Soon enough, the landlords would insist that Siddhartha move out, saying that his lifestyle was unacceptable in a respectable neighborhood. Though they strongly suspected that he was gay, it was never brought up. They had no firm proof, and the large number of women visitors must also have confused them. But, Delhi being lawless in such matters, the landlords either refused to return Siddhartha’s rental deposit or, without giving him due notice, insisted that he leave immediately or be thrown out forcibly.
Because I had long taken on the role of being Siddhartha’s responsible older brother, I inevitably got involved in the crises. Try as we might, matters would deteriorate. On one occasion, I came to blows with a landlord and his adult sons. Luckily, my years at Doon had made me a tough opponent, and they backed off after we traded a few punches.
Very often, Siddhartha and I—and occasionally some of our other friends—would arrive at the local police station to file a complaint against the landlord. There, facing a bunch of dismissive, rough-mannered policemen, we took pains to present ourselves as unimpeachably respectable, upper-class young men, not the bohemians that the landlords insisted we were.
At those times, both Siddhartha and I felt intensely fearful of being identified as homosexuals. Though we never came to discuss the particulars of our fears, his were doubtless very similar to mine. My fear sprang from knowing that the police would automatically brand me a low-life criminal because of Section 377. And because my criminality was defined by sex, the police would view me in the same way as they viewed prostitutes: as a sex-crazed person who deserved scorn and abuse.
Given that pervasive hostility, it was not surprising that the overwhelming majority of gay men and women, irrespective of their class, were closeted. In Delhi, through Siddhartha, I met a small group of gay men and women, all middle- to upper-income professionals and most a decade or more older than I. Numbering about two dozen, with the men in a majority, we were drawn together into friendship because of our shared secret orientation. Many of those men and women were candid about the matter only with their close friends and select relatives and had not come out in their workplaces or broadly in society.
In fact, the bulk of them were not out in any real sense at all; only their partners and that small group of people knew about their orientation. The most flamboyant man among our group of friends, a senior bureaucrat then in his forties, was married and had teenage children—a pretense that allowed him to lead an active sexual life with other men despite the visibility of being a bureaucrat.
I came to find that most gay men entered such sham marriages in a desperate attempt to keep their orientation from becoming known. The threat of blackmail and violence was an everyday reality, because most gay men had no place to meet, socialize, or have sex beyond public areas such as parks and toilets. That was many years before gay support groups and gay-friendly bars opened in Delhi, let alone in smaller towns and cities.
It was no doubt because of the stress and obstacles raised by secrecy and fear that so few among them were in relationships. There were only two or three long-term couples, all lesbian, among our group of friends. But even those women were guarded about their relationships outside the circle of family and friends. They passed themselves off simply as close friends sharing a flat. None of the gay men in our group was in a long-standing or live-in relationship. In all of Delhi, I knew of only two gay male couples, both part of the sequestered world of design and fashion but, even so, painstakingly discreet about their relationships and orientation.
The only time everyone let down their guard was when we hosted parties at one of our homes. Invitation was strictly through a network of friends. In those evenings together, there was an unfailing feeling of security, of having a safe space where the world’s hatred could not intrude.
They were often standing room only, because the parties were fun and inclusive. They were the only ones I knew of in Delhi where everyone was welcome, irrespective of orientation or class. The city’s one cross-dresser and a handful of working-class kothis—kothi is the Hindi term for a feminine man who cross-dresses and adopts women’s behaviors when he wishes—some of whom sold sex to men, would join us. So would three gay men from Western European embassies, two gay fashion designers, and some of the party boys who always hung around them.
Someone would begin to sing a Hindi film song, accompanied by someone inventively using a tin can as a dholak. Siddhartha or some other flamboyant character would swan into the center of the room, copying a Bollywood dance or a traditional mujra. The more camp the performance, the greater the praise.
Apart from such unguarded moments, the extent of fear that even the most privileged of gay men lived in was evident from the fact that not one of us, anywhere in India, allowed his real name to be used in the first major article in the Indian press on gay men, published in 1988. It was a cover story in the then widely read but now defunct Sunday, a liberal weekly for which I often wrote at the time. Titled “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” the article described us as “the country’s most silent and secretive minority.” It was an accurate description. The only gay man who spoke on the record, using his full name, was the British theater director Barry John, a foreigner settled in Delhi. There was still no prominent gay Indian man or woman in the public eye who could start rolling back homophobic stereotypes and assumptions and become a role model for others like them.
The first year of my return to India also marked my first adult sexual experience there. It happened on a visit to Bombay in early 1987, where I was staying with a close friend—the very one I had come out to a half decade earlier in Philadelphia—and his wife. One of their favorite pastimes was to tease me about my ascetic life: my yoga, my lack of interest in alcohol or cigarettes, and, most glaringly, my monklike sexual abstinence. One evening, they energetically ganged up on me, insisting that I get out of their house and not return until I got laid.
I gave in to their bullying, relieved to be forced to do what I ached to do anyway. I was more open to the possibilities here, in a place where HIV was not raging as it was in the United States—the first domestically transmitted cases, contracted and spread within India rather than from abroad, had been recorded just a few months earlier.
