Walking Towards Ourselves

by Catriona Mitchell

  In my late twenties, I moved to India. I fell in love for a time with a male motorcycle-driving Bombay poet. That fizzled out when I met a charming Lebanese businessman on a trip to Dubai, an affair that overlapped with another: with a New York–based Yugoslavian art dealer, considerably older than I, whom I always suspected of being a spy. I had always had, and continued to have, intense crushes on the brains of assorted women, but no desire for sleepovers. My Indian grandmother repeatedly tried to fix me up with assorted ‘nice Goan boys from good backgrounds’, but not too hard; I believe that she secretly applauded my independence.

  I was already in my thirties and contemplating writing my first novel in what was still known as Bombay, when I came across Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body, in which the narrator is genderless, and Githa Hariharan’s novel The Thousand Faces of Night, in which the retelling of Hindu myths about women from a feminist perspective serves as a subversive survival tactic. These novels, among others, propelled me towards an exploration of gender identity and gender roles, though it was still theoretical for me at the time, and was confined mostly to the relevance of gender to writing and writers.

  During this period, I read with fascination studies that differentiated between sexual orientation identity and gender identity, but none of this found clear articulation in my writing. It would be another decade before theoretical began to merge with personal; this, too, in India. India, home of the most ancient sculptures of Hindu and Jain temples, where a veritable orgy of inter-loving between male and female is depicted in all its erotic splendour. India, where it has become cool for elite viewers of English-language television to watch Orange Is the New Black, the Emmy Award–winning series in which many of the characters, and some of the actors, are sexually fluid, and which also stars Australian gender-bender Ruby Rose. India, where I have more openly gay and gender-nonconforming friends than I ever had in the U.S. India, which has been extraordinarily progressive in legalising transgender as a third gender, but which continues to uphold laws built from colonial Victorian prudishness, laws asserting, among other incongruities, that the missionary position should be the only legally sanctioned sexual position. India, where a disturbingly rigid Hindu conservatism, with its narrow interpretations, is on the rise, in dissonance with the Hindu pantheon’s open experimentation with gender and other binaries, as described in Vedic and Puranic literature and as depicted on the walls of Khajuraho.

  It is in India, country of my paternal bloodline, where I live, and where I have come to espouse the notion that gender can be fluid, that at any point in a life one could fall in love with a person, irrespective of gender, that it is possible for an individual to be simultaneously sexually oriented one way, gender oriented another way, and romantically inclined in multiple ways, and that these orientations can remain in flux.

  In one of the Drexler interviews available on YouTube, Camille Paglia, self-proclaimed reigning public intellectual, and author of Sexual Personae, who identifies as lesbian, deplores what she considers the gender smorgasbord in open societies today, referring to it as a kind of debauchery. To me, this position is representative of another kind of straitjacket: a gender phobia of another kind. Many people make the mistake of assuming that being homosexual goes hand in hand with being progressive or liberal, but this is not the case; our sexual proclivities do not necessarily define our politics in the mainstream. In fact, some of the most politically conservative and rigid people I know identify as gay.

  Personally, I applaud the explosion of gender diversity that we see today in all its Ruby Rosean glory, and view its acknowledgement as an evolutionary imperative. My bedmate of choice these days is The Argonauts by the extraordinary Maggie Nelson, an astonishing memoir of her life and partnership with transgender artist Harry Dodge, with table-turningly fresh thinking on gender, love and desire. I am also intrigued by the original, edgy, binary and taboo-breaking work of Indian artist Tejal Shah, who is based in Goa and self-describes as ‘feminist, queer and political’. But what I hold true today – that gender and sexuality are too complex to pin down, much less legislate, that they can and do cross cultures and geographies, and might morph at any moment – is a radical departure from the ideas and ideologies I internalised while growing up.

