by Rahul Mehta
First, know that I didn’t choose to be this way. Who would choose this?
Next, you’ll want to find a reason. You’ll wonder if it was something you did, or something that you could have protected me from, that made me gay. Was I born gay? I believe that I was. Regardless, as tempting as it will be, there is no point in your combing through the past looking for an explanation you’ll never find. Things are the way they are.
Finally, I know you will worry about AIDS. I’ll spare you the graphic details of my sex life, but please be assured that I am very careful. You have nothing to worry about.
I hope this hasn’t come as a surprise to you. As Popeye says, “I yam what I yam.” I hope you can accept that.
With love,
Your Son
What Kiran hadn’t written in his letter was how he remembered his father watching Martina Navratilova on the television and mumbling, “She needs a good man to set her straight.” Or the slight though perceptible way his father recoiled when an effeminate salesclerk in Suitings asked him if he needed help finding his size, the way he’d looked at Kiran afterward and rolled his eyes. Kiran also hadn’t written anything about how he’d had to start the letter over several times, the words rendered illegible by his trembling hand.
When Nishit came home, Shanti, without a word, handed him the letter across the kitchen table and held his hand while he read it. Within the hour, Nishit telephoned his son.
“We read your letter.”
Kiran, in the sixth-floor walk-up, lay on his belly on his frameless futon, his chin propped against the edge, the cordless phone in one hand, a finger from the other hand absently tracing a figure in the dust of the floor: an infinity loop, a sideways eight.
“We didn’t suspect,” Nishit said, speaking for both himself and Shanti, and Shanti—though she had suspected, had, dare she say, known—chose not to contradict him. Meanwhile, Kiran was thinking, If you didn’t suspect, it’s because you didn’t want to see.
There was a silence, and then Nishit said, “We love you. Son, you are the apple of my eye.”
Kiran heard the words and was truly grateful for them. But he also wondered why his father was crying. On the other end, Nishit didn’t know why he was crying either, only that suddenly there seemed to be a gap between the life he had and the one he’d thought he had, a chasm between the life he thought he had given his son and the one Kiran was actually living. Nishit’s foundation was shaken. It frightened him to think how often this might be the case, how often life appeared to be one way when in actuality it was really something else.
When the children were very young, Nishit read aloud to them, not Paddington Bear or fairy tales as Shanti had, but Shakespeare. Never mind that the storylines were too convoluted and macabre for young ears, Nishit wanted only the best for his children, and Shakespeare—hadn’t the world agreed?—was the best. It wasn’t until ninth grade, when Kiran read Romeo and Juliet in English class, that he realized his father had not in fact read them Shakespeare; instead, he had read them the Reader’s Digest prose versions, essentially plot summaries of Shakespeare’s greatest works. When he confronted his father about it, Kiran was angry—he had borne the hot blush of embarrassment in class—but Nishit couldn’t understand his son’s ire. Nishit remembered only how much he had loved sitting with the children, their monkey limbs wrapped around his trunk, and how he dreamed of bright futures for both of them: ages four and eight, and already they were learning Shakespeare! Neither of the children’s lives had turned out anything like Nishit had imagined hunched over in his children’s small beds, reading them Reader’s Digest Macbeth.
A few days after receiving Kiran’s letter, on another phone call with their son, Nishit said, “I just don’t want your life to be hard.” Shanti, sitting next to him, absentmindedly gazing at the Marilyn Monroe postage stamp on Kiran’s envelope still sitting out on the kitchen table, silently mouthed “harder,” because couldn’t they all agree life was hard no matter what?