Of course, neither they nor I knew even one avowedly gay man in Bombay, so going out on a date was ruled out. There were no gay bars in the city in 1987. The possibility of finding dates through the internet was still many years away. But I had heard from Siddhartha, always a reliable guide on matters of the flesh, that men cruised for sex near Flora Fountain. So I walked the short distance there from my friends’ Colaba home.
As the ornate fountain came into sight, my heart began to hammer so uncontrollably that I stopped for a few minutes, worried that I’d be incoherent even if I met someone. On entering the small park circling the fountain, I detected several men’s forms in the poor light. I noticed a handsome man, Nepali in appearance, staring at me, dressed simply but neatly in a light shirt and dark pants. He came up and spoke to me in Hindi. We must have exchanged names, but my wits deserted me in a rush of nerves, and the next thing I remember, I was following him into a run-down office building on a side street.
We climbed three flights of creaking wooden stairs, tiptoeing past sleeping forms on the landings. He stopped on the top landing, lit by a weak bare bulb and street light filtering in through the grimy windows, and—to my shock—started unbuttoning his shirt. I realized then that that small space was his home. I was about to balk at having sex in that open space, but then desire overcame my fears.
He laid out a thin mattress and turned off the light. Casually, with his back to me, he peeled off his clothes. I watched breathlessly, my heart hammering. He turned to face me. He was beautiful naked—a David-like figure gleaming in the smoggy light, small penis jutting out high. He grinned upon seeing my admiration, came up to me, caught my hand, and placed it squarely over his penis, making me envelop it in my palm. His confidence was aphrodisiacal.
He kissed me. His lips felt thin and foreign, and his mouth tasted unpleasantly of onion and fried food. Naked and so close, I also smelled a rank odor from his armpits. But my aversion lasted just for a second; lust took over.
I began to kiss him back. Then, pulling him tight against me, I groped at his body and instinctively reached down to caress his testicles and the silky skin of his inner thighs.
He drew away and began to undress me, tugging at my T-shirt and pants. I realized, feeling gauche, that I was still fully dressed—I had not undone even a button in all this while. Touchingly, he folded my clothes with care, placing them with his own on a suitcase under the stairwell.
He pulled me down on the mattress, immediately laying himself atop me. For a moment, it felt odd to have a body and a cock rubbing so wildly against mine, someone’s lips suctioning at my mouth and neck, hands touching every part of my body. But I soon lost control again, kissing him back feverishly, biting his neck and small erect nipples with such force that I worried I would draw blood, running my hands without restraint over every part of his body.
At some point, he asked me in a whisper to take his cock in my mouth—or did I want him below, in my ass? In my state of desire, I wanted everything: to blow him, to be fucked by him. I whispered back, suddenly aware again of the people sleeping on the landing just below, to ask if he had a Nirodh. As Nirodh was the only condom brand available in India for decades, the word had become synonymous with condoms.
“Nirodh? Why a Nirodh?” He was clearly perplexed. I realized he had no concerns about AIDS; for him, condoms were solely a contraceptive barrier. Cursing myself for forgetting to bring a condom along, I told him that I couldn’t do anything much without one.
I didn’t explain to him why. He doubtless found my behavior highly peculiar—after all, why would a man insist on a condom being used when he didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant? Nevertheless, he said nothing.
He just spat in his hand and, reaching down, slathered the saliva generously over our cocks, the cool liquid a welcome comfort. Then he went back to kissing and rubbing against me, his body excitingly hard against mine, the pleasure making me forget about everything from condoms to the people sleeping nearby.
He came very soon, his semen bursting all the way to my chest. Then he lay still on me, his face buried in my shoulder, his breath coming fast. Lying there, despite suddenly becoming aware of the sweat and sticky mess all over my body, I felt a rush of satisfaction from giving him such pleasure.
After a while, he roused himself and began to masturbate me. I stopped him, whispering that I didn’t want to come. He kissed me on the mouth gently, again and again. I was astonished by how affectionate he was. Like me, he was aching for love and companionship just as much as for sex.
When I said I had to get home, he wiped his semen off me carefully with a towel and handed my clothes to me one by one. Once I had dressed, he embraced me for a long while, caressing my hair and whispering that I was extraordinarily beautiful. I could tell that he didn’t want me to leave.
And so it was that I had my first adult experience of sex in India, encapsulating all the paradoxes of gay life there. It was a country in which the only connections possible were brief sexual encounters with complete strangers—furtive and fearful yet offering pleasure and even the possibility of real tenderness.
SEVEN
LOVE—AND FEAR
But then, one morning in February 1988, over a year after my return, I finished an early walk through Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens—its pearl-like tombs and great trees ethereally beautiful in the mist—and exited onto Lodhi Road, where my car was parked. There I ran into a man who became one of the greatest loves of my adult life. It was a lucky accident, so fortuitous that it would not have happened if either of us had taken a few seconds more in reaching that pavement where our paths crossed, where we looked at each other, where we struck up that first conversation.
