More people arrived, and I snuck away to snoop around her family’s apartment. I looked at the books on her bookshelf—classics of feminist autofiction; photographic and cinematic theory; tomes of Indian history I wasn’t familiar with. I looked for family photos in the living room. I looked for any evidence to help me shape myself into someone she’d desire.
I brought Akhil with me to the bathroom, where I forced them to analyze the likelihood of Zoya’s interest.
“How do I know if she likes people like me?”
“Why, because you’re white?”
I assessed myself in the mirror. I worried I looked too much like a boy. From another angle, I worried I looked too much like a girl. I knew I would tilt myself in whichever direction Zoya preferred.
I was binding my breasts, but their curve was still visible under the fabric of my shirt, a mound of flesh pressed under elastic fabric. The immediate urge was to cave in, hunch over, round my shoulders forward so that the breasts were protected, if not entirely hidden. Any insinuation of my breasts undermined my capacity to believe I was desirable.
When I was thirteen I found swelling in my chest, under my nipples, while I was in the shower. When I pressed the skin, it hurt. I screamed, ran out of the bathroom still wet, and told my mom there was something wrong with me, that I was growing tumors. She said it was just the beginning of my breasts growing. “Like flowers,” she said. “They’re called breast buds.” I had dreams about cutting them out with a knife, like pits from a peach, and throwing them into the dirt so they could grow somewhere else. She took me to the doctor for a checkup and they had me take my shirt off and lie on my back on the exam table. The doctor kneaded the skin on my chest and pressed around the swells. She told me puberty was starting.
That week in the shower I picked up my mother’s pink razor and shaved all the hair off my legs, arms, and knuckles. I shaved the fuzz off my face, too. And when I got out of the shower I pulled the razor down between my eyebrows, over the hairs above the bridge of my nose that my dad told me were “severe” and “beautiful.” I didn’t use soap, so by nighttime I had red bumps all over my arms and legs. I tried to hide the rash from my parents by wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants, but I wasn’t good at pretending and they asked me why I wouldn’t put on my pajamas. My mom said that if I wanted to shave, she’d teach me. My dad was upset. He told me women didn’t have to get rid of their body hair. But I needed all the parts of me to be smooth in order to be okay with what I was growing into.
From that point on I had a semi-addictive relationship to mirrors. I left class as often as I could just to look at myself. When other girls came in, I pretended I’d been washing my hands. I couldn’t walk by windows without following my reflection, a doll moving along next to me. It seemed like if I didn’t check my appearance all the time, as often as I could, something terrible would happen. People would figure out that I was disgusting and that this condition could not be fixed. Other girls started making fun of me for being vain. I forced myself to look at the ground, sat through class, and pushed down the compulsion to make sure I hadn’t accidentally revealed something. It felt like being a girl could slip away from me at any moment, if I didn’t check four, eight, twelve times. If I failed at being a girl, I’d reveal the truth: that I was inherently perverted.
The bigger my breasts got, the more I wanted my body to shrink. That only seemed possible through deprivation. The game was to get so hungry that I was dizzy and then stay in the dizziness, to try to focus in class and ride the subway home and do my homework all while being nauseous from hunger, which was its own type of energy. I was tired all the time. It was hard to open doors or pick up my backpack. I found huge bruises on my legs, purple, pink, and blue, until they turned green and yellow, and I didn’t know what they came from. I was disappearing and that was what I wanted.
I was examining the fruit bowl in the dark kitchen when Zoya entered behind me.
“I was looking for fruit.”
“I was looking for you.”
She cut up some pineapple, which we ate together, and poured me a glass of vodka without ice. I stood closer to her. Someone else entered the kitchen. I was drunk now, and from then on I trailed her.
We ended up on her bed with a group of people I didn’t know. I woke up disoriented, my head on her chest, to the sound of her whispering, “They’re asleep.”
