My parents, Savitri and Basant
All the activity at home would help revive my mother’s spirits. My father would be around most of the time. My parents would fight rarely, and sometimes not at all, during those months, and I was spared the anguish of having to take sides against my father. Instead, there was once again a sense of love at home. What we children wished for desperately seemed to come true, however implausible it might have seemed for the rest of the year: our parents loved each other, they loved us, and we loved them and one another.
The company of my brothers made me feel normal once again. We would spill out everywhere together, playing cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers. We dragged our much-loved dogs into our games. Sally, our spotlessly white German shepherd, was particularly stage-worthy, seemingly born for playing the role of our indomitable protector against the threats of this world.
In the living room, our imaginations were set afire by the enormous tiger skins from our father’s hunting expeditions spread across the floor. When we stood astride them or sat on their stuffed heads—stretched in a ferocious permanent snarl, complete with daunting incisors and raspy tongues—we became Mowgli, Tarzan, or the Phantom.
The weekends stretched out blissfully. A yoga teacher would arrive on Sunday mornings to give us boys a long session of convoluted poses, from surya namaskar to kapalbhati and nauli kriya. Few Indians did yoga in that era, but my parents had embraced it after Pratap’s crippling bout of polio, as a means to strengthen his legs.
One of the high points of the holiday weekends was watching my father at his morning prayers, something I studiedly kept away from during the regular months of antagonism. This was a daily ritual but on weekends stretched on for an hour or more. After showering and completing his yoga, he would sit cross-legged—wearing only underwear, bare-chested, somehow exuding cleanliness of every kind—on the carpet in front of the home temple, brimming over with statues of Maa Durga and Maa Kali as well as Shiva, Ganesh, and Hanuman—his favorite goddesses and gods from Hinduism’s infinite pantheon—as well as his worn copies of the Bhagavad Gita and Hanuman Chalisa, several gleaming lingams and yonis carved from black stone and photographs of his deceased father, grandfather, and grand-uncle.
He would smile at us if he saw that any of us was watching him, patting the ground to invite us to join him if we wished. The moment he turned his face toward the temple and closed his eyes, I saw that he had been transported to a place that I didn’t know of, a magical spot somewhere inside himself where he always, almost instantly, found peace. We would be stilled into quiet and immobility by our father’s single-minded concentration.
He would begin to chant, “Om, om, om . . . ,” that sacred, mysterious sound becoming more resonant with each repetition, like a deepening series of bells. I could see how with each repetition he moved even further into a state of peace. I didn’t understand the process that was under way, but I always felt happy for him.
A great joy of a very different kind came in the afternoons, with long swimming sessions at the Calcutta Club. Once in the cool embrace of water, we three consummate swimmers were like a pod of dolphins, flashing past the other kids, confident and joyous, always together.
Driving home as a family from the club, my father—after grueling sets of tennis, followed by drinks—would flirt with my mother. The attraction between them in those moments was evident even to us kids. He made mischievous sexual allusions while my mother pretended to be shocked. My parents’ favorite music played once again at home: Connie Francis, Eartha Kitt, Frankie Lane, and Millie Small, interspersed with Tom Lehrer’s wisecracks and the pathos of Begum Akhtar’s ghazals. We sprawled out on our parents’ bed with them, vying to rest our heads on our mother’s stomach, wonderfully soft and cool to the touch.
Come bedtime, we would settle heavily into our single beds, with the dogs at someone’s feet or on the floor, the air conditioner humming loudly, and the door to my parents’ bedroom left reassuringly ajar. We would close our eyes and pray silently for a few minutes. Our parents didn’t guide us about what we should pray for or how or why.
My prayers consisted of wishing good things for everyone in our family, including our dogs. For each individual, I had a set of wishes—for Pratap, that his polio-torn legs would be miraculously healed or at least would not handicap him; for my mother, that her choking asthma would be cured and that she and my father would live happily; and so on, an endless detailed list of things that I prayed fervently would come true. I prayed in Hindi—virtually the only time that I reverted to using my family’s original language, replaced in Anglicized Calcutta by English, which for all practical matters was my mother tongue.
After we finished our prayers, Papa would settle down on a low chair to tell us riveting bedtime stories about our zamindar ancestors in the Uttar Pradesh badlands, more than seven hundred miles to the northwest.
In one of them, set in medieval times, a magical giant cobra lifted one of our ancestors onto its hood, thereby preventing our clan from being wiped out in a murderous late-night assault by rival zamindars. In another story, my widowed grandmother and teenaged father, armed with shotguns, rode off on horseback at dawn to a relative’s haveli to wrest back jewelry that the latter had wrongly laid claim to.
A particularly dark story that our father rarely told, but of which we remembered every detail, was about how his own father—newly married and barely into his twenties—had been murdered by cousins trying to usurp his inheritance. Even here, good eventually won—our treacherous relatives had not known that our grandmother was pregnant with our father, her first and only child.
