As at La Martinière, the animosity against my femininity seemed to surface only when several boys were together, as if ignited by some kind of atavistic pack mentality.
One of my indelible memories of Doon is of an afternoon when I was fifteen or so. I’m in the changing room attached to our dorm with a group of my classmates. They are coaching me on how to be a man.
“Come on, Dube, you can walk without swaying your hips!” says one of my classmates.
“Try it like this . . . ,” says another. “Keep your spine stiff. And move your arms like this . . .”
I walk the length of the changing room again. All eyes are on me. It’s still girlish, they tell me. I try it again. And again. And again.
I still fall short of the masculine ideal, they tell me. Each has advice on how I can correct the way I walk, talk, sit, stand, behave. Nonetheless, they are all amiable. We have become friends of sorts and I’m a willing participant, even though I’m aware of the undercurrent of scorn in their tones. Over the years of being ostracized, I have lost some portion of my will to fight back. I now envy their camaraderie and long to share in it, even though it seems composed only of inane or weird things, including endless arguments over sporting competitions and a painful game called thols that has them bashing each other in the testicles.
“Dube, you should learn about Test cricket scores,” one of them says. “Then we’ll have something to talk about.”
I agree.
We go off for afternoon tea. For once, to my elation, I’m included in their gang.
Ironically, it was at Doon that I first experienced intense, wondrous romances. They were the high point of my years there, hinting that the environment could have been a natural paradise for me if it had somehow been shorn of the abuse and violence.
My first romance began when I was twelve—ironically, in the same year as my sexual harassment by Nutty. I did not associate one with the other. While one was my first experience of mutual romantic love, the other was about violence—even hatred. Though both were driven by desire, they had nothing else in common.
That first love was a jock in my class, with sinewy muscles, a wide grin, and a thatch of silky hair. His relentless joking around and playing to the gallery hid an enormously affectionate nature. We’d sit next to each other in class so that we could secretly keep our legs pressed against each other’s. During movie nights, in the dark of the crowded auditorium, our embrace was so tight—our legs entwined, his lips pressed to my neck, his arm encircling me—that we were almost sitting one on the other. We disguised our erotic intentions by pretending to tickle each other under our shirts. Eventually, the tickling would give way to lingering caresses on the chest, nipples, stomach, and back, expanses of my body that suddenly came alive with an almost unbearable sensitivity. In the Rose Bowl, a sprawling outdoor auditorium that allowed for great privacy during evening performances, we’d take turns resting our head on each other’s lap. When I did so, I could feel the burning heat of his large penis through the flimsy fabric of his cotton kurta-pajama.
Every day, I could smell him on myself long after we parted at dinner, forced to return to our separate residential houses. He smelled clean, of Liril soap and sometimes of Old Spice cologne. I’d inhale his smell deeply and unfailingly feel comforted.
Though we were mad about each other for two years, we didn’t go beyond kissing and caressing each other. He often tried to. I knew that he had had sex with other boys—he had the skillful assurance of the experienced in the way he kissed, caressed my buttocks, or tried to undo my pajamas. But at the brink, I always pulled myself back from acting on my desire. That, quite obviously, exasperated him.
After that first relationship faded out, I had several strong mutual attractions, all of them long-lasting and emotionally rich, too. They were with pleasant, good-hearted boys of my age or at most one grade senior or junior to me.
However, it was in my last years at school that the great romance of my youth finally happened. It was of such all-consuming intensity that I was to remember it all through my life.
That boy was idolized as much for his sportsmanship as his movie-star looks and physique. Though we had known each other for years, our mutual attraction sparked one summer evening. It was half an hour before dinner, when the sky was still bright. He walked over to where I was chatting with a friend at the corner of the main playing field, looking at me so intently—as if he had just recognized something about me—that my sentence trailed off.
Within a few days, our attraction turned into lovesick obsession. He meandered slowly past my classroom several times a day just to catch a glimpse of me, his eyes intently locking on mine. I began to spend too much time with my eyes on the corridor, waiting for him to appear. My studies suffered.
The morning assembly gave us precious time to be together. He would stand behind me in the choir section, our bodies pressed so tightly against each other’s that we could hear the other’s heart hammering.
After sports hours, I’d sit in his private study with him, listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on his cassette player. We’d just stare at each other full of desire, rooted to our chairs and unable to make a move. In its entire span of two years, our relationship remained essentially a wordless one, everything expressed through looks and secret touch.
Inevitably, many of his classmates knew about our romance. To tease us, they’d call me across to his table in the dining hall. “Dube, are you his? Do you love each other? Why don’t you love me instead? Come on, aren’t I handsomer? Okay, now sit on his lap. Listen to me, do it!”
He never responded to their banter, but through it he’d smile at me in a steady, protective way that affirmed our feelings for each other. So, far from being an embarrassment, those episodes left me elated.
With the great love of mine, if he had pushed me even a little bit more, I would have had sex with him. We came close to it on several occasions. But my most cherished memory of that boy’s character was the fact that he held back out of some kind of loving concern for me.
