By being together constantly—in our car, on the veranda of our flat, walking and biking together, going shopping—we drew the attention of some of our neighbors as well as of the domestic help and private guards in the area. From their comments and stares, I realized that Tandavan and I were the subject of much discussion, some of it patently suspicious and unfriendly. Tandavan remained relaxed and unguarded, but that was not surprising, as he was—for all intents and purposes—a foreigner to India and oblivious to many of its realities.
My tensions would cross into fear whenever we were being intimate with each other—whether it was kissing, having sex, or just cuddling together. I was aware that we were violating India’s criminal laws, even in the privacy of our flat, and we could be arrested and imprisoned in consequence.
And then, one terrible evening, less than a year after I started living with Tandavan, my worst fears became a reality.
EIGHT
PRISONS
On that dreadful night in the winter of 1988, I had infinite time to castigate myself for my folly in moving back to India, my folly in not heeding my father’s warnings.
Earlier that day, at the Washington Post’s Delhi office, I had received a call from the officer in charge of the Jor Bagh police station, who said that some neighbors had complained about me, although he refused to say what the complaints were. Casually, he suggested I drop by for a talk.
It was about 7:00 p.m. when Tandavan and I entered the police station, an unremarkable single-story building, its yellow paint faded and peeling, located at a quiet crossroads near our home. A few policemen sat in the hallway, desultorily talking to one another. They glanced at us but didn’t stir. Bare bulbs emitted a faint, depressing light. The place felt like one more outpost of India’s apathetic and callous bureaucracy, instead of a station serving one of India’s most elite neighborhoods.
One of the policemen guided us to the officer’s room, and after he had checked with the officer, we were told to enter. I walked through and immediately realized that I had made a terrible mistake going there.
The man sitting behind the desk in the muddy-brown uniform of the Delhi police looked at me with such aggressive loathing that I thought, momentarily, that he had mistaken me for someone else. He was short and powerfully built, with a clipped mustache, possibly a decade older than I. Looking only at me, not at Tandavan, he burst out angrily, almost as if in a rage, “Mr. Dube, I know all about you. I have received enough complaints about you. You are a homo! You have naked men dancing at your house, exposing themselves. Go back to America! If you want to live here, you will live as an Indian, not like an American!”
Breathless with shock, I just stood there.
The officer must have misinterpreted my silence. Or perhaps he lost whatever self-control he possessed. Banging his fist on the table, he shouted, “Watch it, I will come and arrest you! I will arrest you tonight! I will arrest you wherever I like, from the street or even from your house!”
My heart pounded, in a mix of rage and apprehension. I looked at that obnoxious man, who hated me simply because I was gay, and suppressed an urge to punch him really hard. Instead I collected myself and said, steadily but with anger in my voice, “Just try and arrest me, and see what happens.”
All hell broke loose. The officer sprang up from his chair and charged around his desk toward us, his fists clenched as if he meant to hit me. Changing his mind abruptly, he pressed a bell on his desk. “Lock up these gaandus!” he yelled in Hindi—calling us sodomites—at the two policemen who came rushing in. Then he approached me and stood practically nose to nose with me, his face apoplectic. I didn’t budge. From the way he pushed back his shoulders, then locked his hands behind his back, I could see the effort it was taking for him to keep from hitting me.
Tandavan had been shocked and silent through all that. He was clearly finding it difficult to keep up with the Hindi and even with the officer’s heavily accented English. Now he grabbed my arm, no doubt worried that I would hit back if the officer struck me.
The next thing we knew, Tandavan and I were being marched toward the back of the station. I presumed that was where the cells were, but the officer came to the door of his office and yelled that we should be locked up in the constables’ duty room. The sole constable working there was taken aback when his colleagues told him that we were to be locked up here; clearly that was not normal procedure. I felt a slight relief; the officer was obviously restraining himself because he feared that I was well connected.
