manners among Eskimos to offer their wives to strangers as a gesture of goodwill but it is wrong in most other cultures. Now, can we call the Eskimos uncivilized because of that? Don’t get taken in by what others say is right or wrong. Drag everything deep into your heart, study it with discrimination and then ask the question—am I hurting any soul through my action? Can the pain be avoided and if so for what goal? Is the goal worth achieving? When you get sound answers for those questions, then go ahead and do it, boldly and brazenly. Be like Swamiji [Vivekananda] and stop not till the goal is reached.
Ashok: But what about people? They can be very cruel . . .
Swamiji: But the world has always been a cruel place, Ashok. Whatever makes you think that a python eats its prey with
love or compassion? In more ways than one, even Thakur [Shri Ramakrishna] said that ‘a cobra worships you with his venom because it is the only precious thing he has’. [This was when one disciple told Shri Ramakrishna that another disciple used to go to Calcutta and spread nasty stories about him.] So don’t worry about the world. Try to make a reasonable life for yourself by not hurting anybody as far as possible. When you go out and find somebody purposely and wilfully obstructing you or hurting you, then cut him down dead. Don’t pussyfoot with him. Better a clean kill than a half-dead snake who might bite you when you are unaware.
Ashok: But I think I am a homosexual . . .
Swamiji: Look, you might be one. Even if you are, so what? Men have loved each other since the beginning of mankind. You are not someone with horns. Try and sort that out using those three questions I told you to answer. If the answers satisfy you, then go ahead and make a life for yourself and fight for what you think is right. But remember then, what is good for you should be good for all who think like you. It cannot be only right for you, and your right to happiness must mean the least unhappiness for others around you. Finally, when you have lived out your life according to those beliefs, there is a place to rest. That is what this ashram is about. It is not a place to run away to. Not a place to discover God by running away from life. Life is like the coconut tree which slowly sheds its leaves and then bears fruit when it grows tall and looks from high above upon the earth below . . .
Ashok: Swamiji, if only things were as easy as you make them sound . . .
Swamiji: Life is very easy if you have your priorities right. Go out there and act. Action makes the man. Don’t be like other Hindus. We fools never ‘act’. We pass the buck, we preach and pontificate about our great philosophy, the most elevating on earth . . . Because Hindus never ‘act’, that is one quality Vivekananda lauded in the Western civilization. Through ‘action’ comes creation. Vishnu conquers infinite Time, ‘Kala’ [the great hooded cobra on which he is shown sitting], but only when he summons Brahma [the creator] does the Universe and mankind come into being. Otherwise, who would have been there to admire Him? So just go out there and start doing things. And do them to the best of your capability.
Yaraana Page 3
