An Indefinite Sentence

by Siddharth Dube

  I turned my back on celibacy without any regrets. There had been nothing enlightening about it, that destructive struggle against an integral human longing, that twisted obsession with excising a need as natural and essential as breath.

  In the first month or so, Tandavan and I used condoms. But I soon threw caution to the winds and began to have unprotected sex.

  I knew well that I was placing myself at risk. Tandavan had come of age at a point when AIDS was exploding unnoticed in Paris, as in other major Western cities, and the odds were high that he might have contracted HIV. We didn’t know either way, because he had never taken an HIV test. Though there was no place to test for the virus in India back then without the risk of the results being leaked, I could have asked Tandavan to have himself tested on one of his frequent visits to France. But I didn’t. My acceptance of the risks, after years of protecting myself worriedly, was an unspoken affirmation that our lives and futures were bound together forever.

  Over the months, our life settled into a full, happy routine. Tandavan taught dance and art at the nearby Lycée Français on Aurangzeb Road, going off on his bicycle every morning. He then went on to dance practice at his music accompanist’s home. Even after the honeymoon period had long expired, we ached to see each other. I would leave work as early as I could, driving my little Fiat home as fast as possible.

  Delhi was still verdant and orderly, and we lived in its most idyllic part. In the adjacent Lodhi Gardens, there were glorious trees and bird life—frangipani, laburnum, silk-cotton, Indian rosewood, and gulmohar; mynahs, kites, parakeets, owls, hornbills, sunbirds, and even the occasional cormorant. In the evenings, between the India International Centre and the embassies, there was a constant supply of films, dance recitals, and talks.

  At home, Tandavan made inventive fresh salads, casseroles that were a fusion of France and Pondicherry, and bananas flambées. We inevitably had company. Many of my closest friends had moved back to Delhi after university abroad. Tandavan, free-spirited and exotically beautiful, was a magnet. Perhaps too often for my taste, our one-bedroom flat would be bursting at the seams with an assortment of guests—Indian, French, and innumerable other nationalities—for impromptu dinner parties.

  Tandavan and I often went to my brother Pratap’s home, where he and his family treated us warmly. I found even an greater warmth and naturalness at the home of my only other relative in Delhi, my aunt Nandini, the very youngest of my mother’s five siblings and hence of my generation rather than my mother’s. We had been close since our childhood. I had not discussed with her my being gay, so I was surprised and deeply touched to see that from the moment that Tandavan and I started living together she made it a point to specify that he was always invited with me to her in-laws’ home, where she lived in a traditional joint family. From every one of her family, Tandavan and I only felt love and warmth. They may have privately discussed my being gay among them, but not once in their company did I ever feel that my choice of romantic partner was remarkable or made me different.

  I was struck that my other favorite aunt, Usha, who lived in the small town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, also treated my relationship with Tandavan with complete ease, insisting that we visit her often, giving us a bedroom with a double bed, and taking care to give us privacy. I thought of telling her and Nandini categorically about Tandavan and my being a couple, but decided against it on realizing that they were certainly already aware of it yet had not asked for any explanation on my part. All the evidence began to convince me that traditional Indians were immeasurably more accepting of same-sex desire than Anglicized Indians like my father. Siddhartha, with whom I had been debating the matter, insisted that that was true, judging from his personal experience of being raised in a more Indian setting than I, a sprawling extended family that shared a large Calcutta house.

  In contrast, my father—though unfailingly courteous to Tandavan—did not display the same kind of warmth. I didn’t raise the matter with him, as all I wanted him to do was what he was doing already, treating Tandavan politely. But the unfortunate downside was that I stopped joining my parents and brothers on family holidays, to which my brothers’ girlfriends were invited. It created something of a hiatus in my relationship with my father after a decade in which we had drawn closer and closer.

  One outcome of that turning point in my life was that I now longed to taste everything that I had denied myself so far—and so, a few months after we got together, Tandavan and I began having a sexually open relationship.

  It began as thrilling threesomes with some of the attractive young Frenchmen posted in Delhi for their mandatory year of military service. We then branched out on our own. Beyond bouts of acute jealousy—mostly on my part because Tandavan had had experience with navigating the matter in his previous relationship—none of it caused real stress. Our hearts belonged to each other. The casual sex amounted to just extra heapings of sensate pleasures. Those trysts, I was to later realize, also proved to be milestones in my developing a rational, uncomplicated attitude toward sexuality.

  I started off by rediscovering the myriad cruising areas in Delhi that Siddhartha had shown me in my days of abstinence. At the vast Nehru Park, as the sun began to set, the atmosphere would crackle with lust as scores of men would eye one another hotly, strike up flirtations, and then—as darkness fell—disappear into the park’s numerous groves and rock outcrops to have sex. At the busy Dhaula Kuan bus stop, where the nearby expanses of unlit open land and parks provided ample privacy for sex, the numerous cruisers included fit young jawans from the adjacent army base. Even in the congested, brightly lit Connaught Circle in downtown Delhi, I could see dozens of men cruising one another, usually going off to cheap hotels or homes for sex but sometimes furtively enjoying hand jobs or blow jobs in the small neighborhood park.