One night, to my surprise, he called me out of my study and began to pace awkwardly up and down the length of the adjacent playing field. I walked by his side, filled with foreboding at his silence, fearing that he wanted to break up our relationship. Then, abruptly, he said, “I don’t want to spoil anything about you.”
I was flooded with relief. I knew he was referring to my being a virgin. Despite being vilified as a “lender,” everyone close to me knew that I’d not had sex with anyone in all those years, and the label had been attached to me by frustrated seniors bent on coercing me into sex.
But I ached so much to make love to him that I embarrassed myself by blurting out with transparent eagerness, “What if I want to be spoiled? What if I don’t care?”
He stopped and turned to look directly at me. I was elated by the emotions I could see on his face—no different from what I felt for him, the overpowering, almost painful mix of physical desire and appreciation for the qualities we saw in each other. But even though I had given him the go-ahead and the perpetual awkwardness between us diminished greatly, we never had sex.
There was nothing singular about my romances. In a boarding school with five hundred boys speeding through adolescence into manhood, they were inevitable, and very little effort, if any, was made to hide them from others.
In our common rooms, boys would pair off romantically to the Eagles’ “One of These Nights” or Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” holding each other around the waist or shoulders in transparent attraction. We routinely teased one another about the objects of our desire. No one insisted that he wasn’t attracted to some boy or another.
How could we not desire one another? We were in the throes of becoming full-fledged sexual beings. Our physiological sexual pressures were so intense that even masturbating several times a day provided us only momentary relief. Not only was it a world without girls, but virtually every one of us was attractive—our
bodies lean from exercise and good food, shorts scrunched around strong thighs, bulging crotches and muscular buttocks. How could the campus not course with desire?
And because many of us had never stopped aching for affection to fill the void of being away from our parents and home, our desire was often combined with emotional need, making those our first earth-shattering experiences of romantic love.
As in my case, the romances didn’t always, or even usually, lead to sex. Doon’s notoriety as a hothouse of homosexual love was exaggerated. (When AIDS hit India in the late 1980s, nearly a decade after I had graduated from Doon, a popular joke had it that the acronym stood for “Acquired In Doon School.”)
Beyond the minor perils of jealousy, unrequited desire, and even battered hearts, these romances could do us good. Those experiences of eros were probably the only aspect of Doon that advanced our capacity for love and tenderness.
Despite Doon’s homosocial environment, the school’s ethos was rigidly heterosexual. There was no hint of homosexual desire in the novels and poems assigned to us in literature classes—everything was about women and men, whether as star-crossed lovers or as married couples. There was not even any mention in our biology textbooks about homosexual behavior among animals.
Given this institutionalized stress on heterosexuality, it was no surprise that our schoolboy views on same-sex desire were rife with contradiction. Thus, despite the ubiquity of romance and sex between us boys, the unspoken construct that governed our thinking was that once we left Doon we’d be attracted to women, marry, and then send our sons back to our alma mater.
Our views were also shot through with homophobia and misogyny, both stemming from the notion that anything feminine was inferior, even contemptible. There was the despised slur of “lender” for boys who gave blow jobs or were fucked, condemning them for playing the “passive” role that a woman was assumed to take in sexual intercourse. In contrast, no shame was attached to being the penetrative partner, or the “taker,” seen as a masculine boy simply satisfying his sexual needs through a quasi-heterosexual act of penetration.
Strikingly, the harshly homophobic views were largely voiced by the abusers who forced themselves on other boys instead of having consensual relationships. In contrast, the students who didn’t hide their romantic feelings for other boys rarely voiced homophobia or did so in only a halfhearted way, as if to keep up appearances. Nonetheless, the upshot was that homophobia dominated our views about homosexuality, even for many of us who had strong romantic feelings for other boys.
The homophobia solidified as we graduated from school. The prejudice that same-sex desire was disgraceful had been so deeply internalized by everyone that, with rare exceptions, there was now a blanket denial of the attraction and feelings they had previously held for their classmates. The denial was so extreme that graduates from Doon—or similar boys-only schools—rarely behaved any better or more understandingly toward gay men and lesbians later in life. It was as if we had collectively vowed to keep our past strictly secret, an unmentionable, collective folly of boyhood.
About a year into my first romance, at age thirteen and in seventh class, I wrote a short story for our weekly English essay assignment about two boys falling in love with each other. The setting was not a boarding school but a neighborhood more European than Indian, with the boys living next to each other in row houses. One was handsome, the other more femininely beautiful. Both were loving and decent. The two characters also remained staunchly virginal despite their desire for each other.
Sadly, a few years into the boys’ deepening love for each other, one set of parents decided to move away, turning an uncomprehending ear to the boys’ protests that they could not bear to be separated. The boys were heartbroken.
I remember I left the future of their relationship unstated, giving no hint whether the boys met or renewed their relationship later in life. The story had no Barbara Cartland–style happily-ever-after finale. I may have somehow concluded, despite my inexperience of life, that same-sex love was a doomed venture, certain to end in tragedy, or perhaps my belief in happy endings had cracked from being too close a witness to the dissolving of my parents’ marriage.