Though I’d been passively occupying the singular gender-neutral “they” for two years, I still couldn’t summon the certainty to ask for it. When it was used in relation to me, I accepted it. I accepted “she” as well, though it registered as a sharp reminder that my attempts at something other than femininity were failing. Asking to be regarded in a specific way required the courage to claim an identity. I preferred to observe what people wanted me to be and politely follow suit.
Zoya referred to my gender indeterminately without it having been discussed. “They’re asleep.” Two words, and she summoned me into existence, became the keeper of my unrealized self.
Akhil shook me from my resting place on Zoya’s chest and told me it was time to go. The sun was coming up; we had a train to catch in two hours.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said.
“Come with us.”
I brought her with us in a taxi and we kissed sitting on the ledge behind the half-demolished hotel. Mid-kiss, I already wondered how I could see her again. Her friend interrupted us, pulling up abruptly on his scooter. He grabbed Zoya and told her to get on so he could take her home. She hopped on without saying goodbye.
Akhil, Prab, and I were in Mumbai on my twenty-fifth birthday, which fell on the same day as the city’s pride march. We sat in traffic for an hour trying to get there, stopping at a blockade and running to catch up with the crowd. The event was rife with familiar symbols—rainbow flags, equal-sign banners, Lady Gaga impersonators. There were also unfamiliar symbols: impersonators of Bollywood icons, gender-nonconforming people communicating the specifics of their identity through aesthetic and cultural codes I couldn’t understand. Akhil and Prab explained certain things to me—the origin of a specific textile, the caste connotation of an earring placement—and left me living in ignorance of others. That which I wasn’t meant to understand, I suppose. I liked being prevented from knowing. Peering in from the outside thrilled me. Call this the white gaze, the unrealized, already-failed-at-male gaze. Or call it longing. Either way, I’d felt it since I could remember.
Zoya was supposed to join us that night. I bought a six-pack on the way home from the parade and drank two beers to try to slow down my pulse. It was a hot night. Akhil and I walked around the corner to a barbershop, looking for a barber willing to trim their mane, a mop that fell in front of their eyes in tumbling ringlets. I sat behind them, witness to the male drag required for them to be shaven.
I was sure Zoya wouldn’t come until she arrived. When I saw her stepping out of a taxi outside the barbershop, I strode out to greet her. Practice made it possible for me to walk slowly, calmly, resisting the inclination to run toward her. The alcohol made it easier to reach out and pull her toward me, kissing her on the cheek with the confidence I had hoped for.
We had sex for the first time that night. She braided her fingers around the back of my neck. We lay in the dark talking, her head on my chest, and then had sex again. The second time she whispered in my ear that she wanted to be overwhelmed entirely, that she hoped this was okay. I was relieved to decenter my own body, rather than having to summon the vulnerability it takes to be inside it. Always more in tune with my partner’s desires than my own—a false binary, perhaps, when you prefer someone else’s pleasure to yours—I’ve grown accustomed to leaving my body when lovers want to touch me, attempting to anchor myself through the satisfaction in their faces. If I direct all of myself toward my lover’s pleasure, I can ignore my breasts, my hips, the flesh covering my muscles and bones. Why focus on my body when I can only experience it as excess?
After I m
ade Zoya come, she said, “Thank you,” like I’d done my job.
The next week, she met us in Delhi and took me as her date to a brunch at the home of some prominent arts patron, a postmodern mansion overcrowded with expressionist paintings and marble sculptures. This home belonged to the sort of family that had built my parents’ careers and, as such, sustained the comforts of my upbringing. I’d been accompanying my parents to events of this nature since I was a little girl, and I knew how to stay in character: polite and grateful, curious and engaged, self-assured and humble. The only difference now was that I hoped to cut the character with masculinity. To channel composure, I pictured an unassuming, handsome man with his hands in his pockets, leaning against a wall, unafraid of having no one to talk to, immersed in observation.