Despite the grim tenor of those stories, I felt safe and secure. Even at that age, I understood that the moral of Papa’s stories, which he wished us to absorb, was that it was our family dharma to endure even the most terrible suffering without complaint or recourse to dishonorable actions. That was the core message of my father’s favorite texts, the Bhagavad Gita and Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” copies of which he kept not only at home but also in his office. However shattering the blows faced in life, we boys—like our grandmother and the best of our ancestors—were to remain superhumanly brave. We were to do good for others without giving any thought to self-interest.
In such moments, my father seemed to embody the goodness his stories spoke of, revealed in the steadiness of his gaze even when his eyes were soft with affection. Despite the palpable awkwardness between us, persisting from the months of strain that had preceded the holidays, I knew for a fact that he loved me, too, and I was safe with him. Even when I faced hardships in school and later in life, the recollection of my father’s absolute protectiveness and of our family history of fortitude gave me the strength to endure them.
Looking back, I realize that neither of my parents ever admonished me for my feminine traits and behaviors. There were no rebukes, no hostility. As an adult, when comparing my childhood experiences with others who had also had gender-atypical traits as children, I realized how lucky I was. The majority of the people I spoke to, in India and elsewhere, told me that their parents had persecuted and shamed them. A friend in Delhi told me he had been beaten mercilessly, abusively called a hijra—the common term for India’s traditional “third gender”—and locked up in isolation for hours by his parents, all because he insisted on shaving his legs and wearing dresses at home.
It made me think about why my parents handled that matter more kindly than did others from their era. I know that my mother had always half wished that I were a girl so that I could remain at home with her and be the loving confidante she desperately sought. That longing may have contributed to her setting aside any discomfort she felt about my behavior. In my father’s case, despite his being a manly man in the colonial mode, it’s likely that not having a father himself led him to follow his natural instincts as a parent rather than being hamstrung by tradition.
And though they looked like quintessential products of their class, my parents were more
unconventional than many of their friends. They broke social rules, big and small. In an age of arranged marriages, theirs had been a love marriage. My mother spurned jewelry and makeup and was drawn to yoga rather than to parties. They also had a naturalness about both sexual matters and nudity—my father routinely wandered around the house in a jockstrap or briefs, and my mother in just a thin petticoat, bare-breasted—that I later realized was unheard-of in families like ours. They thought nothing of taking us children to striptease performances, flirting with each other in our presence, letting us read adult novels, or, in my father’s case, teaching us raunchy British songs such as “Roll Me Over in the Clover.” Perhaps that freethinking streak made them more capable of withstanding the fears that other parents felt about their children’s gender-atypical behavior.
Their response was close to the best that could be expected, given the times. Even if they had been actively supportive and had sought to give positive direction to me as a gender-atypical child, child psychology services barely existed in India in that era—and very few parents of their generation anywhere in the world would have had better alternatives. Gender-atypical children were viewed by most psychological and medical professionals as deviant or sick individuals who would grow up to be homosexual. Given the oppressive stigma attached to homosexuality and the laws criminalizing it, their approach was to “cure” children through “aversion therapies,” including electric shock treatment to the genitals or other areas while the child looked at images of the “wrong” gender. The idea was that such images would become frightening rather than arousing. Those so-called treatments were not only ineffective but left children at high risk of depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behaviors.
However, while my brothers and I remained very close, they, too, began to see me as a girly-boy, like the students at my school. One day, when some of my parents’ friends were visiting, Bharat—to whom I was particularly attached, as we were just fourteen months apart in age—blurted out, “Siddharth reads Barbara Cartland and Mills and Boon! And he plucks his eyebrows. Look at them!”
Everyone turned to look at me. I sat there in shock and then said in a trembling voice, “I don’t.” (I was referring to plucking my eyebrows; they are naturally arched and tidy by some twist of androgyny.)
“Yes, he does!” insisted Bharat in his most convincing voice. I was close to tears. Forever after, throughout my childhood and teen years, Bharat would repeat those announcements to adult audiences at unexpected moments. I would sit speechless, at best mumbling in protest. Though I knew that it was just Bharat’s bull-in-a-china-shop way momentarily getting the better of him, my sense of shame was so intense that I could never speak about it to him. I thought bringing it up would only confirm that I really was a girly-boy.
By the age of nine or ten, I began to be attracted to boys and men. The first object of my attraction was one of our drivers. It was a vague kind of desire, not the headlong sexual pull that I began to experience a few years later. I’m not even sure why I found him attractive. He wasn’t handsome, and his skin exuded the rancid odor of cheap alcohol. My desire had something to do with his dissolute style as well as a somewhat transparent, creamish nylon shirt that he often wore that displayed his smooth, hairless flesh.
I’m not sure what I felt first, romantic desire or sexual desire. I know I first experienced romantic desire through the pulp novels I was reading. I longed for the heroes to love me obsessively, to sweep me away—preferably on a magnificent Arab stallion—to the land of happily-ever-after. It was an inexplicable yearning, a strange ache that made me feel as if I had been separated from an unknown someone for whom I continually pined.