When the entire family was home one Thanksgiving some years later and the topic, uncharacteristically, came up, Kiran repeated himself: “This isn’t a choice.” Shanti instinctively understood what that meant. Shanti had not chosen to come to America, just as she had not chosen Nishit for her partner, not really. “Do you like him?” her mother had asked after their arranged meeting. “Do you want to marry him?” But Shanti understood even then that she didn’t really have a choice. She could have said no, but who knew what the next prospective match might be like? Eventually her parents would have lost patience. She could practically hear her mother saying, “Some young women are lucky to have even one good match. Don’t be greedy. You make what you can from what you are given.” So many things in life had been chosen for Shanti. Why, Shanti wondered, were Americans so dogged in their belief that they could control things, that in this world they had perfect freedom of choice? Why could they not appreciate, as Indians did, the role of fate?
“I didn’t choose to be gay,” Kiran said that Thanksgiving, “but I would. If given the choice, I would choose to be gay every single time.” Who would choose this? he had written in his coming-out letter. So much would change in the years that followed, and Kiran would realize that if being gay had made his life difficult in some ways, it had also come with invaluable gifts. But this was still many, many years away.
Kiran was lucky, he knew it. He had heard all the stories: dear friends who had been rejected from their families or tossed out of their homes at fifteen, made to live with sympathetic parents of friends or to find their own way on the streets, friends subjected to “Dear God, what have I done to deserve this?” or “As far as I’m concerned, I no longer have a daughter.” Kiran was lucky; he was loved. Not that his parents were perfect, not that there weren’t moments of fumbling, mistakes—past present and future—some major, and while Kiran often wondered if they were proud of him, he rarely doubted how much they loved him. But that love was both a blessing and a burden. It hurt to be loved. It hurt because it was paradoxically unconditional and loaded with responsibility. It hurt because he knew he didn’t deserve it.
When Kiran arrived in India, Bharat had spoken to him of duty—dharma, a concept that looms large in Hindu culture. There was a period in one’s life where duty was foremost. Once you’d fulfilled your duties—traditionally that meant getting married, raising children, taking care of your own aging parents and seeing them off to the next world—then your life was yours. Until then, you were bound.
What did all of this mean for himself and his sister—American born and raised? Surely there were not the same expectations. But there were expectations nonetheless. All parents had expectations of one sort or another for their children. And children, in turn, had expectations for their parents.
Kiran thought of his mother. She had done her duty. She had rejected Chris. She had stayed. What went into that decision, Kiran couldn’t know for sure, but he knew one thing: he knew the look on her face the second after she kissed Chris, the second before she saw Kiran across the food court, peeking from behind the concrete pillar, a look he’d seen again when Chris slung his arm, big as a tree bough, across the back of their seats in the pickup truck and Kiran gazed up at his mother, a look he’d seen those two times and then never again.
In Kiran’s mind, the equation worked like this: his mother had rejected her own desire to preserve the family. In reality Shanti’s decision had been more complicated. But that’s not how Kiran saw it, not now. He saw it only as sacrifice. Surely Kiran wouldn’t be expected to make the same sacrifice, to reject his desire. But weren’t there other sacrifices that were expected of him?
Now, on the line with his father, Kiran thought only of the sacrifices his parents had made for him and his sister. He heard not his father’s words—You are the apple of my eye—but only the tears in his voice. He would rather his father shout at him than this, the certain sadness (so much worse than anger) that Kiran knew he had caused.
A we
ek after tossing the unopened envelope with the Mississippi postmark into the milk crate, Kiran dug it out from under the additional junk mail that had since arrived. He was in his small room, sitting cross-legged on his secondhand futon mattress placed directly on the never-swept floor: a raft, grit and dirt and hair from Penny’s cat gathering like flotsam at its edges. Unlike his mother’s short note and his own letter, his sister’s was not handwritten; it was typed, single-spaced. Even the envelope was typed. The only evidence of his sister’s hand was her signature at the end, not just her first name, but her full name—first, middle initial, and last—no longer the bubbly loops of the girl who dotted the i in her name with a heart, but now the cold, clean lines of a woman who had no patience for frivolity.
Kiran read the letter by the light of the gooseneck desk lamp on the floor beside him.