At this point, she knew virtually nothing about me. I’d overheard her tell someone my name, but she’d gotten the second part wrong. I took this as proof that she liked me neither because of nor despite my affiliations. I was hesitant to correct her, though I worried my omission verged on manipulation. In being unknown to her, I could relax. All she knew was what I’d given her, what she’d gleaned. And, if her language was any indication, she saw me as neither male nor female. Intoxicatingly, she appeared to believe in my ambiguity.
In the backyard, waiters served Bloody Marys and trays of hors d’oeuvres to European curators and wealthy Indian art collectors. I drank two Bloody Marys in quick succession, smoking a cigarette next to a table covered in a pink tablecloth, while Zoya made her way around the party chatting. Periodically, we stared at each other across the lawn, but I tried to stay still and grounded in my body, my gestures. I knew how to look around the room, curious but without demands. The goal was for my masculinity to function like armor, without making me into a man, per se. She’d made her disdain for men clear. I added it to my own disdain—read: emulsified envy and fear.
Zoya returned to my table and asked how I was doing. I told her I was having a ball, people-watching, enjoying the pleasures of my own company.
“You’re very beautiful, you know,” I said, after a pause. She looked away and took a drag of her cigarette. Not a thank-you or even eye contact as acknowledgment; she changed the subject to the land reclamation of Mumbai at the hands of the British Empire. I feared I’d recast myself as a groveling male, biologically programmed to be overwhelmed by her good looks, too dumbstruck to notice how profoundly she didn’t care. I wanted to clarify and explain myself. Instead, I said nothing, afraid to break character.
That afternoon, she took me to an art fair—aisles of objects, people crafting identities through studied consumption. This, too, was a familiar scene. Nearly every weekend of my childhood, my parents took my sister and me to brightly lit white rooms where people crowded around art and drank wine out of plastic cups. I remember getting a bad feeling in my chest when grown-ups looked around the room, worried about whom to talk to next. The more they drank, the more they talked. Women took me to the bathroom with them while they reapplied their lipstick, or let me come into the stall with them while they peed. Afterward they’d tell my parents how special I was, while I pretended not to listen.
Now I followed Zoya dutifully as she took me on a tour of the work she found interesting. I asked thoughtful questions. Really, I just wanted to know if my statement earlier that day—you’re beautiful—had closed my access to her completely. A few times, I grazed her back with my hand, hoping for a gesture in return. She was focused on the art. I grew more anxious, more frustrated with my own anxiety.
Later on she took me to a party at a modernist embassy. Security personnel flanked the entrance. Inside, young people bounced up and down to EDM. I wandered away from Zoya, convinced that I needed to perform disinterest to stay desired. Eventually she found me and brought me to a marble terrace for a cigarette, where we chatted with a handsome man who appeared to be in his early thirties. They had a rapport; she brought him into our conversation, asking him what he thought about my statements, asking me what I thought about his. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, gesturing with his hands. He wore glasses, and his thick hair kept falling in his eyes in the middle of his sentences. He pushed the hair back with one hand, smoked with the other. He passed Zoya the cigarette periodically, as if he knew when she wanted it without her saying so. My jealousy pulled at me, sensing her admiration of him and suspicious of their familiarity with each other. Always torn between treating my jealousy like paranoia and treating it like intuition, I tried to suppress the discomfort in the back of my neck and listen, engage in conversation politely and normally. Did he find her beautiful? How could he not? And did she find him handsome? How could she not? I reminded myself that I was unfamiliar to her—a well-spoken and attractive outlier who brought dynamic ideas and different reference points (didn’t I?), who offered aspects of masculinity while still constituting queerness. This was the type of script I’d learned to recite to myself when jealousy threatened to crumble my sense of self-worth. A behavioral therapist had once taught me to use rational analysis to undermine the voice inside my head. Proof against and proof for: as if two columns of facts could provide me with the information I need to feel desirable. Column A: she didn’t touch me; she hasn’t looked at me in five minutes; I stare at her more than she stares at me. Column B: she said she loved having sex with me; she did touch my back one time earlier; we just met; I’m crazy.
