The city itself now seemed to be in a golden era, an exhilarating balance between being safe yet wildly edgy. There was no better place for a nonconformist, liberal immigrant like me to feel at home. I once again rented the small apartment in the West Village where I had lived while on my previous stint with UNICEF. It was in a prewar building at the crossing of Grove and Bedford streets, architecturally unremarkable but vividly bohemian in spirit. (I was not the only person struck by the building’s originality—it had been featured as Jackson Pollock’s Village home in the 2000 movie Pollock.) The main door was a brilliant green, opening onto a narrow corridor with bright yellow stucco walls. The tiny elevator, big enough for no more than three people squeezed tightly together, was of the same exciting green color as the main door.
My neighbors were just as exciting as the building. Most unforgettable to me were a zestful gay man whose bushy hair seemed to stand up on end of its own accord and an intense young Spanish woman who resembled a Pedro Almodóvar femme fatale. Someone or other from the building was invariably sitting out on the stoop smoking or chatting; it meant setting aside time for conversation every time one entered or exited.
And I loved my apartment, up on the fifth floor. It was all of five hundred square feet, but the high ceilings, the numerous windows, and the elongated layout—the bedroom was separated from the living areas by a long, narrow corridor—somehow made it seem spacious. A graceful ginkgo tree stood outside one window and an exuberant honey locust outside the other. The area was a haven for birds, including nesting red-tailed hawks. I felt I had a private balcony because two people could squeeze onto the fire escape.
I shipped in my few possessions from India. At Pottery Barn, I splurged on a solid frame bed, a capacious sofa bed, linen curtains, an expanding dinner table and chairs, a bookcase, and an armoire; it was all I needed and all that would fit into the little apartment. Then I began to unwind in ways that I couldn’t back in the country of my birth.
In India, I felt conflicted about eating out at restaurants, using a swimming pool, or even living near a green park to walk in—those were luxuries available only to a privileged handful. In New York, I relished the simple joys of going Rollerblading along the Hudson, working out at New York Sports Club, and eating at the city’s plethora of good, cheap restaurants. Of course, I realized that it was absurd that my psychological conflict eased merely because I was several thousand miles away from the sights of suffering, but those were the fabricated stratagems I used to quiet my conscience.
I could also finally unwind about being gay. I exulted at living right near Christopher Street. In 1986, less than a decade and a half before, when I had first lived in New York, I had skulked through the area, an outsider peeping nervously at sights that I lacked the courage to participate in. But now I lived here! Lived right in the heart of what I had come to think of as the world’s sacred place for gay and trans people—our Benares, our Bodh Gaya, our Jerusalem, our Mecca, our Vatican!
That patch of small city blocks embodied the resilience of our spirit, enduring despite the terrible things we had suffered. Though the full-scale slaughter of the AIDS epidemic had waned, it still felt like a country recovering from war—the missing generations, the numbed silence about the past, the hopelessness on the faces of those who had lost unbearably too much, the skeletal survivors on the brink resting outside Bailey-Holt House, which provided a home for people living with AIDS.
And all of us who lived there, or flocked there in the evenings, knew that the neighborhood was a ghetto in a city and nation rife with hate and threats. A friend and I once mapped out, based on our own experiences, that the only safe area for gay and transgenders in Manhattan extended precisely from Leroy Street on the south to Seventh Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west, stretching up merely to Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea.
But it spoke volumes about our spirit that straight people had never created such a liberated holy spot or such a welcoming and fun ghetto. I was soon affected by Christopher Street’s buoyant spirit. I looked at myself in dismay—I was surely the most boring gay man ever to live in those precincts. My clothes were all preppy, baggy cottons from Gap. I wore sensible Naot sandals or waterproof shoes. I’d never yet had a full shot of anything stronger than beer or done more than puff at a cigarette. I was more boring than even the most boring straight man.
So I set about reinventing myself.
At the gym, I rapidly became as fit as I had been in my days as an undergraduate competitive swimmer. Under the tutelage of Sankar—who was now a muscular hunk, not the geeky genius I had known at school—and my sexy friend Kamala, I splurged on French Connection jeans and T-shirts, all woven with spandex that clung to my musculature. I soon had a veritable collection of Valentino hot pants that barely covered my crotch and bum. I had party shirts, too—form-fitting black Armani, shiny metallic things with zips, even a leopard print in some velvety fabric.
I learned the joys of drinking. One night, dressed in my beau monde finery, I headed to Wonder Bar, the tiny East Village dive that had been Tandavan’s and my favorite when we had lived together all those years back. I gulped down two vodka martinis in the space of a few minutes. The results were magical. Brimming with derring-do, I deep-kissed several men at the bar, letting my hands and theirs do whatever they wanted. I bummed a cigarette and inhaled deeply, suppressing my coughs but feeling mature and sexy, an irresistible mix of Marlboro Man and femme fatale.
