The arguments made by Singhal’s lawyer were more unhinged still. “Anus is not designed by nature for any intercourse, and if the penis enters the rectum, victim is found to get injury,” he pronounced. By their suspect sexual behavior, gays had forgone the right to justice, he stated, saying gay men who “didn’t use condoms do not deserve sympathy or mercy.” He put forward an endless number of mystifying arguments for why the sodomy law had to remain in place. Decriminalization of same-sex relations would lead to a flood of divorces. It would “shatter” every member of the family. It would change the country’s sex ratio. If the court were to decriminalize homosexuality on the grounds that it was the choice of two consenting adults, then why not also allow incest and the selling and buying of kidneys?
Rounding off the opposition was the bizarre AIDS denial group known as Joint Action Council, Kannur (JACK). As far back as 2002, that fringe group had filed an intervention against the Naz petition on the incomprehensible grounds that although HIV was not the cause of AIDS—it didn’t explain what the real cause was—Section 377 helped control the AIDS epidemic by discouraging “rampant homosexuality.” It had since accused the prominent lawyers representing the Naz Foundation and Voices Against 377 of financial corruption as well as other wrongdoing. Those wild charges earned the ire of Chief Justice Shah, who acerbically noted that he had never seen “such low levels” of argument in court.
Month after month after that final hearing, we waited impatiently for a verdict. Eventually it was listed for the morning of Thursday, July 2, 2009. There were throngs outside the court, and the courtroom was packed to capacity.
Anand was in the courtroom, and soon my phone pinged with a message from him that said, “We won!”
Justices Shah and Muralidhar had ruled, “Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalizes consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14, and 15 of the Constitution . . . Moral indignation, howsoever strong, is not a valid basis for overriding individuals’ fundamental rights of dignity and privacy. In our scheme of things, Constitutional morality must outweigh the argument of public morality . . . A provision of law branding one section of people as criminal based wholly on the State’s moral disapproval of that class goes counter to the equality guaranteed under Articles 14 and 15 . . . The criminalization of homosexuality condemns in perpetuity a sizable section of society and forces them to live their lives in the shadow of harassment, exploitation, humiliation, cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of the law enforcement machinery . . . [Thus] Section 377 IPC grossly violates their right to privacy and liberty embodied in Article 21.”
Anand told me that he and many others had wept unabashedly in the courtroom when they heard the judges rule in our favor. Days of celebration followed across India. People danced in the streets. Countless crisscrossing emails shared the judgment’s inspiring hundred-page text. There were impromptu open-door parties. For days, the newspapers and TV shows carried editorials, op-eds, and speakers praising the decision.
I was free. We were free. We were no longer criminals.
I couldn’t join in the celebrations, however. I was with my father that day at his home in the Nilgiri mountains. Just a month earlier, after complaining of unbearable headaches and disorientation, he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. The headaches had disappeared after surgery to drain the cerebrospinal fluid that had dammed up in the brain—but he didn’t have long to live, perhaps as little as another three to six months.
His voice breaking with emotion, my father told me he was overjoyed that he had lived to celebrate this day with me, to know I could no longer be persecuted because of this hateful law. He would no longer fear for me as he had when I had first returned to India from the United States twenty-five years before. He could pass away peacefully now, he told me, knowing that I would be safe even if I continued living in India. He said he would now pray that one day soon I would win the right to officially marry Anand.
With Dad, on one of his last walks
I was too choked with tears to say anything of consequence in response—let alone to say all that I wanted to say, which was that I was filled with such gratitude to have had him for a parent, that just this far outweighed the share of hardships I’d faced, that had it not been for him I would probably never have had the courage to fight, that I would probably not have made it through my dark years of early adulthood, and indeed that I didn’t know how I was going to make it through the rest of my life without him.
I had been constantly choked with tears since rushing here in May, after Ketaki, his ayah, had called me in anxiety in Goa, when the terrible headaches had first begun. When I had arrived, worn-out after driving seventeen hours straight with Lorca, my father had stared at me blankly, as though I were a stranger. Some minutes later, he had reached out and touched my face, saying “Rana,” a look of relief washing over him, telling me that his head was bursting with pain.
Within minutes of seeing him the doctor at the hospital in Coimbatore, a three-hour drive away on the plains, told me the signs were distinctly of a brain tumor, a diagnosis soon confirmed by a scan. They had operated on him the next day, fortunately able to drain the accumulated spinal fluid surgically rather than having to implant a shunt with all its attendant risks.
I had barely left him for more than an hour or two at a stretch since. All the plans dreamed up just over a year earlier and just beginning to be realized—that I would live in Goa and he here in the Nilgiris and I would see him through a happy old age—had been destroyed. The most beloved person in the world to me, the most reliable constant I had or would ever have, was dying. I had experienced loss and suffering and even heartbreak before, but all those now seemed insignificant, preparatory losses—this was the real loss, the unbearable loss, the life-changing loss. So alone with my dying father at his solitary hillside home was where I wanted to be on that day of celebration.
