It was a full moon night. A few college students had arranged a seaside picnic. Manoj and Manjri both were anxious to leave the picnickers. After eating doodh poha, the picnickers dispersed. Manoj and Manjri went to sit by the beach. Sitting in a quiet corner, they enjoyed the moonbeams playing on the sea. Then Manjri spoke: ‘Manoj, for some time now, I’ve seen a change in your behaviour. You’re not interested in religion any more, I think. You keep on staring at me, I feel. Is that right?’
Manoj kept silent for a while, then said: ‘I have wet dreams. I see you naked in my dreams.’
Manjri laughed and taking Manoj’s hand, put it to her breast. ‘That’s natural! Have you read the sex manual? I recommend you read it if you haven’t already!’ Saying this, she sidled closer to Manoj. Manoj squeezed her breasts with both hands. Sighing with ecstasy, Manjri said: ‘The sex manual catalogues the harm done by nocturnal emissions. One drop of semen equals forty drops of blood. Hence, you’re told to conserve semen.’
Manoj asked, ‘Will you marry me, Manjri? Mani kaka is eager to have a daughter-in-law in the house. He will be very pleased if I marry you.’
Manjri nodded in assent.
Manoj passed his BA in the first division. Manjri, too, secured a good second class. Their education ended. Manoj got a job as a salesman. They got married. Manilal’s madness to have a daughter-in-law was fulfilled.
The wedding night.
The prime of youth.
Sweet moonlight.
A bed spread with roses.
Manoj awaited her on the bed. Wearing her ghoonghat, Manjri entered.
‘Why are you late?’ Manoj asked.
Manoj lifted her ghoonghat.
Manjri received his kiss on her lips.
Both undressed.
Both were intoxicated by the fragrance of roses.
‘Do you like me?’ Manoj asked.
‘Do you like me?’ Manjri asked back.
‘Yes,’ said Manoj.
Manjri said, ‘Today, we are going to practise the instructions of the sex manual fully.’
‘Then this night is going to be too short for it,’ Manoj said.
Manoj kissed Manjri and felt her body all over.
Manjri slept on her back facing him and got a hold of his penis. Both were perspiring profusely.
Manoj’s linga entered Manjri’s yoni. Manjri squealed in delight. She said: ‘It seems you have studied the sex manual by heart twice!’ Then she offered him her rear. That night, both of them made many experiments in bed.
In the morning, Manilal said to Manjri: ‘Thinking you would have stayed awake all night, I have made breakfast for everybody.
Manjri was impressed by Manilal’s understanding nature.
Due to his job as a salesman, Manoj went out of town often. Manjri seldom felt Manoj’s absence as both Manilal and she talked a lot about religion. Manilal and Manjri would go to see Bollywood mythologies and talk of morality, keeping the company of holy men and service to one’s elders. Manjri would accompany Manilal to religious meetings. Manoj was happy seeing the rapport between his wife and his father.
It was the rainy season. Lightning played in the dark night. Manilal was ill with a cold and cough. Manjri kept running around the house serving him hand and foot. Masala tea, Glycodin syrup. Whenever he coughed, she stroked his back with her smooth hand. Late that night, Manilal felt better. He said, ‘I have worn you out. You have served me like a wife.’ Saying this, tears came to his eyes.
Manjri said, ‘I am the Aryan woman who sacrifices herself in the service of her elders. What do I have besides you?’ Mani kaka said, ‘Sleep next to me tonight.’
Manjri said, ‘Consider me your wife.’
She embraced him.
Manilal said, ‘Your touch is so warm!’
Manjri said, ‘Today is my first wedding anniversary. Manoj and I had decided to spend the night together. But our wish remains unfulfilled.’
‘I promise you I’ll fulfil all your unfulfilled wishes,’ said Mani kaka.
And that night, even Manjri agreed that all her wishes were fulfilled.