While I was writing the story, my words flowed out effortlessly onto the ruled pages of the essay book. But upon completing it, I told myself that I should tear it up, feeling that I was crossing a forbidden line. By writing it, I was breaking with all that I had imbibed—from books, lyrics, movies, everything and everyone—that love was always between men and women, between boys and girls. Yet, in the impulsiveness of my youth, I handed in the essay to Krishna Kumar, a young teacher who was idolized in the few years he taught at Doon.
A few days later, I was gripped afresh with trepidation as Kumar began returning our essays to us, calling out the grades we had scored and, in his characteristically acerbic manner, adding a comment or two of stinging criticism or (far more rarely) faint praise. Though I was sitting in the front row of the class, my turn never seemed to come. I took that as proof that I had erred badly in submitting the essay. I burned with apprehension at the prospect of Kumar mocking me in front of all my classmates over that freakish story.
Kumar had just two or three essay books left when he turned to hand me my book, announcing “Seven on ten! That’s the highest I’ve ever given anyone. Well done!”
Weak with relief, I barely registered my classmates calling out “Wow! Well done, Dube!”
I spent that class in a haze of delight. As I was leaving class, Kumar called me back to say that he wanted to publish my story in the Doon School Weekly, a campus paper largely featuring works by students. I was overjoyed. It would be my first article in the Weekly, an honor at that young age.
A few days later, Kumar asked me to stay after class and, looking distinctly awkward for once, told me that the teachers overseeing the Weekly had decided against running the essay. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t have the gumption to ask why or even express my disappointment, though my dejection was no doubt evident.
In my remaining years at school, I went on to have several articles published in the Weekly. Even so, I never quite forgot that rejected short story of gay love. I felt it surpassed all my published articles in authenticity of personal feeling. It was only later in life that I realized what the story actually was: the first public statement of my orientation, despite its fictional form.
Two decades after I graduated from Doon, Krishna Kumar and I became close friends in New York City. When I asked him about the essay and why the Weekly had turned it down, I was surprised that he remembered it readily. Kumar told me that he had been impressed with how it handled a difficult matter and even more by my courage in submitting it. He had shared it with the teachers on the Weekly’s editorial staff, and he had no doubt that although it had opened their eyes, they had probably justified their decision to not publish it on the grounds that it would hurt the sensibilities of parents as well as the younger children. And so I came to learn that I had been a young schoolboy when I first suffered censorship for daring to mention homosexual love.
Nowhere in the India of this time, either in my years at Doon or later, during a year of college at Delhi’s elite St. Stephen’s College, was there anything to help a young man or woman deal with his or her homosexuality. There were no openly gay men or women to validate the way I felt or for me to emulate or turn to for advice and help. Indian newspapers and magazines were silent on the subject of homosexuality, which did not feature even in popular “agony aunt” columns. So were films and television. In that pre-internet age, there was no way for me to learn about the nascent movements for gay rights in the United States and other industrialized countries.
The nullifying silence was punctuated only by incidents that revealed a widespread, intense hatred of homosexuals. When out with my parents, whether in Calcutta or Delhi, I found that the conversation often turned to prominent men who were rumored to be homosexual: the unmarried editor of a Calcutta newspaper,
an unmarried business magnate who reputedly had a young male lover on his staff, and a former nawab in Delhi who was married and had children. I don’t recall a single mention of women rumored to be lesbian; the conversations were all about men. Those men were spoken about in disparaging, hate-filled tones that I never heard in any other context, even when talking about the most vile politician or corporate swindler. Inevitably, someone would call them pansies, the insult triggering unpleasant memories of being taunted at Doon. Someone would pronounce that they should be sent off to England or Pakistan, as homosexuality was a vice peculiar to English and Muslim men.
Far from contesting those comments, everyone seemed to be wholeheartedly amused. I shrank at seeing that my father was often an active participant in those discussions, adding prejudiced comments about the men, even though he knew several of them well. I was too unsure of myself then to dwell on the peculiarity that the class of Indians who were most sexually liberated—what with the striptease shows, affairs, and divorces—reviled just one kind of sexuality so intensely, and that, too, a sexuality that was invisible in that era, in which there was not even a single avowed homosexual in the country. Those repeated displays of homophobia convinced me that I would never get succor from anyone, not even my parents, if they discovered I was homosexual. So I kept my dark secret to myself, a subterranean source of anguish.
My despair might eventually have mounted into some kind of breakdown, but I was spared that predicament because of my father’s loving attentiveness.
He and I had become steadily closer since my penultimate year at Doon. I never forgot the exact moment that the toxic hatred I harbored toward him as a soldier for my mother’s side of their marital battle dissolved. Sick with hepatitis A from a schoolwide epidemic, I had been transferred from the school infirmary to my parents’ Delhi home and woke at a predawn hour to find my father seated beside my bed in the darkness, caressing my head, in the exact spot where he had been when I had fallen asleep hours earlier. He had spent the entire night watching over me. I remember that my first feeling was not joy but shame and embarrassment at being the object of such love. In that moment of self-awareness, my hatred fell away forever.
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