TWENTY-FOUR
A DEATH
Among the many unlikely and singular things that our father taught us brothers while we were still children was fearlessness about death.
None of us can remember exactly how young we were when he first sat the three of us down together, in an orderly row, to talk about death, but we all know it was one of our early memories, so well before even Pratap reached his teens, which would mean that I was probably age eight or nine. The gist of what we remember is that he told us that if he was ever severely disabled or in any way not able to enjoy his life, we boys were to ensure that he could pass away. That was, of course, many decades before discussions about assisted suicide or “death with dignity” became at all common. We children had asked him what he meant. He explained that he didn’t want to live if he was in grievous pain or bed-bound, that he would rather be sent on his way to God happily and willingly.
We didn’t dwell on the conversation, but all three of us recall that from that moment on each of us decided that dying willingly was the right way to die, and consequently, for each of us, death became not a fearsome thing to be avoided but something that we ourselves would choose to embrace at some point. It affected all of us in similar ways in our adult lives. Though we worried over careers or finances or our love lives, we had never worried about our own deaths. (Losing others was a different matter.) As adults, we were always genuinely puzzled that others were so fearful about dying—and we remarked to one another what a difference it had made to have our father’s guidance. There was no bravado involved; it was simply just an old familiarity with the notion of dying, that we would embrace it willingly when the time came.
Even so, I could not bring myself to tell my father about his tumor and grim prognosis. My brothers had left this decision to me as his main caregiver. Week after week went by as I constantly found one excuse or another not to do so. When he asked me about the odd golf ball–sized indentation on his forehead—left by the surgery to drain the hydrocephalus—I lied and told him he had hit his head o
n the washbasin after slipping and didn’t remember because he had passed out from the blow.
But then, characteristically, my father asked me point-blank, just as he had all those years ago during that unforgettable car ride on which he had pushed me to tell him I was gay. He was in bed one morning, looking out at the waterfall in the distance, in thrilling force from the monsoon rains. He looked at me with that direct gaze and said, “Son, how come you’re hovering around me all the time and not going back to Goa? There is something you need to tell me.”
And just as with coming out to him all those years back, my heart missed many beats and I wished I were anywhere but there. I sat next to him on the bed cross-legged. He pulled himself up to a sitting position, his face now impassive. And I told him, in just so many words, about the tumor, how it had come to light, and the terrible prognosis.
He looked at me steadily throughout that minute or two. Knowing him as well as I did, I knew that the concern he was trying to hide had to do not with his death but at the volcanic grief that I was clearly doing my hardest to suppress. He then smiled broadly and said, “See, I was right, you were hiding something,” humor that helped ease the tension I was under.
He asked me a handful of questions and nodded in approval when I told him that my brothers and I had jointly decided that he wouldn’t want to suffer through chemotherapy, as it would give him only a few extra months. After about fifteen minutes of conversation, he said, smiling and calm, “Son, thank you so much. Will you give me some time alone.”
An hour later, my dad came down to the living room, where I was doing yoga in an effort to control my emotions. For the first time since the problem with the tumor had emerged, he had back his old serenity rather than seeming bewildered. I was instantly glad that he had pried the truth out of me. He sat on the sofa near me and told me that he’d spent the time sitting in front of his gods and he was now at peace. Though he didn’t say anything directly, his eyes were full of compassion for me.
Remarkably, defying the odds, for nearly a year after I told my father about the tumor, he carried on much as before. He did everything with that attentive, lived-in-the-moment relish that had struck me from my childhood—whether it was something as routine as splashing cold water on his face when he began his morning ablutions, his impregnable absorption during his morning yoga and prayers, or the transparent joy with which he played with the dogs or gazed at a passing herd of gaur.
He retained that quality even though he was not the youthfully vigorous and alert person he had been before the tumor had emerged. Though he walked six miles up- and downhill every day with me, he was visibly frail, his shoulders bowed, using a stick or my arm for support when he tired and taking frequent breaks. There was no question of him going alone on walks any longer—quite apart from the risk of falls, he would often lose his bearings, whereas earlier he had had the trained hunter’s unswerving sense of recall and direction.
At home, both Ketaki and I made sure he was never alone once awake, given the real risk that he would fall in the bathroom or while taking a shower or walk out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows on his second-floor bedroom. We did so as unobtrusively as possible, and if it irritated him, he never let on. The one source of daily friction with my father was over my attempts to limit his drinks to one or two a night—a battle that I gave up when my brothers or his friends were visiting, as there was no stopping him then in his convivial mood.
