To my utter surprise, Bharat burst out laughing, saying that he had guessed this several years before. And then, obviously to put my mind at ease, he proceeded to tell me about all the pretty boys he had been attracted to while at Doon.
That was a great leap forward. With my fears of rejection diminished, I gradually began to tell my closest friends. I realized that the intensity of my fears diminished with each successive confession, though I still remained tense and apprehensive.
I wrote to tell my dearest friends from my year of college in Delhi, Alka and Rosie, in a letter addressed to them together. Several weeks passed before I heard from them—such was the speed of even airmail to India—but my ties to them were so special that I surmised, correctly, that all I would find in their letters would be an outpouring of love and affection for me. I told Pratap, my eldest brother, when we next met.
My greatest surprise was when, on successive weekends while at Tufts, I confided in two dear friends, Sankar Sen and Siddhartha Gautam, who were studying at nearby East Coast colleges. (Sankar and I had been friends at Doon; Siddhartha and I had become close friends a few years earlier, when on holiday in Calcutta.) Both promptly told me that they were also gay and had been struggling to decide whether they could safely tell me about it! Those were life-changing developments—I now knew other gay people in flesh and blood. And they were wonderful individuals whom I loved and who were patently not abnormal or sick. I now had company in charting my life as a gay man.
A year after joining Tufts, I decided to confide in one of the handful of American friends I had made there, from the swim team. For no clear reason, I felt he might be gay, too. It was impossible to tell—he was a jock with a thick Mark Spitz mustache. Though I had never felt that he was attracted to me, I had the inkling that he was smitten with a mutual friend.
One evening, walking back to the main campus from the swimming pool, I told him that I was gay. He merely glanced at me and said, evenly, that he was honored that I had taken him into confidence, his expression remaining as controlled as ever. He then started to talk about our Latin American history class.
Our friendship carried on as earlier, our discussions involving swimming practice, classes, and other everyday matters. Though I wondered why he never asked me anything about my being gay—my other friends and Bharat always seemed to have new questions to ask of me—I was grateful that there was no strain evident in our friendship and let the matter rest there.
But then, some months later, over dinner at his off-campus apartment—he often cooked Kraft instant macaroni and cheese for me, amused that I found it irresistible—he suddenly began to weep, covering his face with his hands. I sat frozen with shock, unable to get up to comfort him. He blubbered that he was gay, that he was obsessed with our common friend, and was tortured as he didn’t dare confess his feelings to him.
That evening marked my first turn at helping another gay man confront the traumas of our condemned desires. It was strange to be in that position so soon after I had myself first confided in anyone.
Just as surprising, witnessing my friend’s anguish, was realizing that even though he was American, his burdens of fear and self-loathing were as terrible as mine. Like me, he had never had a relationship or even sex with a man; to keep up the pretense that he was straight, he had forced himself, for years, to date and have sex with women. His Catholic family expected him to get married, preferably to another Italian American, and to have a large family. He feared that he would lose them if he told them he was gay. He had never confided in anyone till now, harboring his tortured anxiety just as I had for years.
Even though my fears and sense of isolation began to ease now that I knew that I had the support of my friends and brothers, my self-hatred about being gay persisted. I continued to deny my desires in practice, my subconscious goal being to avoid the fact that being gay ultimately means having sex with men. In effect, I had broken free from solitary confinement only to wind up under house arrest: a more salubrious setting but a prison nonetheless.
My internalized homophobia was one factor in my embrace of the enduring current of Hindu philosophy that emphasizes the blanket repudiation of desire—material, sexual, and even psychological—in the individual’s search for wisdom and spiritual progress. This subjugation of all desire was spotlighted in the Bhagavad Gita—my father had gifted me a copy when I was first leaving for the United States—as well as vividly in Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Gandhi seemed just as tortured as I was, even when writing about heterosexual desires. His torment dated back to age sixteen, the precipitating incident being that he had failed to be with his father at the moment of his death because he was having sex in the adjoining bedroom with his wife, already some months pregnant. “This shame of my carnal desire even at the critical hour of my father’s death” was a source of such anguish for Gandhi that he believed it had directly led to the infant’s death within a few days of its birth. At the age of thirty-seven, Gandhi decided to forever abstain from sex, but he was to remain tormented by his sexual desires to the last years of his life.
Following those precepts, by my second year at Tufts, I led a markedly monastic lifestyle. I moved off campus to a tiny studio apartment, a bleak clapboard place buffeted by passing traffic. I had never yet smoked or drunk, and I remained strictly vegetarian. I gave up the expensive Fiorucci jeans I had worn in India for Levi’s, which I often teamed with Gandhian khaddar kurtas, the most visible assertion that I was now an aspiring follower of the Mahatma. Mornings and evenings, alone in my apartment, I practiced yoga and meditated. I read reams of poetry, having developed a passion for Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Federico García Lorca. Every night came to a close like the one before, with me sitting in the vajrasana pose on the floor near my bed, reading the Gita or Jiddu Krishnamurti’s philosophical works, facing a framed photograph of my yoga teacher in India, Ma Chaitnashakti, her face exuding a peace I longed for myself.