The policemen left. We heard the door being bolted. Through a large window near the door, I saw that one of the policemen had seated himself on a nearby stool to keep guard.
Tandavan and I sat down on the benches in the corner of the room. We were too shaken to speak. Everything had escalated too fast.
I forced myself to breathe deeply, so that my heartbeat would slow down and I could think more clearly. I put my hand on Tandavan’s and tried to comfort him. Everything would be fine, I said. The officer knew better than to hit or jail us. The guy had held himself back because he realized that he would eventually get into trouble with his superiors for threatening me needlessly.
While I comforted Tandavan, my head swirled with angry recriminations. I had been foolish to listen to the officer on the phone that morning, I thought. I should have realized from his dismissive tone and his refusal to specify what the complaints were about that there was trouble in the offing.
Why had I assumed that being a government-accredited foreign correspondent would give me the leverage to handle anything? Why hadn’t I had the basic common sense to tell Pratap, my brother, before coming here? He knew how to deal with India sensibly.
Or should I have left a note for Siddhartha, who was staying with us that weekend, saying that we had gone to the police station? He would have been able to do something. Why, why, why hadn’t I behaved like a competent adult?
I wondered about the hate-filled threats the officer had spewed at us. How did he know I was a “homo”? Where had he gotten those ideas about naked men dancing in our apartment? Who on earth could have brought the fact that Tandavan and I lived together to his notice?
An hour passed. I knocked on the door, and when the guard opened it, I told him politely that I was entitled to speak to a lawyer and wanted to exercise that right. He said he would ask the officer. He came back to say that the station’s public phone wasn’t working. I told him I’d spotted a policeman chatting on it on our way to the lockup, but he ignored me.
It was now 9:00 p.m. I realized, to my alarm, that it was well past the time for Tandavan to have his evening dose of insulin. He had juvenile-onset diabetes and needed shots of insulin morning and night along with an adequate meal. My heart sank as I noticed telltale beads of cold sweat on Tandavan’s face and the nervousness indicating that his sugar levels were dangerously out of balance. Though I knew he had kept quiet so as not to add to my worries, I couldn’t keep from worriedly scolding him.
I knocked urgently on the door and asked the guard to check if they could free Tandavan. He was blameless, I pointed out, because the neighbors’ complaints were against me and Tandavan had not talked back to the officer. In any case, he was a French citizen, not an Indian, and this was a medical emergency.
The guard returned a while later to say that the officer wanted to see Tandavan. It was 10:00 p.m. by now. Tandavan was sweating profusely, even though I had turned the ceiling fan on to its highest speed. He was clearly in medical distress, but before he followed the guard out, he tousled my hair and told me not to worry. It was impossible; he was all I worried about for now.
He looked ashen when he returned twenty minutes later. The officer had said that he would be released only if he signed a statement saying that he had witnessed me insulting and threatening him. Tandavan had refused to sign though the officer had badgered him relentlessly. He was utterly drunk, Tandavan said, so much so that he wasn’t even trying to hide the bottle of alcohol he was dri
nking straight from.
The next hour was the very worst of my life—even my most fearful moments at Doon paled in comparison to this. I pleaded with the guard to get a doctor for Tandavan. He was clearly sympathetic, because it had now become obvious even to the untrained eye that Tandavan was ill. He went off once again but returned in a bit to say that the doctor would be called only if Tandavan signed the statement exonerating the officer.
Helplessly, I sat there watching my boyfriend, my love, tossing restlessly on the bench. It was nearly midnight when the door opened and four policemen came in, all carrying their wooden laathis. They said they would take Tandavan to our house to have his injection and then bring him back here. By that time, Tandavan was pallid and shivering uncontrollably. As he couldn’t walk, the policemen said they would take him pillion on one of their bicycles. Just as he left, I told him to quickly phone Pratap to tell him what had happened.