So began the years of mindless fun that I’d never had in my teenage years or as a young adult. I tried out and relished everything that I hadn’t done yet in my life. My days, whether the weekdays or the weekend, became a happy routine of concentrated work, followed by the gym or Rollerblading, and then invariably dinner with friends. And then I went for a drink to Bar d’O or the Monster in my neighborhood or dancing on weekends to Splash or La Nueva Escuelita. I reveled in knowing that after downing four drinks I was slurring and even weaving drunkenly. I tried out pot, poppers, Ecstasy, and cocaine. On the weekends, I would invariably return home after dawn, both exhausted and energized, usually after hours of sex with a hunky stranger. It was all a welcome break after being relentlessly serious.
At the LGBT Community Center on West Twelfth Street, a short walk from my home, I saw a Keith Haring mural that was worlds removed from the popular matchstick figures emblazoned on mugs and shirts, so different that it was difficult to believe they were the work of the same artist. The gigantic work of black-on-white line drawings, which covered the walls of a small room, was of countless men and their mouths, cocks, and assholes joined in an orgiastic daisy chain of sexual pleasure, of fucking, sucking, rimming, jacking off, and coming. It had been the second-floor men’s bathroom when Haring completed the mural in May 1989 as part of an artists’ commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. That was why the mural began at the chest-high height where the urinals would have been fixed at that time. Haring’s distinctive signature was on one corner. Below it he had written, “Once Upon a Time.”
It was Haring’s ode to sexual freedom for us gay men—our victory over the endless centuries during which acting on our desires triggered the risk of our being shunned, jailed, thrashed, or killed. It was also Haring’s final act of up-yours defiance against AIDS—he died eight months later of the disease, age thirty-one.
The mural hit me with the force that Picasso’s Guernica had—the force of unvarnished honesty and truth telling. “Once Upon a Time”—a fleeting, glorious time when we could savor every pleasure that had long been demonized and outlawed.
And though that halcyon time had long passed, I had sex like that more times than I can count in those years in New York. With unknown groups of men, dozens strong, in sex clubs. Those endless nights of pleasure were the zenith of my sexual life, both physically and intellectually, which had begun to flower just over a decade earlier with Tandavan.
I would be shivering with excitement by the time I reached the do
or of El Mirage, my favorite club, on the Lower East Side, the prospect of what lay ahead overcoming even the two drinks I’d had to unwind. It would be close to midnight and this eastern stretch of Houston Street deserted. Anyone who didn’t know the number of the building would miss the unmarked door. You pressed a bell. Someone unseen checked you out from behind a one-way glass panel embedded in the door. You entered to find many other men standing in line to pay at the windowed booth, you were then frisked by the muscular bouncer, you unzipped and showed your penis to him—evidently police regulations prohibited policemen from exposing their penises, so that kept out undercover cops—and only then did you make it to the rooms of pleasure beyond.
By the time I left, after three or four hours of almost nonstop sex (with no worries, this time, about AIDS: I unfailingly used lubricants and condoms), I felt as though I’d had the most consuming gym workout but one of utter pleasure. I had no regrets or psychological conflicts about those nights, at least nothing more than ruefulness if I was exhausted the next morning. If anything, I felt those were precious hours of utter honesty, such a rarity in human social life.
Walking back home, as I invariably did despite the late hour and the distance back to the West Village, I would often remember lines from a favorite Cavafy poem, one that celebrated outlawed desires and secret rooms like the ones I had been in:
When I went to that house of pleasure
. . .
I went into the secret rooms
considered shameful even to name.
But not shameful to me—because if they were,
what kind of poet, what kind of artist would I be?
In those first years back in New York City, I tentatively began to feel an optimism about global progress that I had not known before. I wasn’t certain, though, whether my optimism stemmed from the general euphoria about the new millennium and my distance from events in BJP-ruled India or was built on firmer foundations. Were Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama right in positing that with the Cold War ended, the world less bloodied by wars, and the United States providing a benevolent Pax Americana, globalization would spread Western liberal democracy, modernity, the rule of law, and material comforts universally, ushering in a golden epoch for all of humankind? Surely there were good grounds for hope that humankind would have learned sufficiently from the horrors of the previous millennium—from its record of slavery, imperial conquest, mass poverty, famines, genocides, world wars, and nuclear weapons—so as to not repeat them.
Even with the AIDS pandemic, for the first time, it seemed as though real change was happening globally, two decades since the disease had come to scientific attention and with more than 60 million people infected or dead.
In January 2000, a special session of the UN Security Council declared the pandemic to be a threat to the security of nations because of its catastrophic toll on economies and societies, the first time that the council had identified a disease thus. A year later, at a special session of the UN General Assembly dedicated to the pandemic, the world’s governments agreed to a global plan of action for slowing the spread of HIV. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called for a superfund to fight AIDS, with a target of raising and spending $7 billion to $10 billion a year. His idea quickly began to turn into reality, with large new commitments from donor governments—including the promise of foreign-debt relief for poor countries to free their money for AIDS-related efforts—and major foundations, raising the money available for combating AIDS in developing countries into the billions of dollars from the inadequate hundreds of millions spent yearly through the 1990s. It was now possible to substantially scale up national responses in the next years.