  Gender pride and prejudice as a transnational phenomenon

  In 1966 my Indian grandfather became very unwell, and was suspected of having stomach cancer. We flew from the U.S. to Goa. It turned out to be a peptic ulcer and he recovered, but we continued to visit Goa nearly every year thereafter. In 1974 my parents divorced. My Goan family openly and vocally commiserated with my father, reinforcing patriarchal notions in my psyche about male/female roles. I would say that, during my formative years, I was programmed not to question my father’s authoritarian way of doing things. Even for many years after, I embraced my Goan family’s view of my mother as the problematic parent, bad wife, bad mother – a view that saw her only in relation to my father, rather than as a person with her own identity.

  Besides female bias, gay bias (especially against boys and men by straight boys and men) was full blown in my Goan family during my formative years. Effeminate behaviour in men was a subject of derision and a trigger for verbal abuse. Similarly, women who did not outwardly represent the cultural norms of ‘femininity’ were frowned upon. Women who did not meet cultural standards of beauty were criticised. Bitchy women just needed to get laid. Men were the designated drivers and breadwinners and, most significantly, men controlled property. Four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese rule likely infused Goan culture with its own version of machismo.

  In the late seventies, at an official dinner for Mother Teresa, while talking animatedly to my father, a wispy Indian diplomat kept placing his hand on my father’s knee. Touching while talking is not unusual among Indian men. My father did not attribute it to anything out of the ordinary, certainly not anything sexual. However, his considerably younger and more savvy brother did. He went up to my father and whispered to him in Konkani – Goa’s mother tongue and a language the diplomat, being from North India, was unlikely to understand. My father suddenly looked disgusted. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. And we did. Later, I asked my uncle what he had said to my father at the dinner. ‘Heh,’ my uncle laughed, ‘I told him the man with a hand on his knee was bonk an so munis.’ An arse man.

  Only one time did I myself express gender bias in a way that shocked and shamed me. I was in my thirties, visiting the U.S. from India, and planning to spend a few days with the retired principal of one of my primary schools. She informed me that her daughter Sarah would be picking me up at the airport. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘Sarah is now Steve.’

  ‘Sex change?’ I asked, impressed with my own ability to process this news without missing a beat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but in transition. Don’t worry, you’ll recognise him.’

  Although I was perfectly fine with the idea of Sarah becoming Steve, this would be the first person I had known as a woman actually in the process of migration to physical manhood. On the flight from New York to Miami I became inexplicably anxious. Upon arrival, when Steve, a more manly version of Sarah, approached me, smiling, I became confused. Should I hug? Kiss? Shake hands? I settled for a kind of patting on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘would you know where the ladies’ room is?’ Steve pointed, laughing too jovially. I almost ran to it, bursting into a stall, and promptly threw up.

  Disturbed by my incapacity to reconcile my progressive gender politics with the visceral reactions of my body, I willed myself to behave in a way that was consonant with my belief system. By the time I left I was able to hold extended conversations with Steve on new literature without stammering or blushing. But I never asked him about the transition, which surely he would have expected and appreciated from a friend. And, for a long while afterwards, I continued to have ambivalent, uneasy feelings about the encounter, and avoided reconnecting. If I knew where Steve was now, I would apologi
se profusely for my lunatic behaviour.

  In contrast, I’ve had no problem with male friends or acquaintances transitioning to female. With them my mind and body have stayed in harmony. I myself have always floated between girlishness and tomboyishness, but I’ve never wanted to be a boy. The idea of losing or changing any of my female body parts is repugnant to me. Perhaps this has something to do with my reaction to Sarah/Steve.

  For about twenty years now I have managed my father’s inherited estate in Goa – much to the disapproval of many male members of my father’s land-rich family. In the tourist brochures Goa has often been presented as a hedonistic paradise. But that is a different Goa. Goans are a fairly conservative lot, including many members of my family. To them, though I spent nearly every summer holiday in Goa, I am somewhat of an alien, my ‘otherness’ excused because I am (a) a hybrid and (b) an artist and writer. They have rationalised me as ‘eccentric’. I have survived with some felicity on this eccentricity clause. Family members on my father’s side who never left Goa to study or work continue to have a narrow and, in some cases, downright feudal outlook on caste and race, to say nothing of gender. But I seem to have missed the memo about genitalia playing a part in one’s ability to be a better estate manager. Perhaps I owe this fortuitous lapse to my interest in my Hindu ancestry and my understanding of duality in Hindu mythology.