The solitude and reflection were helpful, even healing. I was particularly consoled by Jiddu Krishnamurti’s insistence on confronting fear—not particular fears, but fear itself, which, he said, was the crucial “first and last step” in any individual setting themselves “absolutely, unconditionally free.” So many of my youthful life experiences had been terrifying. More than anything else, I wished to live without the constant, overpowering feelings of threat and anxiety that had taken root in my Doon years.
I was also emboldened by Krishnamurti’s insistence that “truth is a pathless land” and every individual should think through every single matter independently and break with their dependence on the views of the herd or even of spiritual leaders, including Krishnamurti himself. He wrote, “To deny all morality is to be moral, for the accepted morality is the morality of . . . good citizens in a rotten society.” It was the very opposite of the conformity that had been drilled into me in my regimented school years.
And on homosexuality, in words that were music to my soul, he said bluntly, “Why do we make it into such an enormous problem? Apparently we don’t make heterosexuality a problem at all, but we make this into a problem, why?” All those insights, so impatiently critical of the dogmas of mainstream religions and standard morality, I mulled over hungrily, and they were liberating.
For the first time since I was a young child, I noticed, I was now often filled with joy—rising unexpectedly when I was biking home or looking at trees or reading poetry or listening to music; exactly the cartwheeling, ecstatic joy that I had known as a child. I felt an immense relief to know it again. One afternoon on the Boston Common, I spotted a young woman doing cartwheels effortlessly, endlessly, down a path and was struck with wonder, thinking, “Ah, that is precisely how my soul feels when I’m joyous.”
For all that, the unstated goal of my ascetic lifestyle was, I knew even then, an unhappy, unhealthy one. By being a celibate do-gooder, I could lay claim to being moral despite my sinful des
ires. In contrast, my subconscious reasoning ran, if I allowed myself to be actively gay by having sex, it would mean that I had embraced a sexuality that I still thought of as depraved and sinful.
Consequently, my romantic and sex life at Tufts was even more barren than at Doon, amounting to not even a single kiss or holding hands, even though thoughts of sex remained uppermost in my mind, consumed with desire as I was at the sight of all the attractive men on campus. I sometimes feared that I would lose all self-control if I saw another set of muscular golden thighs or a taut male stomach or firm pectoral muscles or the hint of armpit hair.
Two of my college mates cautiously showed that they were attracted to me—but I fled from both. With my panicked rebuffs, I inadvertently ruined those friendships.
Several women made obvious passes at me, too. Not wishing to hurt their feelings but afraid to tell them that I was gay, I played the innocent Third World student, pretending that I didn’t understand.
Eventually, in the summer of 1984, after graduating from Tufts, a few months short of my twenty-third birthday, I resolved to tell my father that I was gay, for very personal reasons that overcame my knowledge that he abhorred homosexuality.
I didn’t feel the need to tell my mother, because though we remained emotionally close, our relationship had not made the transition to an evolving, adult understanding, in great part because of her worsening mental illness. But over my years abroad, my father and I had become ever closer. I was moved by his encouragement of my passion for social justice. With my growing maturity, I had come to realize that he cared profoundly about poverty and injustice and was deeply ambivalent about our family’s privileged position, despite being a businessman with an appreciation of the finer things in life. Indeed, I understood that my growing sense of social justice was owed most to him, to what he had taught us brothers and to the personal example he set. I had come to admire his ability to cope uncomplainingly with whatever difficulties he faced, whether it was his mounting business problems or the inexorable unraveling of his marriage. I marveled that he remained cheerful as well as generous to others, regardless of his own stress.
More than anything else, there was the old imperative to be truthful with him because he had always put the highest stock on honesty, telling us children that anything could be forgiven if individuals remained unfailingly honest and trustworthy. If anything, I believed that I had lived up to the letter and spirit of my father’s dictum.
Though I was determined to tell him the truth, I became anxious about doing so once I reached Calcutta for the summer holidays. I kept imagining that he would be so consumed by anger that he would disown me. I should have had more faith in my father’s decency and love, but I lacked, at that young age, the capacity to think it through calmly. In a feverish, half-fantastical way, I made plans about which friend I could stay with if my father threw me out and how I would find the money for my flight back to the United States. (My tuition and other expenses were covered, as I had won a fellowship for graduate studies at the University of Minnesota.)
The right time to tell him never seemed to come. Two weeks of my vacation ticked away. And then one evening, on the way to our regular game of badminton at the club, my father asked in a tone that was distinctly purposeful, “Why didn’t you bring Anita along today?” My heart began to thud anxiously. This was not how I had wanted to start my confession, by discussing women.
I said, “I don’t want her to get the wrong notion—to think that she is my girlfriend.”
He was driving, but even so he turned momentarily to look at me.
After a few moments of silence, he asked, “Son, is there something you want to tell me?”