And, crucially, there was now global agreement that it was unconscionable to let tens of millions of impoverished people in developing countries die from AIDS when lifesaving medicines existed. What had seemed impossible just a few years before even to those of us who wished for it fervently was now becoming a reality. Activist coalitions demanding treatment for themselves and others, patent-busting generic drug manufacturers, and a handful of committed developing-country governments had fought the multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers of the antiretroviral drugs and the Bill Clinton administration (which threatened to impose punishing trade sanctions), forcing down the price of the drugs to less than a dollar a day from the original $20,000 annual cost. Though the details were still to be worked out, it was now definite that a global effort to ensure antiretroviral treatment to even the poorest of people in the poorest of nations was in the offing. It rapidly proved to be one of the greatest victories in the history of modern public health—saving millions in developing countries and turning AIDS from an implacable force into a solvable challenge.
Unexpectedly, in the summer of 2001, I plummeted into a frightening bout of depression. It was about a year into my settling into New York City, just a few months before my fortieth birthday. It began one ordinary weekday evening, not provoked by any incident or trauma. But in the space of hours my normal, carefully maintained equilibrium had been smashed.
My joy in my home and city drained away. So did the satisfaction I had gained from the books I had written. My sense of being special for having the deep love of my father, my siblings, and many close friends emptied of meaning. The sense of self-worth I normally felt about being a principled person no longer moved me. The cartwheeling, childlike joy that would, unbidden, invariably transport me for many minutes every day now felt like a cruel figment of my imagination.
All those things were swept away. And in their place was a bleakness so heavy that I felt powerless against it. My life had amounted to nothing. I had no one. I would never have love or children. Life would never improve. I was a failure.
At some point I pulled all the curtains close so that there was no light and turned off the phone ringer. Unwashed, unshaven, teeth unbrushed, I lay endlessly in bed in the darkness with that despair choking me, sometimes squeezing exhausting bouts of sobbing out of me.
It took me days to recover enough emotional strength to answer the worried calls that had filled up my answering machine—from my friends, my father, my brother Bharat. I was so embarrassed and loath to tell them the truth that I made up some lie about the answering machine having malfunctioned.
It was only with two close women friends who insisted on visiting me immediately that I admitted what had happened. Though I cried while telling them, it was from relief at being able to trust and savor human connections again. I promised those two friends that I would unfailingly call them if I ever began to feel like that again. It was only while saying it that I realized how strange it was that although I was unfailingly candid about every personal matter with my close friends and family, until now I had not been able to admit to anyone that I was lonely and unhappy.
Though I soon found my way back to my old equilibrium of appreciating life, I noticed that the episode had changed me. Whether those were positive changes, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t fight them. I felt I knew myself far better now, and I accepted as legitimate these feelings rather than insisting to myself that I had to emulate the heroic people I admired for overcoming adversity uncomplainingly, those I knew intimately, such as my father and my eldest brother, or the legion of impoverished or oppressed people I had interviewed over the years. But it also felt that my awareness of my sadness had begun to color my life, as though a dye had been mixed into it, taking away some of the passion for living—and for social justice causes—that had emerged since my undergraduate years.
There was no confusion in my mind about the precise causes of the disquiet. I was turning forty but even at that late stage my life didn’t seem to have any moorings, anything that I could point to and say “This is mine,” in the sense of a child or a long-term boyfriend. I had two books, lots of learning, and some success to show for my thirties—things that had filled my life with meaning when I was doing them but seemed pointless seen against the larger, empty canvas of my life.
And though I had been in New York City for just a year, I had quickly become pessimistic about finding a long-term relationship there. For all that I had made a determined effort to fit into the city’s gay life, I realized that at heart I didn’t belong.
I had zero interest in fashion once the initial fun of getting a wardrobe together had ended. I couldn’t discuss Queer as Folk; I didn’t even own a television. I disliked the shallowness of mainstream Chelsea bars and Fire Island’s Pines. The blatant pecking order based on looks, wealth, and race, and the scornful exclusion of those who didn’t make the grade, left me appalled, wondering how those of us who had suffered endlessly ourselves could act so heartlessly. I wished I could find a way of meeting gay men interested in the things I cared about, but online dating was in its infancy. It spoke volumes about the dysfunction of gay life in New York City that there were countless others in exactly my situation, endlessly single and endlessly searching for romantic love.
I knew I was not blameless for the lonely predicament I found myself in. I was drawn far too much to good looks and missed out on relationships with a number of men whom I liked deeply. Through my own brand of immaturity I also destroyed the one relationship that had true promise. It was with a Cuban American a few years older than I. I was drawn to Sebastian’s gravitas—it made me realize that the only men I now had a lasting connection with were those who had suffered deeply and had emerged wise and upbeat.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 25