About half an hour later, the policeman guarding the room unbolted the door and said in a deferential tone that I was free to go. Looking at me with awe, he said that one of the city’s seniormost police officials had just phoned the station officer.
I had to keep myself from running out of the police station to my car.
It was past midnight by the time I reached home. Siddhartha was waiting up for me, his face gray with worry. He didn’t ask me to explain the events of the evening—and I said nothing, desperate to put them as far behind me as possible. Tandavan was fine, Siddhartha reassured me, and had fallen asleep within minutes of getting a meal and medication. But I was so filled with foreboding still that I couldn’t keep myself from going straight to our bedroom to check on Tandavan, even if I woke him. Looking at his familiar, beloved frame in our familiar bed, I was filled with love and regret, blaming myself harshly for having put him in harm’s way.
I tore myself away to call Pratap, to let him know that I’d reached safely. I could tell that the only thing holding him back from scolding me was concern. Minutes later, the phone rang. It was my father, calling from Calcutta. His voice was grim; his worst fears about my returning to India had come true.
The next morning, I resolved that Tandavan and I must leave India. The worst of my fears—that of being imprisoned, of being deprived of my freedom, of my ability to fight back or even to flee—had become a reality. It left me with a terrifying new awareness of what it meant to be criminalized—it meant I could be summarily imprisoned to suffer the corruption and capriciousness of India’s rotten policing and judicial systems.
The only reason things hadn’t taken a disastrous turn at the police station was that the homophobic officer had taken cognizance of my social status and held himself back from doing worse. From all that I had seen during my years in India, I knew that if I had been just an average gay man, Tandavan and I could have been beaten, raped, held indefinitely, and then blackmailed—our lives ruined, with no hope for recourse because we were criminals under the law.
Just some months after our traumatic night at the police station, Tandavan and I learned from Siddhartha of a young gay man in Goa who had been arrested and was being held in isolation because the police and health authorities had found out that he had HIV. Siddhartha, I, and other friends in our group feared that that was the first salvo in a campaign against gays triggered by the AIDS scare, which was intensifying as a growing number of Indians came to be diagnosed with HIV.
We had long dreaded that hysteria about the disease would further demonize us. “AIDS is the last thing the Indian homosexual needed,” the Sunday cover story on gay men had sympathetically noted in 1988. “Proscribed by law, ostracized by society, he now faces the prospect of being held responsible for a scourge that is not of his making.”
My own recent experience sharpened my horror at the ordeal of Dominic D’Souza, a young man in Goa. On February 14, 1989, in Parra, a rural parish of northern Goa, Dominic had breakfast with his widowed mother and aunt, as he usually did. They left home before him and so missed meeting the lone policeman who arrived a short while later, telling Dominic that he needed to come to the police station in Mapusa, northern Goa’s major town, as soon as possible. The policeman offered no explanation for why he was wanted.
Dominic was surprised, but Goa was a tranquil place then and his was a respectable Catholic family. Having phoned his boss at the Panjim branch of the World Wildlife Fund to say that he had been delayed unexpectedly, he started off for the police station on his motorbike. It didn’t cross his mind to leave an explanatory note for his family.
From the moment Dominic arrived at the police station—a series of innocuous buildings dating back to Goa’s Portuguese colonial rule—his life changed irrevocably. Without being told why, he was driven in a police van to the nearby Asilo Hospital, a place to which he went regularly to donate blood. Several doctors appeared and began to look closely at him, as if to conduct a medical examination without touching him. They badgered him with questions—asking if he frequented prostitutes, was homosexual, injected drugs, or had had sex on his recent holiday in Germany—but not one answered his increasingly anxious questions.