Dear Kiran,
By now you must have heard about Shawn. I’m guessing that Mom sent you the same obituary clipping that she sent me. His death has stirred up emotions long buried, and I have been thinking again of the past, as I imagine you might be as well. I barely know where to begin, how to resume a conversation stalled almost two decades.
Let me start by saying I never blamed you. Okay, yes, I was angry. I was angry at you. I was angry at him. I was angry at myself. I was angry at Mom and Dad for not being there. I was angry at all those kids who saw me stripped naked, who kept coming back again and again, and who never once thought to go home and to tell their parents what was happening. At least I hope they didn’t, because the possibility that one of them might have told an adult and that adult didn’t come to help me is too horrible for me to contemplate. So, yes, I was angry. But I never blamed you.
Yet I have wondered over the years why you waited so long to bring help. I’ve wondered what you did in those intervening hours, where you were, what you were thinking, if you were thinking of me.
I am asking for God to give me strength to tell you now what happened that day, because for so long all I wanted to do was forget. But you need to know. Or I need to tell you. I’m not sure which.
He came to the house early that Saturday morning, throwing stones at my window. He told me that he was sorry, that he missed me, and that he had something to show me. I was glad to see him. We walked hand in hand up Sherman Road. We turned into the woods and made our way to the Cathedral.
I didn’t know what was in his backpack until we were already there. He took out the Indian headband with the feather and told me to wear it. I did. He told me to twist my hair in two braids. I did. He told me to remove my shirt. I did not. He removed it for me. He held me against the tree. I struggled, but it was no use. He took the jump rope from his backpack and tied me up, all the while calling me Pocahontas.
The neighborhood kids started coming almost immediately. The first must have stumbled on us by accident, having come to the Cathedral for their own reasons. But then word spread, and soon it seemed every kid in the neighborhood had come and gone and, in some cases, come again.
When I saw you, my heart leapt. I thought, It’s finally over. But you left, and it was hours before anyone came to help.
When I saw you, I had already been humiliated. But the worst was still to come. Soon after you left, the others followed suit. Shawn and I were alone again.
He whispered in my ear, “You are my Pocahontas. I am your Captain Smith.” He put his hands all over me, he put his filthy fingers inside me. Even now, when I close my eyes I can still see the smirk on his face.
For years I felt those fingers inside me. My body was not my own. For years, I felt empty inside except for his hand.
When he was done, he disappeared, leaving me alone, still tied to the tree. I didn’t know if anyone would come. I don’t know how long it was after he left me before Prabhu Kaka arrived, but it felt like days.
I know this will be difficult for you to understand, but in spite of everything I don’t regret any of it or wish it had happened any other way. Were it not for what happened, I may never have found God.
Kiran, I know you’ve never understood and I know you don’t believe, and still I feel I must tell you the love and consolation I have found in the Lord.
After Shawn left me alone in the woods, I thought there was no point crying out, that no one would hear me. But I was wrong. God hears me. Not only that: He answers.
When I first started attending the Bible group at school and going to Ray of Light Ministries, I was attracted to how black and white everything was. Wrong or right, evil or good, there is no confusion, no shades of gray. We grew up with so much gray. Still, I wasn’t sure I fully believed. I wanted a sign. And then I got it.
For Christmas, my friend Clara gave me a Verse-A-Day desk calendar. Each night I went to bed with a question. When I woke up, I flipped the page of the calendar. Every day for two straight weeks, the Bible verse directly answered my question. It was the sign I was looking for.
From that moment on, I have felt a deep and intimate relationship with Christ. I am never alone, just as I know now I wasn’t alone when Shawn left me tied to the tree. God is always with me.
Kiran, I know you are struggling, I know you are searching. You don’t know what you are searching for (that is the very nature of searching), but I do. I know what you’re looking for, even though you don’t: Jesus Christ.
I know something else, Kiran. I know what Shawn did to you. I knew it by the way he smiled at you when you came to the woods, and the way you slinked away. It was the same smirk I saw on his face later when he put his fingers inside me. I know that is why you are the way you are. I know that’s why you are gay. I was your big sister. I should have protected you. I didn’t. I will never forgive myself for that.