  Musings on shape-shifting in Hindu mythology

  Four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese rule could not entirely erase the strong influence of Hinduism, to which the Roman Catholic Church and the Portuguese eventually relented, allowing even converted Hindu Brahmins to retain their caste identities, which is why those Goan Brahmins who converted from Hinduism centuries ago can trace their Hindu ancestry and the temples to which they belong. My own ancestral temples, which I make a point to visit from time to time out of pure fascination, are dedicated to Mangueshi – an incarnation of Shiva, a gender-bending deity – on my grandmother’s side, and to Shantadurga – the peacemaking avatar of Durga, but still a superpower – on my grandfather’s side. The Mangueshi temple also contains a subsidiary shrine to the androgenous Lakshminarayana.

  Hinduism has had centuries of foreplay with the notion of transgenderism and female agency, going by their frequent appearances in Vedic and Puranic literature. The impetus towards gender-bending among the deities most often manifests in men desiring to use female power in some manner, rather than the other way around. However, frequent morphing of deities, or their merging into one entity encompassing both male and female principles, tends to be far less about sexuality or desire than about expedience, the balancing of scales and the resolving of conflicts.

  Books 5 and 6 of the Adi Parva in The Mahabharata contain the story of Amba. Here is a summary: Princess Amba is abducted by the celibate warrior Bhishma as a war trophy, but he later returns her to her betrothed, Shalva. In most versions, Shalva rejects her out of a petty sense of pride, and she returns to Bhishma demanding that he correct the wrong done to her by marrying her. When he refuses, she performs intense penance for many years until the god Shiva promises she will be reborn as male so she can exact her revenge. Then Amba commits suicide by throwing herself into a fire. Shiva’s promise takes a detour: instead of being directly reborn as a boy, she is reborn as a girl with the name Shikandhini, but raised as a boy known as Shikandhi. She is later unmasked as a woman when her father marries her off to another woman (surprise!). Publicly shamed, she goes into exile in the forest where she meets a forest deity, Stunakarna, who offers to exchange genders with her so that she may have her revenge on Bhishma, who claims he would never fight a woman. Shikandhi, now endowed with the all-powerful penis, becomes the warrior Arjuna’s charioteer in the battle of Kurukshetra. As the chariot approaches Bhishma, Arjuna hides behind Shikandhi. Bhishma recognises Shikandhi as the reincarnated Amba and lowers his weapons. Arjuna then slays him with a volley of arrows. Shikandhi has his/her revenge but is also killed in battle. Case closed.

  In another story Arjuna himself is cursed by Urvashi to become a hijra, or person of the third sex, for a year. Arjuna makes the best of it: ‘… wearing brilliant rings on my ears and conch bangles on my wrists and causing a braid to hand down from my head, I shall appear as one of the third sex, Vrihannala by name’1. Vishnu assumes the form of the enchantress Mohini in order to trick the Asuras into returning the elixir of immortality. The Lord Shiva falls madly in love and lust with Mohini, and, in several versions of the story, he impregnates her during some violent coupling, resulting in a son, Ayyappa.

  Evidently, there is a great deal of both awe and ambivalence connected with female power in Hindu mythology – a blurring that often enough manifests in contemporary Indian culture on many levels, one of them being degrees of transgenderism.

  A man with whom I have long shared a largely platonic relationship is named Devi (goddess). He identifies as a heterosexual male, and claims to experience revulsion at the idea of gay sex, though he has no problem interacting socially with gay or trans people. Yet his persona carries many so feminine qualities that I completely forget he is a man when sharing confidences. Many of his married women friends also see in him a confidant, and some might even be a little smitten by his boyish looks, yet none of the husbands experience this friendship with their wives as a threat. One of them told me that even though he, Devi, is a heterosexual male, he is not ‘that kind’.