My father barely ever mentioned the tumor again. It was not that he had forgotten. One day, when he must have sensed that I was particularly struggling with the prospect of losing him, he said, “Son, how about I go only after we celebrate my eightieth birthday? And we have a real ball until then, for the next two years! Agreed?” And once in a while he would rub the indentation on his forehead left by the recent surgery and remark that it was amazing that such a simple procedure could leave such a large, permanent mark.
Momentously, in December 2009, six months after his diagnosis, when I had moved him to Goa for the winter, he and a friend of mine who was visiting from Geneva fell deeply in love. I was there when Marguerite and he first set eyes on each other—as I returned from the airport from fetching her—and they were smitten with each other at first glance.
From that minute, they spent every moment with each other like besotted teenagers embarking on their first love. Long after I had turned in for the night, I could hear them chatting away on the veranda. It made my heart sing to see that they had both found love and were living every moment with headlong relish, unmindful of what lay ahead.
My father told me, beaming, “Son, you’ve been the best son one could ever dream of—you’ve even arranged the last relationship of my life!”
Through all that, I was floundering myself.
It was not that I had an emotional breakdown, but I found I was consumed with the thought that nothing in my life seemed to have any lasting stability—indeed, everything seemed to be built on quicksand. Just when I had pieced it together from the rupture with Arndt, happy with this new life where I got to be with my father and a boyfriend I cared for deeply, work that was extraordinarily fulfilling and productive, it had all come apart again. All my courage and resourcefulness seemed pointless. I was constantly losing everything I cherished, I thought. It filled me with despair.
The worst impact was on my relationship with Anand. He had been faultless in caring for and supporting me, rushing up to my father’s home to help when the crisis first began, and then regularly taking time off from work to visit us. But I truthfully had no emotional capacity to give him anything in return. All my thoughts were about my father—and all I wanted to do was to care for him. (There was no doubt that my desperate subconscious reasoning ran that if I cared for him with single-minded devotion I could somehow keep him alive—or even that perhaps my devotion would somehow impress the gods into being charitable to me and letting him live.)
I ended our relationship early in 2010, all the while angry at myself for hurting Anand so. If I could have been more logical, I would have explained my feelings and sensibly asked for just a pause in our relationship. My father continued to ask often about him: about when Anand would next visit, when he could speak to him on the phone. I took advantage of his fading concentration and short-term memory loss. I didn’t have the courage to tell him the truth—that I had been unable to sustain that wonderful relationship, that the marriage he had wished for me would not happen, and that I’d be alone after he passed away.
In June 2010, shortly after Marguerite had left for Switzerland after several months with my father at his mountain home, promising to be back soon, I moved there to be with him. Then the normality ended with heart-stopping sharpness.
On his usual evening walk, which by now had shortened to about three miles, on the final steep incline a half mile from home, my father’s face went gray and he sat down abruptly in the middle of the road of rock and earth. He looked exhausted, in a desperate way, almost as though he knew he was now losing control over his body forever. I could have left him there and returned with the SUV, but I was afraid of what might happen in that time; there was a steep fall where we had stopped. I never carried my mobile phone, as there was no coverage on that walk around the mountainside. Half an hour later, with him apologizing constantly, we struggled up together, me carrying his weight as best I could.
My father seemed shaken but otherwise better at dinner. But when I went to check on him the next morning, I felt a wave of apprehension, as he was lying stiffly in exactly the same position as when I had left his room late at night. I could see he was breathing, so I let him sleep, imagining he was exhausted and would recover. But when Ketaki and I tried to wake him at noon, we realized he was unconscious.
The doctor arrived from a kindly friend’s nearby tea-garden hospital. He put my father on a drip but told me honestly that he wasn’t sure he would recover, that complications related to brain tumors proceeded in inexplicable ways. I called my brothers.
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It was only when Pratap walked into my father’s darkened bedroom late the following night, entering from the walkway at the far end of the bedroom, walking softly so that his caliper did not scrape the floor, that my father stirred for the first time in forty-eight hours and, still unable to see him, said, his voice tender in the darkness, “Son, I was hoping you would come.”
What a strange period followed—an indefinite sentence of fear, of knowing I would lose my beloved father today or tomorrow or this week or next week, this month or next month. The end would come soon. There were no miracle interregnums possible.
It was the most anguished period of my life—and the most precious. I suffered constantly, day after day, but I would not have escaped for anything, even if I had been given a guarantee of having forever every other joy I wished for.
Whatever progress my father made in the coming days, with Pratap and the nurses caring for him ceaselessly, there was no denying that the tumor was now inexorably shutting off his capacities. There is no knowing what brain tumors will do. What my father’s did to him was, on the whole, given the horrific possibilities, a blessing: it shut off all pain. Brain tumors do this sometimes, I learned, though usually they cause the most excruciating, ever-changing repertoire of agony. So in the manner of his dying my father was given the peace that had been denied to him throughout his life, a peace that he so singularly deserved.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 35