Often, when Manoj returned home in the evening, Manjri and Mani kaka weren’t in. Manoj’s absence did not bother Manjri. She was deeply immersed in prayers and bhajan-singing. Manoj noted this fact. In the bedroom that night, he spoke to her: ‘You seem to be neglecting me these days. You go to religious meetings and mythological films with Bapuji. Have you renounced the world? Are you god-mad like Meera? Father is old, but why this renunciation in your youth?’
Manjri said, ‘Bapuji and I are collecting punyam for you. It will be evenly distributed as good karma for our future births.’
Manoj pulled Manjri towards him and playing with her fingers, he said, ‘I must have done ten punyams with all my ten fingers to have earned a devoted wife like you.’ Saying this, Manoj hid his face in Manjri’s palms.
Manjri said, ‘Manoj! Your father, you and I are the three circles of a happy samsaric cycle. As an Aryan woman, it is my duty to believe in God, to serve my elders as I serve Him. I am doing no more than my duty. And as an Indian woman, it is my religious duty to serve the nation and defend it.’
Manoj was disbelieving at her firm faith. He considered himself lucky to have a devoted wife like Manjri.
Manjri told Manilal what transpired between Manoj and her the previous night. Manilal said: ‘Manjri, you consider it your duty to serve your elders. If you take me as a husband, we can both serve God more peacefully.’
Manjri said, ‘Your wish is my command.’
When Manoj returned from work that evening, Manilal placed before him his marriage proposal. Manoj did not think any sacrifice too great for his father. Hearing Manilal out fully, he rushed to the kitchen and fed jaggery to both of them. That evening, they talked of marriage late into the night.
The wedding day was fixed. Manilal did not spare any expense. He invited the whole clan to dinner at home. Friends, lovers, everyone. The newly weds were heartily blessed. Due to being well fed, people tended to be charitable. Everything went off well.
To enjoy their nuptial night, Manjri and Manilal entered the bedroom. The whole room was decorated with flowers. They entered a world fragrant with flowers. Taking off his black cap, he hung it on a peg. Slowly, Manjri shut all the doors. He put a mogra flower in Manjri’s bun singing a Hindi film tune:
Maa tum kitni achhi bholi ho!
How sweet and innocent you are, my mother!
Manjri smiled sweetly. The night passed sweetly.
Manilal said, ‘God knits together the hearts of his true devotees. My faith in God has multiplied manifold today.’
Manjri smiled languorously and clung to Manilal as a tender vine.
What did dawn find? Two lovers, intertwined.
After Manilal’s and Majri’s wedding, Manoj began to feel lonely. His gaiety abated. Manjri noticed this. She wished dearly that Manoj should call her mother—Manoj’s mother had died in his infancy—as then no one could take her place. He did a puja before his mother’s portrait unfailingly every morning. He lit a lamp and garlanded the portrait. The place in his heart marked for mother was always empty.
Manoj left early for office daily after breakfast and returned home as late as possible. Manjri cooked him a good breakfast. Batata poha one day, fried potatoes the next.
The days passed. One morning, Manjri slept late. She had stayed up late with Manilal the night before. As she awoke in bed, she heard Manoj give out a heart-rending cry from the dining room. She ran to the dining table, her clothes still in disarray. She saw Manoj had badly cut his finger with a knife while paring an apple. The blood flowed freely. She tore her saree end and bandaged the cut.
‘Mother! I found my mother!’ Manoj cried.
‘Son! Son, I’ve been awaiting you ages!’ said Manjri. ‘Come. Let me see your face more closely!’
And both fell weeping into each other’s arms.
Standing in his dhoti and banyan in the doorway, Manilal,
too, wept tears of happiness.
Translated from the Gujarati
The story is a variation of the Yayati myth. The fathers are still emasculating the sons. In Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, it is the son who steals his father’s concubine. Here it is the father who steals his son’s wife. The son calls her ‘mother’. It is a disturbing turn on the oedipal theme. It is not so unknown in central India to share your wife with your father. Sex is power: some get empowered, some enfeebled. When the body refuses to die down, the spirit rears its surreptitious head as well. The oedipal conflict between father and son is played out on the mother’s body. When the son is defeated, he seeks spiritual solace. Fathers, Bapus all, refuse to let go.