  Everywhere in India that I traveled as a journalist, I came to find that there was a rip-roaring same-sex life among men. They were desperately seeking one another out for sex in parks, public toilets, railway sidings, any secluded spot. Many would travel for hours to get to those cruising spots. In some of the areas, it often felt like a frenzied sex party, entire crowds of men dissolving into pairs or even small groups. It was thrilling to witness and participate in all of it.

  Even more astonishing than the massive scale of nighttime cruising was finding, once I grew attuned to it, that men were picking other men up almost everywhere and at every hour—during any routine interaction in the day, in shops, while walking down a street, or waiting at the bus stop. The flirtation had its own secret lingo. It worked through gestures and innuendos known only to those already initiated into the sexual network but invisible to all others: a deep stare and an inviting smile, a handshake held for far too long, a hand dropping suggestively to the crotch, or the otherwise inexplicable offer of “Aur kuch sewa kar saktha hoon?” (“Can I serve you in any other way?”).

  Given the lack of privacy in India, those connections usually led to assignations at night. But sometimes the goal was immediate sex, and ardent men would try to beguile me into a quickie in the corner of a shop or a by-lane, which somehow proved to be magically shielded from the pressing crowds in a way that was fully in sight yet invisible for the moment. I was left profoundly impressed with Indian ingenuity when it came to finding places for sex.

  Participating in that sexual network was a vast range of men, almost anyone who mixed in public spaces rather than stayed in the isolation of elite privacy. They ranged from college students to policemen and soldiers to the myriad laborers, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers working in the vast informal sector, besides a smattering of white-collar professionals and a handful of foreigners.

  I soon came to agree with what Siddhartha had long been telling me from his own experiences: virtually every youngish Indian male, barring those with westernized backgrounds like ours, burdened with a Victorian paranoia about homosexuality, was up for having sex with other men. As to whether they were gay or bisexual by orientati
on, or were having sex with men only as a fallback because women would almost never have sex outside of marriage or prostitution, was a conundrum that Siddhartha and I often argued over. The matter was complicated by the fact that though most of the men were married—or would eventually be married, per the social norm—they saw their wives infrequently, often after gaps of many months or even a year or more. The women stayed back in their native villages and towns, while the men moved to cities to find work. Obviously, there was no doubt that all those men were strongly attracted to other men, experiencing sexual pleasure with male partners, after which they continued seeking them out for more. Just what that meant in terms of primary or preferred sexual orientation was less clear.

  Even less clear was the related matter that Siddhartha and I often also argued over—whether traditional Indian men and women were qualitatively more accepting of same-sex desire than those of us who were “Macaulay’s Children.” Siddhartha took the view that traditional Indians were far more accepting of same-sex desire than Anglicized Indians, whether it concerned men or women, saying that it sprang from tolerant religious and cultural traditions as well as from the limitless physical intimacy allowed only between those of the same sex, both as children and as adults.

  I had mixed views on the matter. I saw that my aunts and other less Anglicized relatives had handled the fact that Tandavan and I were in a committed relationship in the most natural, constructive way I could have imagined, drawing him into the family fold with no questions asked. Moreover, from what I saw and experienced firsthand, many nonelite Indian men treated same-sex desire as routine and acceptable to an astonishing degree, qualitatively different from the overt prejudice displayed by Anglicized Indians or the kind of violent homophobia that erupted so regularly in the United States and United Kingdom as to be a defining cultural trait, such as gay bashing or the barbaric schoolyard tradition of “smear the queer.”

  I found that was true in both urban and rural settings. The naturalness with which the men expressed their desire was such that I was often taken aback.

  The handsome man in Bombay with whom I had that unforgettable experience of making love on a staircase landing, just months after my returning to India, had displayed no discomfort at all with our bodies or what we did together. In a village not far from Delhi, where I was reporting an article on agriculture, two young brothers—barely out of their teens, their kurta-pajamas brown with dust from the fields—pleaded with me to spend the night at their family home rather than drive back to Delhi, their voices thick with desire, each gripping one of my hands, ardent coconspirators and bitter rivals at the same time.

  In rural Bihar, where I was volunteering with a grassroots organization, one smitten man would serenade me with amorous Hindi film songs as we bathed at the communal hand pump every evening. That was the zenith of his ceaseless daylong advances. Our coworkers, all male, egged him on as if they were family members trying to facilitate a suitable marriage.

  Outside Benares’s Ramnagar Fort, I was ogled by two handsome young policemen sprawled out on a charpai, their limbs intertwined in a loose embrace. Winking, they patted their bed invitingly and called out to me in Hindi to join them, paying no heed to the crowds of Indian tourists passing by. The head of security at a Madras hotel, a man with a Tarzan-like physique and torn underwear that resembled that hero’s loincloth, spent hours through one night making tender love to me.

  Innumerable incidents such as those left me feeling that same-sex desire was both individually and culturally acceptable among quintessentially Indian Indians, even if it almost unfailingly ignited Victorian antigay bigotry among its Anglicized population. Not just on matters of same-sex desire, but on other counts, too, I was now finding that traditional Indian culture—which I had once shunned as retrograde—often compared favorably to Anglicized India, whose norms seemed to combine the most patriarchal and oppressive aspects of elite British and Indian society.