Even though the books depicted romance only between men and women, I didn’t really wonder if that implied that I would have to transform myself into a woman. I only concluded that I would have to be alluringly feminine, because it was feminine charm that drew the heroes to the heroines instead of the other women.
I first felt sexual desire through the Barbara Cartland and Jacqueline Susann books, but it was only in the Harold Robbins books that I found regular snatches of explicit sex. I fixated on the description of the men’s bodies, their cocks, what they did, the pleasure they felt. I came across a thrilling section in The Pirate, several paragraphs long, where a gigolo about to have sex with a wealthy woman instead remembered the headlong pleasure he had recently experienced while being fucked by a handsome black man. That elevated my excitement to a degree that I had not known before, with those passages remaining forever alive in my mind.
Sexual desire became another yearning within me, and this one was a force located in my groin—single-minded, insistent, and attention-seeking. It led me to discover the joys of masturbation, an inexhaustible source of pleasure. And though I was furtive about the practice, locking myself up in my bathroom, the fact that my parents treated sexual matters openly and casually spared me the common trauma of thinking that the act itself was sinful or deviant.
At that early point, and for many years later, I did not wonder whether other boys—my brothers, for instance—fantasized about men or women or whether the nature of my newfound desires had any link to my feminine behavior. Such was the blissful ignorance of childhood, not knowing that my desires, like my femininity, made me disgracefully different from most other boys.
TWO
A BOY’S WORLD
My first great experiences of desire and romance occurred, ironically, in an atmosphere marked by brutal physical and sexual abuse. I left home at the age of eleven, in 1973, to go to the Doon School, India’s Eton and Andover, a famed bastion of boys-only education where all the men in my family had gone since its founding in the last decades of the British Raj. I left behind a world in which I was despised for my femininity only to enter one where it made me an object of both desire and condemnation.
I had joined Doon desperately hoping that I could start over again as a regular boy in this new setting. From my very first day, I boasted, shoved, and strutted, mimicking the tough boys who had dominated La Martinière.
My aggressive behavior made an immediate impression, though not the kind I had been aiming for. Within the very first days, I ended up in fistfights with classmates as well as school seniors. Bharat, then in his middle years at Doon, sought me out to warn me that several boys—including his peers—had complained to him that I was insufferably aggressive. I must behave better, he said, clearly wondering why his gentle brother had suddenly turned rogue. I usually heeded Bharat’s advice, but because there was no other way to hide the fact that I was a girly-boy, I decided to persist.
As it happened, my disguise didn’t take long to fall apart. It was too alien to me to be kept up for long. More to the point, I was quite simply not the strongest among my peers. A month into my stay at Doon, I was defeated in a fistfight. I still remember its course as if it had ended just minutes ago.
It was with a boy of my age, but taller and better built. We fought in our changing room, a small chamber adjacent to the bedroom that we shared with three other newbies. Every inch of wall space had uniforms and pajamas hanging from wall hooks, rows of shoes were lined up below, and a long towel rack occupied the window area. There was just enough space left for two brawling boys of our size. We boxed each other on the face and stomach. We tore at each other’s hair. He knocked me to the ground. We wrestled. I fought as hard as I could—because I had everything to lose.
But I was outclassed. The fight ended with all my strength exhausted and him sitting astride me, scornfully saying that I wasn’t half as tough as I acted. I didn’t cry but, lying on the floor there, I felt the sinking dread from La Martinière coming over me again. Now that I had lost a fight, they were going to figure out that I was “girly” and despise me.
Doon displaced home. For the next seven years, I spent nine months of every year at its secluded campus in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Home became a painful ache in my heart—a faraway pla
ce from which letters arrived. Almost all were from my mother, the envelopes bearing her fluid, elegant handwriting. Her letters were long and often were written not on letter paper but on the backs of Polaroid “instant” photographs that she had taken of our dogs, the potted plants, and the half-dozen pigeons that she had allowed to roost in the veranda. Despite her resolutely cheerful tone, the pain of her loneliness bled through. It mirrored mine; I ached at every letter, treasuring them, reading them over and over again in quiet moments, holding back tears.
My father wrote every second week jointly to Bharat and me. His letters were brief, two or three short paragraphs, impeccably typed out by his secretary on his company letterhead. At the very end, he added a personal line or two by hand. When Bharat passed on our father’s letters to me, I’d just glance through the letter or say I wasn’t interested in reading it, to underscore that I faithfully sided with our mother over our father in their battle. That small act kept alive my enmity toward my father despite the distance of a thousand miles.
Doon was a place out of time, a place out of place. An elite British school had been transposed to India to groom us, sons of privilege, into “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” as Macaulay had so precisely described the goal of his imperial education policy, launched in 1830s British India. As the vanguard of “Macaulay’s Children,” we were expected to dutifully fulfill our roles as the rulers of modern India, like the countless politicians, administrators, generals, judges, and tycoons who had been schooled there over the decades.
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