This is my gay misreading of the myth from the point of view of sons:
Yayati - II
I coupled with the angel of death
last night in my dream
I gave him a tickle
I gave him a wink
But he wouldn’t let go
short of coupling
So ashen as he was
I took him in
I turned ashen
My mouth tasted of ash
By morning
From the dead I awoke
winged.
from Flower to Flame, Delhi, 1992
Zib-al-Abd
Hoshang Merchant
I
Nigger dick
Nigger dick
Flower of hell
With a sick-sweet smell like sex
I brought it home in armfuls
to my dinner table
(The Arabs laughed)
By midnight I had to open the door to
let out the smell
II
Poets talk of this flower
Williams calls it the Asphodel:
Of Asphodel that greeny flower
I come my love to speak to you
He claimed to go even to hell to find it
And having found it he found a moment’s truth
Until hell and war returned again
And truth had to be won all over again
III
It grows abundantly on the hillsides of Palestine
And like truth it is a despised flower
No one in his right mind brings home hell
No one in his right mind loses home for hell
But having lost home men are prepared to go to hell
to find it again
What some call home others call truth or love or freedom
IV
Bayyati the Iraqi poet lost home at twenty
He was nowhere at home for the next forty years.
He was his country’s slave, the slave to truth
he searched in seven lands
In his seventieth year he was ready to die
Everything he had done was about to be undone
The children sang his songs in the streets
in the soldiers’ faces
It is as if he had brought home to them
Armfuls and armfuls of the flower of hell
His deed is done . . .
Dirge
Hoshang Merchant
I have just come from a funeral
My lover’s, which is to say, my own
Seven months after his death
I went looking for his grave
I was no relative, only a lover
It was a fine graveyard
Shah Wali’s
In the shade of a tamarind
stood many graves
going away into the distance
into a vista of cypresses
And above it all, the fortress of Golconda
I threw roses on the grave
of one Yunus Khan
It was the wrong Khan
But my tears were real
And my perfumed prayers reached him
(My lover would accept anything as long as it was from me)
He was playing hide-and-seek even in death
And I smelt all of roses . . .
What is one funeral
in the wake of the funeral of all Iraq?
I haggled for oranges in the marketplace
The same market where we haggled love’s price
And I smelt all of oranges
And suddenly I smelt all the orange groves of Iraq
Afterword
Hannah Arendt writing in The Human Condition after the War said that a human being’s greatest authenticity came from her experience, her suffering.
Author/authority—the two are related. Post-structuralism has announced the death of the author. Philosophies need authors: the Gospel according to St. John. This is my testament.
It is fashionable to blame mothers for homosexuality in sons. The fact is weak husbands make for strong wives who breed weak sons who in turn become weak husbands. Strindberg catalogues this in The Father which is wrongly considered a misogynistic play. This is specially true for the Parsi society today.
‘For whom will you write your book?’ the anti-intellectual working-class American gays taunted me at a ’70s liberation rally. ‘For the gays,’ I’d then said. ‘But the gays already know it all.’ (They’re living it all,’ was what was meant.) Then I said: ‘I’ll write for the straights.’ I still think gays can use this book better than straights. Liberation, like charity, begins at home.