Dominic’s fears turned to terror when he spotted one of the doctors entering his name into a register with “AIDS” printed across its cover. Traumatized, he did not protest when he was handcuffed and driven to an unused tuberculosis sanatorium a short distance from Mapusa. There, with the handcuffs removed, Dominic was locked, alone, in a vast room littered with rat and pigeon droppings, bare but for broken-down metal beds. Armed policemen guarded every exit. “[I] was left all alone with my helplessness and fright,” Dominic wrote later of that moment. “[M]y arrest and isolation were the most traumatic and terrifying experiences of my life . . . [They] seem almost like the acts of a sadist.”
Dominic D'Souza
Dominic’s family and friends—led by Lucy D’Souza, his mother and a retired nurse, and Isabel de Santa Rita Vaz, a well-known professor of literature, whose amateur theater company Dominic was a part of—came to his defense. D’Souza and Vaz pleaded with Goa’s administrators to release Dominic. They cited World Health Organization guidelines, which specified that people with HIV should not be incarcerated or quarantined. They emphasized that Dominic posed no threat to anyone and said they would guarantee that he would stay at home.
Dominic remained incarcerated. Officials and politicians, however sympathetic their tone, said they were constrained by the law. In 1987, Goa’s legislators, concerned that their state was particularly vulnerable to an HIV epidemic because of the thousands of foreigners who were attracted to its unspoiled beaches and its fame as a drug-and-sex hippie haven, had approved punitive anti-AIDS measures that effectively turned HIV-affected people into criminals.
The state’s health officials were empowered to demand HIV tests of anyone they suspected of being infected. Those who refused could be arrested even without a court warrant. Doctors were required to notify the authorities if they learned that someone had HIV, rather than protect the patient’s confidentiality. Infected foreigners were to be deported, while Indians were to be imprisoned indefinitely in isolation.
In late March, Lucy D’Souza filed a case in the High Court, challenging her son’s imprisonment on the grounds that it violated the Indian constitution as well as the WHO guidelines on HIV that the government had endorsed. She and Vaz also rallied public support for Dominic’s cause. The Parra panchayat passed a resolution demanding that the authorities release Dominic and let him return home to his village.
On the day before D’Souza’s suit was entered in court, she and Vaz led a massive demonstration through Panjim, the state capital, to seek Dominic’s release as well as the repeal of Goa’s draconian anti-AIDS law. They were joined by neighbors, women’s groups, and local activist organizations. D’Souza carried a placard saying “I have AIDS, please hug me,” to underscore that her HIV-positive son warranted love and support, not imprisonment and ostracism.
The support for Dominic was so strong that the Ti
mes of India commented, “It appears that the government [of Goa] has been taken aback at the barrage of protests and outrage from citizens, organizations and the medical community from within and outside the state over Dominic’s incarceration.” At least in Goa, the overreaction to AIDS could not be blamed on public sentiment. Rather, it sprang from the paranoia of government officials and the judiciary.
Eventually, on April 18, 1989, more than two months after Dominic’s ordeal had begun, the court passed an interim order freeing him from his solitary confinement and placed him under house arrest. A police constable would be posted to ensure that he didn’t leave his home. The court gratuitously instructed Dominic to “refrain from having sexual intercourse with any person” and not donate blood or act in “any manner so that the dreaded disease is communicated to others,” yet again displaying its prejudice that HIV-positive individuals could not be trusted to behave responsibly. It was the first, harrowing chapter in Dominic’s life as a figure of national notoriety.
Yet, to our surprise, even after Dominic’s widely reported saga, there was no punitive campaign by the government against homosexuals as part of AIDS-control measures. The government, as well as the media, treated his case without making a single reference to what Siddhartha, I, and some of our other friends knew for a fact: that Dominic was gay. His assertion that he had contracted HIV while donating blood, via contaminated equipment, was accepted unquestioningly, even though such a scenario was highly improbable. Infections from medical sources would have led to a telltale outbreak of cases, rather than just a single one. A tailor-made escape had been provided by the Indian peculiarity—stemming from our cultural diet of extravagant religious myths—of accepting even the impossible when packaged as a melodramatic tale of noble intentions going tragically awry.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 12
