Whatever lingering rose-tinted notions I had about the United States as a superior society were exploded by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn exposed the rapaciousness of the United States’ past and present, at home and then abroad as an imperial power: the merciless genocide of Native Americans; the unimaginably brutal chattel slavery of abducted Africans; the unending failure to tackle its domestic burdens of poverty, ill health, racism, violence, and drug use; the reprehensible use of nuclear bombs and chemical weapons in its modern-day wars; the subversion of democracy in independent-minded countries in favor of biddable despots.
What a chasm there was between the glorified notion of America that I had grown up with as a beacon of freedom and liberty and its blood-soaked reality. As it was many years before globalized television news and the internet made viewers intimately familiar with the problems of every part of the world, those of us from developing countries still naively harbored the colonial-era belief, dinned into us by our “Macaulay’s Children” education, that the Western world was perfect in every sense while our own societies were congenitally backward and needed to emulate our former colonial masters. It came as an enormous shock to begin to be disabused of those notions—and consequently to begin to understand how completely I had swallowed and internalized that self-serving propaganda.
I had never before read history like Zinn’s—accounts based on the views of oppressed women and men, rather than the elite. It was through Zinn’s book that I first began to understand that, although human societies are invariably unjust and cruel in their treatment of vast numbers of people, the excluded always fight back and it is the efforts of countless ordinary, wronged people—and the leaders who emerge from their ranks—that overwhelmingly fuel social progress, not the altruism of elites.
And then there was Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. That simply written book jolted me awake to the world’s staggering material inequities. More than a billion people went hungry every day, and millions starved outright every year. Lappé showed that the massive scale of global hunger was caused not by laziness on the part of the poor, overpopulation, or even an overall shortage of food but by exploitative inequality both within and between countries. These facts were graphically evident every day at the Tufts campus cafeterias. Not only was there a smorgasbord of food, drink, and desserts—so unlike the unremittingly Spartan fare of Doon and St. Stephen’s—but it was invariably left half eaten or discarded by many students.
I had never before seen anything like that wastefulness—and I was appalled by it. Everywhere in India, even in my family’s privileged circles, the Gandhian and socialist aspirations that India had begun with at independence still largely inspired people, and greed and waste were scorned. I was stunned, too, to see the plethora of possessions owned by many of my peers at Tufts, from countless clothes to expensive sports cars; no one I knew in India, not even our equivalents of the Rockefellers, spoiled their children like that; the excesses of the maharajas were by now a fading memory. That thoughtless feeling of entitlement and embrace of consumerist excess struck me as a uniquely American trait, as I had not seen it even while vacationing in Europe with my parents’ wealthy friends.
Following Lappé’s advice about the small steps each of us could take, I turned vegetarian, so as to free up for others the many pounds of grain that would otherwise have gone into producing the meat I would consume. I took part-time jobs, wanting to contribute as much as possible toward paying for my education, rather than letting my parents cover everything. I was suddenly keenly aware that, in this era decades before India’s economy boomed, it was a strain for even families like mine to cover the high costs of private American colleges. I was also impressed by the conscientiousness of some of my American peers who juggled studies and part-time jobs while putting themselves through college. I felt that model was inherently more responsible than the custom among well-off families in India and Great Britain, where college-going children were not expected to take part-time work.
In the fall of 1982, I began working two afternoons a week in a small university office that dealt with foreign students, located in the basement of a quaint old house. My responsibilities consisted of sorting and distributing the mass of incoming mail and handling the equally large volume of outgoing mail. I handled the routine work with such enthusiasm—even licking the stamps and labels with my tongue instead of wasting time on using the wet sponge—that the full-time clerical staff began to look at me with some distaste, perhaps because my naive embracing of the work just heightened their awareness of its drudgery. And though I was paid the minimum wage, roughly three dollars per hour, I was thrilled to receive my modest bimonthly checks.
Buoyed by that first experience of the dignity of labor, I decided to spend the winter of 1982 working full-time, rather than flying back to Calcutta for the one-month break as my parents had indulgently urged me to. In addition to Anand’s Untouchable, I had been reading Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Inspired by the Mahatma’s insistence on cleaning toilets himself, I decided to seek work as a janitor. I was hired almost instantly, because very few people wished to work over the Christmas holidays.
I was assigned to cleaning the cavernous main gym, including the showers and toilets. To my shame, my dedication vanished in my very first hours on the job. After scrubbing row after row of stained, dirty toilets, I was nearly overpowered with repulsion—it took all my willpower to keep from quitting the very first day. Early every weekday morning, I forced myself awake in the grim near darkness, reported for work, pulled on thick gloves, and somehow spent the entire day cleaning. Though I worked diligently at mopping and cleaning the sports areas, I cheated with the bathrooms, splashing pails of water over the toilets instead of scrubbing the bowls with the toilet brush as I was duty-bound to do.