It should be obvious from this survey that ‘gay’ in India is not an ethic, not a religion, not a sub-culture, not a profession, not a sub-caste. Yet it is all-present, all-pervasive, ever practised and ever secret. It comes upon you in unexpected places, in unexpected faces. It is shame, guilt, subversion; for some new-fangled ones, even their honour and pride. Homosexuals are largely unorganized and blend with the crowd. Hence, homosexuality is unspoken about, unaccepted, a danger to the homosexual and the non-homosexual alike. Unlike ‘hijras’, the gays do not have a local habitation or even a name. No word exists yet for the homosexual in any of India’s languages. No one in any class wants to own up to it. It is a movement with a thousand colours. Yet, it is distasteful to many and many consider it tasteless though it has its very pungent odours and colours. There are laws against it but they have not been enforced for a hundred years. Yet, no one wants to bell the cat, no one wishes to repeal a practically defunct law. Parliament has gone to sleep over the Bill moved by some Delhi gays. The Culture Studies establishment does not want to own up to gay studies and the village school teacher may not play Plato especially if he is one. Gays get married (to women), get humiliated or mutilated (as hijras) almost daily with a sickening frequency, and some homosexuals masochistically seek out humiliation several times a day. Riyad Vinci Wadia says in Parsiana (Dec. 1996, p. 24) that ‘50 million Indian men have sex with other men’. There is no remedy, therapy, counselling for any one of these many millions of people. Homosexual men are accused of harbouring AIDS though it is the heterosexual population that is the main carrier that spreads the disease in Asia. AIDS is just one more new reason to hate the gay.
Recent genetic theory gives a genetic basis to homosexuality. Some future Hitler now can happily stamp out all human differences by aborting foetuses testing positive for the ‘gay gene’! Homosexuality has always been a happy hunting ground for fascists of all hues.
Proust called homosexuality ‘a freemasonry of the damned’: a homosexual could make a grand tour of Europe once without once paying hotel rent, so numerous was the sisterhood. In San Francisco, I called Castro Street its ‘gay ghetto’ with ‘fags living on top of dogs living on top of fags’! In the bourgeois West, the homosexual is accepted as a happy credit-card-carrying, tax-paying bourgeois with just another kink in the head or in the bed. That, too, is just one more bourgeois plot to make us disappear.
July 1999
Hoshang Merchant
Editor’s Note
Recently, the Delhi High Court read down Article 377(b) of the Indian Penal Code which prohibits homosexual acts. Now private consensual gay sex between adults should be
outside the purview of the law. Gay rape and gay paedophilia will now be clubbed with 377(a) which deals with rape. The government has yet to plead its case before the Supreme Court simply because it is afraid of a public backlash. Meanwhile poor gays continue to be exploited by the police in Delhi as elsewhere and rich, closet homosexuals continue submitting to blackmail if not murder as at Vasant Vihar, Delhi, and in other parts of India. Online gay chat groups claim that police exploitation has lessened in Delhi but I saw no statistics to back up their claims. I think it is just wishful thinking on the part of the spoilt young, cocooned by their parents’ wealth and social acceptance of their gay identities. No change in the law has taken place at the time of this book going to press though the media, as usual, has gone mad 24x7 with its gay hoopla.
Since I edited Yaraana ten years ago, a new term ‘queer’ has come into vogue even in India. Judith Butler (among others) invented the term to mean that all men and women have a little bit of the gay in them. Modernism used the categories ‘straight’ or ‘gay’. Post-modernism uses ‘queer’ which is more complicated, kinder, poetic. In India, however, this would implicate everybody and frighten everybody. This would further inhibit acceptance by India of its gays. Just as there is stupidity in the world there is also compassion. I suppose ‘gay’ will be current in India a little longer.
A whole new generation has grown up under globalization watching Hollywood and Bollywood movies and daily TV news stories about gays. They are more at ease with their own sexualities and that of people around them but they are also under renewed pressure from their families, schools, churches. Saving souls is as big a business as the world economy and gays continue to play into it from the comfort of their double-income/single-sex ‘families’! Dalit gays are thrown on the scrap heap.
A word of caution on ‘gay marriage’: This will only lead to the bourgeoisification of gays, not necessarily a good thing. ‘Married’ gays with ‘families’ suit the world economy better than less well-off, single gays. Marriage is a decaying institution in the West. India’s gays should question the concept of marriage instead of swallowing the bait thrown to them by the globalized economy. Also, gays should not blindly imitate straights.
Yaraana Page 21