I wanted her to stop talking to this man. I wanted her to kiss me. I wanted her to tell me she wanted me. I wanted not to need those things. I wanted to be someone who wasn’t already cycling through the same old obsessions, grasping for proof that someone I’d slept with twice cared about me. I wanted to be this luscious-haired, distinguished man. I wanted to punch this luscious-haired, distinguished man in the face.
The man asked me a question, but I’d been so focused on the contours of his face, the line of his biceps and pectoral muscles under his linen shirt and the particular way that the collar revealed his sternum, that I hadn’t heard what he said. My insecurity made me myopic.
I tuned back in, tried to quiet the surveyor in my mind, who intended to analyze every part of his body and compare it to every part of my own. I asked him questions about his career in academia and about contemporary politics, listening to the answers just enough to formulate the next intelligent question.
In the car on the way back to the hotel, she told me she didn’t want to have sex that night. I was a deft enough performer to immediately thank her for telling me, express my gratitude that she felt comfortable being honest.
“Do you think I’m a prude?” she asked.
“Never,” I said. “Of course not.”
“It’s just that I don’t feel like I know you, yet. And I want to talk, to feel like I know you.”
Then I asked her about the man. I tried to reframe my jealousy as openhearted curiosity, in the hope it would slip under her radar.
“Who was he?” I asked. “I really liked him.”
“You did? Yes, he’s special. He’s just a friend of mine.”
Her casual admiration made my face get hot and my fists tighten up.
“That’s so nice,” I said.
She’d rented a guest room in a neighborhood called the New Friends Colony. We tiptoed quietly to her room, to avoid waking up the guesthouse’s resident managers, who had warned her against young women coming home late. We lay down on the bed next to a pile of outfits she’d been choosing from earlier. She rested her head on my chest. It calmed me down. I worked up the courage, a little tipsy, to apologize for telling her she was beautiful earlier in the day.
She told me I didn’t need to apologize. I pushed her to tell me how my saying that had really made her feel.
She explained it was something she’d been told often, and it wasn’t what she needed—or wanted—to hear. I tried to swallow my embarrassment and told her I wouldn’t say it again.
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t. Tell me other things.”
And
then I tried to explain to her—my first attempt, I think, at stepping out from behind my laconic facade—that it was different for me. I wanted to be told I was handsome, to be longed for. I was nourished by adoration; whether or not it is a quick fix for a deep lack, it lifted me up, at least momentarily. She listened quietly and, when I’d finished, said that it was okay to need different things.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of wanting me,” she said. “I’ll tell you if it’s too much for me.”
We held each other for a while and then she told me that she’d lied to me earlier, about the man.
“We had an affair,” she said. “I was embarrassed, because I don’t even like men. But it felt quite queer, how much he worshipped me.”
I listened quietly, enraged and aroused. My character’s job was to understand why she’d done what she’d done, affirm her desire, and defend her actions. It made me more attracted to her to imagine her with him. I’d never say that out loud, though; I’d never admitted to a lover that when my attraction waned, I imagined them with a man—the last one they’d loved, maybe—engulfed in pleasure, as if I had never existed, would never exist. This vision usually revived my interest.
We stayed up talking. She’d showed me the effect worship had on her, and this intensified my fixation. Now I had something to invest myself in. We stayed up until the slit of sky between the curtains turned pale blue. I wrapped myself around her. Close to sleep, she said my name like she was asking a question.
“Grace?”
The next night, the fourth we spent together, we went to a party at a villa outside the city. I’d been waiting all day to be alone with her, maybe because I wasn’t getting the attention I wanted; maybe I needed a level of attention no person could conceivably give me. I feared that, at the party, I would inevitably lose her to small talk. I did, and I took the time alone as an opportunity to dance with myself and wander around staring at people. Periodically, I’d bring her a drink without interrupting, or try to look handsome and severe while she introduced me to someone.
A Year Without a Name Page 2