  Indeed, when we swapped tales of our adventures, Siddhartha and I often hypothesized, in amazement, that average Indian men were actually indiscriminately polysexual—either simply because they were desperate for sexual release and didn’t care who provided it or possibly because they were genuinely attracted to the spectrum of genders. That omnisexuality was vividly evident in cruising areas that were frequented not just by gay men but also by small numbers of hijras and women sex workers. (Hijra is a widely used term for a range of “third gender” traditions found across the Indian subcontinent of men who dress in women’s attire but consider themselves neither strictly male nor female but an advanced amalgam of genders, with no exact match in the Western taxonomy of gender and sexual orientation. Many, though far from all, voluntarily choose ritualized castration.) Many of the men who were cruising would flirt with whichever of the women sex workers, hijras, and men they were attracted to. Their decision about whom they eventually had sex with seemed to be determined by sexual attraction to the individuals available, as well as whether the hijra or woman sex worker was so attractive that it justified paying for sex rather than having it for free with one of the many available men.

  So it was ironic that even many men who routinely came to the cruising areas seeking sex with other men had ambivalent and even homophobic feelings. While having sex, the men would vociferously insist on playing only the penetrating “male” role. They would avoid touching my genitals, sometimes even asking me to hide them from sight. They would reject any intimacy or gentleness such as kissing. They would show no reciprocity in terms of sexual acts. Their aim was literally paani girana—to “drop water,” semen, as speedily as possible.

  Those boorish men displayed all the depressing, warped twists of Indian male sexuality that I was coming to learn about. They were fixated on sex, talking about it incessantly in the most adolescent, prurient way. Yet they were torn by visceral disgust at actually having it, convinced that not only their own but particularly their partner’s genitals were not merely dirty but also “polluting,” in the foundational Hindu metaphysical sense of being one of the endless list of things considered so defiling as to imperil an individual’s purity and caste status. That intense conflict was no doubt the reason why sex with those men was inevitably brutish and short, bereft of the headlong eroticism I had learned from Tandavan.

  I had little patience with those men, even if they were physically attractive, and began to cut off flirtations as soon as I spotted telltale signs. Friends told me that some of the men would even get threatening or violent once they had ejaculated—demanding money, hitting them, or directing other men to their homes for forced sex. I snuffed out any threats with the authoritative, upper-class manner I put on.

  Strikingly, in my experience, a disproportionate number of the homophobic and abusive men were policemen, with a smaller number comprised of swaggering young thugs. (In contrast, men from the army or other armed forces almost never displayed homophobia, just enjoying sex wholeheartedly.) The police made many of the cruising sites dangerously unsafe for the men there, to the point that apprehensiveness was almost as palpable an emotion as lust. Even off duty or out of uniform, they would use police IDs and force to extort sex and money. The hapless victim would beg and plead but eventually give in to their demands, faced with the even more terrifying threat of being hauled off to the police station to face worse torments and the risk of blackmail. Tellingly, the worst violence was directed at the men whom they had seen servicing others, especially if they were at all feminine in appearance.

  I unfailingly intervened if I saw any harassment or abuse taking place, drawing out my government-issued press card and barking at the offenders in my most commanding manner. It invariably had the desired effect. After some grumbling, the policemen would leave, having reached some face-saving compromise for themselves, such as mumbling that I would be held responsible if they misbehaved again.

  In time, after my travels across India, I decided that both macho behavior and the concomitant homophobia were strongest
in the north, getting steadily milder as one headed toward its southern or eastern parts. I was not sure if that had something to do with the greater dominance of elite or land-owning castes in the northern region or the extreme misogyny of these areas, or if there were other factors at play. But there was no doubt of the harsh, poisoned notions of masculinity that northern men—especially those who were from well-off, dominant castes and groups—were raised with.

  And though I eventually began to agree with Siddhartha’s argument that traditional Indian culture was significantly more tolerant of same-sex desire than British or American culture, I also felt that India had been changed too much due to British rule, particularly because of its virulently homophobic laws and policing systems, for that legacy to have a significant impact any longer on the level of lived realities, with the vestiges of the traditional acceptance now outweighed by prejudice and violence. Consequently, I came to feel that despite the widespread homosociability, the limitless opportunities for male-on-male sex, and even the vivid examples of ease with same-sex desire among average Indians, the outcome was, in the balance, not a happy one. It did not make a haven—it provided only a dark space for us criminalized people to hide in, afraid and ashamed, and to have nothing more than furtive, hidden sex.

  Despite the joy that I had found in India with Tandavan, there was no escaping the burdens of secrecy and fear that came with being gay in the India of that era. Once I began to live with him in a rented flat, rather than at my brother’s home, those myriad apprehensions intensified into a constant low-level fear, much like a chronic fever. This was so even though Jor Bagh is one of the few areas of Delhi inhabited by numerous foreigners, where Tandavan and I did not stick out as sorely as we would have elsewhere.