Rather than being a period of revelatory personal growth in the tradition of the Mahatma, it turned out to be just a depressing year ending. When the new term began, I hastily refused an offer to stay on as a part-time janitor and left, shamefaced but relieved. I had begun to realize the finite limits to which I could follow my ideals. However sincere my empathy, I was not made of the stuff of Gandhi or his true followers.
It was back in India, when I was home for the long summer breaks, that my engagement with matters of exclusion and injustice set down real roots.
In the summer of 1984, just after graduating from Tufts, I volunteered with a charitable organization, the Lutheran World Service, that worked in Calcutta’s shantytowns. I had no practical skills to offer, no knowledge of poverty beyond what I had read in the courses at Tufts, and not even a working grasp of Bengali because of my Anglicized upbringing. But the head of the charity’s Calcutta office generously found a task for me, asking me to document and write about its grassroots efforts, explaining that it had been struggling to report on its work.
I began to visit parts of Calcutta that I had not even heard of before: Ultadanga, Khudirampalli, Rajarhat, and beyond. Calcutta, despite its legendary poverty, was actually a refuge for those fleeing even harsher deprivation, and its “squatter” settlements housed countless rural migrants, often from states with even more intense poverty than West Bengal (where poverty rates were falling at record speed because of a pro-poor land reform campaign undertaken by the Marxist government), as well as Bangladeshi refugees, millions of whom had fled during the bloody war of independence a decade back. Around the ubiquitous ponds and canals on the city’s outskirts, in areas that still seemed semirural and far from the city’s chaos, they had pieced together shacks from mud, broken bricks, and scraps of thatch, plastic, and tarpaulin. It didn’t require any expertise to realize that Bengal’s ferocious monsoon rains, just two months away, would beat through those skeletal structures.
Inside the huts were bare mud floors, inevitably a paper calendar on one wall, a handful of cheap cooking vessels and an earthen chula stove in a corner, a few
bedraggled clothes hanging on a nylon line, a stainless-steel trunk for storage. There was no furniture—not even beds. The entire family, often spanning several generations, would spread out on wafer-thin reed mats at night.
There were no bathrooms, so everyone defecated in the open. Drinking water came from a few creaky hand pumps. Everyone bathed in the ponds and canals—though they seemed relatively clean by the standards of Indian cities, they were increasingly contaminated with feces and other pollutants. There were no schools in the vicinity and no municipal services, not even electricity connections. Medical clinics and hospitals were miles away. In that context of utter want, anything that the Lutheran World Service did—whether it was the crèches and schools it built and ran or its adult literacy sessions, basic health programs, and training classes for “cottage” industries—provided a lifeline, possibly even a way to climb out of poverty.
Everything I saw and learned over several weeks of visits to a bewildering number of programs, I turned into a report for the charity organization as well as an article published in Bengal’s venerable English-language newspaper The Statesman. My article was painfully earnest in its portrayal of the charity’s work—which was probably why the subeditors gave it the maudlin title of “Light at Least a Candle.” But the staff of the Lutheran World Service was delighted by the public attention it got for their work.
Later that summer, I volunteered at a grassroots organization working in rural Bihar. It had been recommended by the Lutheran World Service, which provided some of its funding. The three-day journey by train, bus, and cycle rickshaw took me from the sooty industrial expanse of Calcutta to the sleepy provincial towns of Patna and Muzaffarpur and then on to villages, which gave way to scattered hamlets, consisting of a few mud huts grouped together.
Eventually I arrived at the Paroo Prakhand Samagra Vikas Pariyojna, which in Hindi literally means “project for the comprehensive development of Paroo.” All in all, its premises consisted of a tiny brick office, about a dozen mud-and-thatch huts, and a makeshift acacia hedge circling the compound. As a visitor, I had been allotted an independent hut, consisting of a tiny room furnished with just a newar cot. There were no lights or fans, because there was no electricity connection. Water came from communal hand pumps for bathing and drinking. The dry pit toilets were functional and clean, placed near the residential huts. A kitchen housed in one of the larger huts was where the group’s dozen staff were served simple vegetarian meals, all of us sitting in rows on the ground.
The atmosphere was consciously that of an ashram, a traditional Hindu hermitage. It reflected the asceticism of the group’s founder, a middle-aged American named William Christensen. I knew from the Lutheran World Service that William-ji—as he was known locally, ji being an honorific—was a Christian priest from the Marianist order that dedicates itself to working with the poor. But William-ji did not proselytize. For all purposes—barring his looks—he was an Indian villager, fluent in Hindi and the local Maithili dialect, always dressed in a lungi, banyan, and rubber slippers. The staff, all men, were of diverse faiths, including Hindu, Muslim, and Christian.
I threw myself into the work. Education was one of the pillars of the group’s efforts—chosen precisely because the Dalits, the former “untouchables,” had for eons been barred by the dominant castes from being educated. (Dalit, meaning “oppressed” in Marathi, was adopted by the former “untouchable” castes in the years following India’s independence as a self-description expressing pride and assertiveness, much like the term “black” was adopted by African Americans.) Harsh caste strictures also forbade them to own any land, the key source of wealth and productivity in rural India. Because the group could not get public schools to take in the Dalit children—the teachers and students were exclusively from the dominant castes—they established small schools near the Dalit hamlets in the area.