Now that I had been given a clear opportunity, all I wanted to do was to avoid it, to delay, to pull back from this precipice. I said, “Dad, there’s really no point, because your knowing won’t make either of us any happier.”
He pulled the car over to one side of the road, outside the luminescent marble expanse of the Victoria Memorial. I was frozen with fear. He looked at me with an expression of somberness and gentleness that I remember distinctly even today, and said, “Don’t worry. You can tell me anything.”
I buried my head in my arms, began to cry, and said, “Papa, I like men. I like men, not women!” My courage had failed me, and I couldn’t utter the word “gay.”
I waited, terrified, for the anger and the blows.
Instead, through my disorienting anxiety, I could feel my father hugging me tight, kissing me on my bowed head, saying over and over again that I was a special child, that he loved me enormously, that everything would be fine. I could not have dreamed up a happier response.
But I also heard him repeat, almost as if trying to convince himself with a mantra, “Don’t worry, son, we can fight this together. We can solve this.” Despite my gratitude for his loving response, I bristled inwardly. I knew he meant that I should go to a psychiatrist to change my orientation. My father was never the kind to give up on trying to fashion the life of his loved ones into exactly what he thought best. But, for that moment, I just gave myself over to the joy of being comforted by him and of hearing such deep love in his voice.
Of course, that discussion left a lot unresolved. Over the next few days, I could tell from my father’s unusual quietness and the intent way in which he looked at me that he was thinking about the discussion we had had. Not knowing what to do, I kept silent and wished the matter away.
But then, a week or so later, over breakfast, my father suddenly erupted with uncharacteristic rudeness, calling me “an unrealistic fool,” and left the table, food barely eaten, slamming the dining room door on his way out. At first I thought his comment had something to do with my plans to spend the summer working in violence-torn rural Bihar, which we had just been discussing and which he was opposed to because of the likely risks. By the time it dawned on me that he was actually referring to my homosexuality and my anger surged, he had already left for work.
Commandeering my mother’s car, I headed straight to his office on Shakespeare Sarani, incensed. He gave me a chilling look as I barged into his room without even knocking, but after seeing the anger on my face, he asked his staff to leave us.
I yelled, “Dad, I’ve never lied to you or done anything wrong, so if you’re ever rude to me again about my being gay, I’m going to walk out and you won’t see me again!”
My father parried the threat consummately. “How can you even be sure you’re homosexual if you’ve never had sex with either a man or a woman?”
I said, “Dad, trust me, I’ve always known that I’m attracted to men, not to women.”
True to his forceful nature, he continued to redirect the conversation. I began to feel foolish, standing there like an angry child opposite his imposing table, my back pressed against the wall to keep my knees from giving way.
He asked me not to tell anyone else, that I could at least agree to that wish of his. I said I would consider it but then immediately became angry at my acquiescence, certain that he wanted me to keep the matter under wraps more because of the social shame of having a homosexual son than out of concern for me.
To my surprise, I also felt a surge of satisfaction that my father was now paying the price for his own homophobia. “This will teach him a lesson,” I thought to myself. He would learn never to hate and condemn needlessly. This was sweet, ironic revenge.
He pushed further, saying I should get married, that that was what all homosexual men did in India and even in England.
“There’s no way I’ll get married, Dad.” I was relieved to find some firmness in my voice once again.
Not one to quit, he said, “You must promise to go to a good psychiatrist when you get back to America.”
I said “No” firmly, adding that I didn’t see how a psychiatrist could be of any use. My confidence began to return.
I went back to the point that I had been making at the beginning of our conversation, the point that was most import
ant to me. This time, I spoke with a sense of maturity that I had never known I possessed. “Dad, you have to treat me with respect. I’ve never lied to you, so don’t I deserve your respect?”
My comment must have hit at a nerve, because he lost control, shouting, “I feel sick at the thought of a man giving you a—blow job!”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, just think of me giving him a blow job!” I said without any forethought, equally out of control.
He looked stunned. I had won.
FIVE
FIRST STEPS
Now I felt I could allow myself to open up to relationships and sex, rather than constantly denying myself these needs. I began a new life at the University of Minnesota to study journalism, which I had now decided on as a career. It all felt unimaginably different from the desperation I had been sinking under just thirty months earlier at St. Stephen’s, before I left for the United States.
Just a few months after moving to Minneapolis, I summoned up the courage to go to a gay bar—something I had never yet done. In the back pages of the local weekly magazine, the Twin Cities’ equivalent of the Village Voice, I had spotted ads for two gay bars. I picked the Saloon, which conjured up images of rugged cowboys in sexy leather chaps.
On a Saturday night, I dressed myself in a white kurta-pajama (which I had washed, starched, and ironed to crisp perfection), certain that its stark Indian minimalism highlighted my exotic good looks. I put on an alluring dash of Dior’s Eau Sauvage and set off downtown by bus. I knew where the Saloon was housed because I had figured out the directions earlier that week, so that I would be able to find it at night without having to ask for directions. The neighborhood was deserted and looked even seedier than it did in the day.
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