  When a woman loves a woman

  Some years ago, while researching a paper examining the contemporary contributions of women in creative fields to gender politics, I watched two independent Charlie Rose interviews – one with the late Susan Sontag (considered first an icon and later an arch rival by Paglia) and the other with her partner, Annie Leibovitz, after Sontag’s death. From them, I derived a sense of partnership where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, which I would consider the entire point of life partnership, irrespective of gender. I had to rely on this sense when, in my mid-forties I found myself not only in love with, but sexually attracted to, and in bed with, a woman artist. A straight woman. Two women who think of themselves as straight are possibly at a disadvantage – we had nothing to compare our experience to on the female spectrum – we had to figure it out.

  About time, said my bisexual friend Deepika, you’ve both been missing half the population in the dipping well.

  Mohini’s painting work, influenced by the abstract action painters, notably Franz Kline, manifested a muscular masculinity and, since she never signed her canvases, viewers in galleries usually assumed the works were by a man. It was this very forceful quality of her art that was attractive, but also other gender-related incongruities of the painter herself, whom she met when she purchased a painting. Mohini’s abundant hair was bound in an enormous bun held together by a hairclip fitted with massive cloth flowers. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a kurta and closed, boot-like shoes – unusual footwear for tropical Goa. Her facial features were fine and feminine, her voice husky. She spoke in an oddly sophisticated, yet antiquated language. The overall effect: a hot, but slightly dikey librarian type. They met a few times after that for coffee or a meal. They discussed painting, ideas, books. They discovered they had almost identical bookshelves. They talked for hours on the phone; it was mostly Mohini who initiated the calls.

  She was surprised when she discovered Mohini’s high level of dependency on the men in her life: her father, her husband, a lover in a political power position, a youngish man with an obvious mother complex. Mohini had never balanced her own chequebook. Her husband, with whom she hadn’t shared a sexual relationship in decades, travelled extensively on business, and during one of those trips Mohini asked her new woman friend to spend the night. They talked late, well beyond the witching hour. Finally, they fell asleep in the same room on separate mattresses which they had spread on the floor. Early in the morning Mohini reached out, kissed her hands, and said, ‘I’ve never met anyone like you. May I touch you?’ It was not the first time a w
oman had asked, but it was the first time she had said yes. And she continued to say yes for a year.

  During that period, slowly, without her being fully conscious of it, she began to take over the roles of the men in Mohini’s life: protector, interlocutor, financial and legal manager. Six months into the relationship, Mohini began a process of triangulation, flirting at random with men or women whenever they went out. If she objected, Mohini, smiling, would tell her she was imagining it, and display an affection that seemed confusingly out of sync with her earlier detachment.

  About a year into the relationship she stood in Mohini’s bedroom. She was naked before the full-length mirror, silently examining her body, still moist, glistening from the shower, her face flushed, made younger and vulnerable from being in love. This is what happens to women, no matter whom they are with, she thought: we see ourselves through the eyes of the patriarchs. We still seek outside approval, wondering, do I look good enough?

  On cue, Mohini, who was watching her, said, ‘Baby, you have a perfect body.’ As if seeing it for the first time. Mohini had never commented on her physical attributes before, other than to say ‘You look lovely’ when they dressed to go out together.

  Her stomach clenched as she saw Mohini’s face turn sullen, forecasting a storm ahead.

  That night began with a mechanical circular licking of her eyelids, which she found slightly unpleasant. It was not that she didn’t know the words to tell Mohini that this wasn’t doing it for her. It was that the words were caught in her throat, stuck in limbo between not wanting to upset the feelings of her female friend/lover and what she would surely have demanded from a man. But she also realised she didn’t care that much. It was enough for her to feel Mohini’s breath and fingers on her to experience pleasure and joy. She did not feel the need to compare, to wonder whether they were ‘doing it’ right. Besides, they had both agreed that Mohini would stay with her husband, and that they would not abandon their existing male lovers, so man love was always an available option for both. Meanwhile, Mohini insisted that they keep their relationship hidden. People can be cruel, Mohini said. Yes, she agreed, they can.