Those were schools in name only—held under shady trees, in a cattle shed, or in a large hut. But they were overflowing with children, from toddlers to teens, grouped together in a mass, as each school had just one teacher. The children were unfailingly attentive, repeating the Hindi alphabet and words that the teacher was writing on the blackboard or singing songs with gusto. When the midmorning meal of daal, rice, and bananas was served, they ate it hungrily but even then maintaining the politeness and order that are expected of Indian children.
Dalit families were initially wary of sending their children to the schools, terrified that it would excite the wrath of the dominant-caste landlords. When those fears eased—in great part because of William-ji’s mediation with the landlords—the pent-up demand for schooling was so overwhelming that the charity was soon forced to limit enrollment to just one child from each family, typically the eldest girl, in an attempt to correct the pervasive cultural bias against women. It was heartbreaking to see the younger siblings standing wistfully near the schools every morning, sometimes repeating aloud what they could hear the teacher saying. William-ji readily agreed when I asked him if it would be possible to start afternoon classes for the children not going to the day schools. When the afternoon schools opened soon after, the classes were, from the very first day, flooded with eager children. I felt prouder of that development than anything else I had ever achieved in my life.
By dusk, I’d return to the vicinity of the ashram, given the risk of encountering one of the many poisonous snakes in the dark. I’d stop outside to watch the cattle wending their way home without coaxing or herding. I could almost hear my mother exclaiming that the Hindi word for this precise time was so accurate and lovely—godhuli, “cow dust,” literally the haze of dust kicked up by their hooves.
I returned to Calcutta changed forever by that summer of 1984. My own suffering seemed less random and unfair now that I could see so many other people who had also been wrongfully cast out by society, many of them suffering immeasurably more than I had. The passion I felt for social justice was genuine; it also made me feel that I was being an upright and good person, that I was living up to the very best aspects of the dharma my family held dear. That gradually bolstered my nascent feelings of self-respect and self-worth.
FOUR
COMING OUT
After about ten months in the United States, I couldn’t keep myself from telling the truth to one of my friends from Doon and later St. Stephen’s, now studying at the Wharton School in Philadelphia. I was visiting him over the Thanksgiving break and had hoped that the joy of seeing him would ease the dispirited mood that I had been in for several days, my torments intensified by the bleak November skies and the weeklong break from studies. But to my embarrassment—as our friendship had so far always been uncomplicated and fun—my spirits had not lifted.
In early evening, we found ourselves sitting face-to-face in his tiny apartment, him lounging on the sofa bed and me sitting rigidly upright on the chair. He was looking at me expectantly, with an expression of concern that I had not seen before in our decade of friendship. It made me break down. My confession erupted—haphazard and unformed, told through sobs. The only thing I recall is blurting out, at some point, “I like men, I like men.”
I’m not sure how long it was before I stopped crying. But it was clear that he had been comforting me for a while before the sound of his voice broke into my consciousness.
I had braced myself for the worst but received, instead, an outpouring of affection. At some point, as my tears subsided, I heard him say how proud he was to have me as a friend, that I was strong and brave to have faced all this on my own. From the tone of his voice alone, there was no doubting his care for me, as well as no doubting that the secret I had revealed to him had not lessened his affection for me.
For the first time ever, we talked about our Doon years. Despite his evident heterosexuality now, he told me about his romances at Doon, ribbing me for having forgone my chance of having sex with our attractive classmates. Toward the end of my stay with him, he, too, disclosed the secrets that had been weighing him down
: that in his early years at Doon he had been routinely sexually abused and that he had been beaten viciously during a terrible witch hunt launched by the school’s prefects to weed out homosexuals, in which they hypocritically thrashed the young boys they were themselves abusing. Our friendship became immeasurably stronger from that day, cemented by the trust we had placed in each other.
Buoyed by his support, I resolved to confide in Bharat, to whom I remained deeply attached and from whom I had never in my life hidden anything, except my gay identity. Some months later, in the spring of 1983, Bharat developed pneumonia, and I went to Duke University, where he was studying law, to look after him. On the evening I arrived, he had a high fever and looked visibly ill. But I forced myself not to latch onto that as an excuse to delay telling him. We had just turned off the lights in his bedroom—I was sleeping on a sofa bed—when I said I had something important to tell him, something that would explain why I sometimes appeared sad. He sat up in bed and said he had wondered about that.
At that point, I lost every shred of self-control and began to shiver uncontrollably, faced afresh with the terror of being rejected by someone I loved dearly. I began to cry. Bharat, no doubt shocked by that, began to rise painfully out of bed. So I forced myself to say, barely audibly and choked with sobs, “Bharat, I like men, I’m gay.” Even at that anguished moment, I felt a twinge of pride that I had identified myself as gay and gone beyond the euphemism about “liking men” that I had used with my friend in Philadelphia.
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