In the hospital every day, I see people suffering. I know what it looks like. I know you are hurting. Let God heal you. I don’t want to preach, but my prayer, dear brother, is that you will one day find what I have found: an intimate relationship with Jesus. This world is too painful, Kiran. I don’t want you to have to walk through it alone.
Love,
Preeti N. Meyers
Over the years Kiran would torture himself wondering why Shawn had hurt Preeti. After what he’d done with Kiran, was Shawn trying to assert some twisted sense of heterosexuality? Was he trying to prove something to himself, and to Kiran? And why had he kept calling Preeti Pocahontas, when he knew they weren’t that kind of Indians?
A friend of Kiran’s told him she’d spent years trying to understand her own childhood sexual abuse before accepting that there was no answer. Abuse was beyond reason, she said, and to try to understand the abuser was to give him a kind of power he didn’t deserve. Still, Kiran couldn’t help wondering if he wasn’t somehow to blame. Maybe if he hadn’t followed freshly showered Shawn into his bedroom and shut the door, Shawn wouldn’t have pursued Preeti, spending hours on the phone with her, Kiran in her lap. Maybe he would have never brought her to the woods.
That night after finishing reading Preeti’s letter, Kiran drank until he could barely stand. Around one a.m., he stumbled down the five flights of stairs and started making his way crosstown to the Limelight, remembering Halloween two years earlier, the year he dressed as Princess Leia, marching in the Greenwich Village Parade, the sexy Jesus (there was always a sexy Jesus) and the very intimate relationship he’d had with him that night. At the Limelight, the thump of the techno house was loud enough and the drugs he procured strong enough to drown out Preeti’s voice in his head, speaking her letter. The next morning, he wasn’t sure how many men he had been with in the back room, but he imagined he could still feel their hands. Hands on his chest, on his ass, fingers in his ass, in his mouth. Hands on his stomach. Hands on his shoulders, on the back of his head as he sucked a cock. Hands pushing him down, holding him there. Hands that hurt. Hands that healed.
Chapter 22
Aimlessly wandering the jumble of streets around his cousin’s house, Kiran saw a man standing on the railed balcony of a concrete ch
awl. He was wearing nothing but a green lungi, his mouth closed around a cigarette. The man looked at him, and Kiran knew—he didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew it with certainty—that inside the open doorway, deep in the shadows of the room, another Kiran, the Kiran whose father never immigrated to America, was lying on sweat-soaked sheets, trying to collect himself after having just been broken open.
Kiran had felt this sensation before. He would walk past a Dutch Colonial in Bethesda, Maryland, and would know that there was a Kiran who would live there, whose son, not yet born, would bounce a basketball against a garage-mounted backboard. Or he would peer from the sidewalk into a white-clothed restaurant in TriBeCa and know that the Kiran who got into Princeton and became a banker, the Kiran who was heterosexual and who married his childhood sweetheart, Kelly Bell, was eating seared ahi across the table from her.
Sometimes he could feel these other Kirans tapping at his shoulder, Kirans from other worlds, their hands having somehow slipped through the walls that separated this world from theirs, having found a crack in a window, curling their fingers underneath, prying it open. Sometimes they scratched at him. Sometimes they pulled at his clothes. But mostly when he felt them, they were gentle; he felt their hands pressing on his back. An infinite number of Kirans. It made him feel both inflated in a Walt-Whitman-Song-of-Myself-I-am-large-I-contain-multitudes kind of way and also tiny like a grain of sand. It made what this Kiran did in this world mean both more and less.
If it was true for himself, it was true for others. Somewhere there was a Prabhu whose wife didn’t die. A Shanti who had stayed with Chris. A Bharat who fell in love with Maria and remained in America. A Kelly Bell who called in sick the day the towers were attacked. Somewhere there was a Preeti who never went with Shawn. A Shawn who never hurt her. A Kiran who didn’t wait to call for help.