He was a mystery man: a Frenchman from Paris, though of Tamil and Vietnamese ancestry. He was a Bharatanatyam dancer. I had never heard of a name like his: Tandavan. (He told me that Tandavan was the manifestation of the god Shiva associated with the eternal cycle of renewal brought about by perpetual creation and destruction.) I had never seen anyone who looked like him, either—a dark Nureyev, breathtakingly sexy, incredibly gentle.
Tandavan was a decade older than I, but he looked ageless. I fell in love with him instantly, not bothered by the fact that we hardly even knew each other. He fell instantly in love with me, too. This was not the fantasy of a love-starved twenty-six-year-old—I knew it as a certainty, in an unfathomable way that I’ve never known since. A month later, Tandavan gave up his Paris apartment and returned to Delhi to stay with me in a small rented flat in Jor Bagh, a minute’s walk from the spot where we had met. We weren’t strangers anymore.
Had I been with a partner less loving and less self-assured, my accumulated burdens and fears would have rapidly wrecked any relationship, as had happened with Eric in Minneapolis. But Tandavan brushed aside all my problems as if they were trivialities. Often, through the years of our relationship, I thought to myself that he was like a loving parent who was patiently teaching a child the skills of life.
With my romantic life practically barren since my school days at Doon, I needed to love and be loved without restraint. That I did with Tandavan. We gave ourselves almost desperately to each other, as if we couldn’t believe we had found each other and wanted to make the most of this blessed good fortune before life snatched it away again.
Tandavan already had experience of life’s vagaries: his boyfriend of thirteen years had committed suicide after a long struggle with depression back in Paris, and though more than two years had passed, he was still drifting along, unable to wholly live in Paris or to leave it. My desperation sprang from years of yearning for romantic love as well as from fearing that I was doomed to a life without it. We promised to be with each other forever.
Tandavan had a gift for making everything sensually intense. Overnight, my world turned into a feast of color, smells, tastes, and senses that I hadn’t even known about until then. He fed me, by hand, from small turquoise blue bowls as iridescent, fragile, and perfectly formed as birds’ eggs. He called me nai-kutti—the Tamil diminutive for “puppy”—his tone making it a synonym for all the love he felt for me.
He dressed me in his chalk-white cotton lungis, with thin borders of gold, red, and blue. He bought handwoven papers to draw and paint on, making me stroke them with my eyes closed to feel their concentrated mix of nubby grain and silk. He brought me music: I fell under the thrall of Maharajapuram Santhanam and M. S. Subbulakshmi, as well as Maria Callas and Édith Piaf.
Of all those pleasures, the most sublime was watching Tandavan practice Bharatanatyam every morning on the small patio outside our flat. There was the rhythmic, syllabic Carnatic music, the vocals punctuated by the beats of a mridangam and the plaintive notes of a violin. There was the geometric precision of his arm movements. There was the strength with which he sprang and whirled from the demi-plié position. There was the resounding force with which his bare feet hit the ground. There was his beauty—his antelopelike musculature, neither distinctly male nor female, the expressiveness of his dark eyes, the sheen of sweat on his velvety brown skin, the single line of hair that rose to his navel, the areolas that ringed his nipples. Shiva must indeed look like this in his ecstatic, dancing form as the creator of life.
Tandavan, at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar
Then there was the physical everyday intimacy. I couldn’t get enough of that. My Brahmanical obsession with personal hygiene fell away. On waking, I kissed Tandavan passionately without waiting for either of us to brush our teeth. I wore his shirts to work and his kurtas at home, inhaling his distinctive chocolaty smell from them. I showered with him, and we soaped every part of each other’s bodies—parts that I had never yet touched in another person, let alone caressed. I licked, kissed, and mouthed every
single inch of him—deep into his mouth, his ears, his eyelids, his nipples, his armpits, his almost womanly buttocks, his anus, his balls and dark cock, his toes, and the soles of his feet, cracked and leathery from dancing. The tastes of the most intimate parts of his body were the richest nourishment to me.
And then there was the sex, lovemaking beyond anything I had ever imagined. Every inch of Tandavan’s body seemed to be an erogenous zone, alive to pleasure, so much in contrast to mine, which had till then been deadened by denial. His nipples—as large and sensitive as I imagined a woman’s to be—became my obsessions, and I tongued and sucked at them as if I were an infant suckling his mother.
Tandavan taught me to forget myself and surrender to pleasure. A giant dam of desire, pent up since my adolescence at Doon, broke inside me. We had sex all the time, many times a day. There were hour-long sessions as well as quickies. Sex when I was burning with fever; sex when he was unwell. We were insatiable.
Tandavan was the first person to fuck me. It was agonizingly painful. Not only was I a virgin, but he was rough with desire and his cock was large. I remember flailing angrily at him to stop, to go slower, to ease the burning pain. But ultimately he was all inside me, and despite the continuing discomfort and pain, there was soon more unmanageable pleasure than I had ever known before, driving me to the most uncontrolled, wild orgasm. (I thought to myself that heterosexual men—knowing only how to fuck—were missing out on a realm of fantastic erotic pleasure.)
And soon, to my astonishment, through Tandavan I discovered an insatiable pleasure in fucking. My fantasy role-playing from my childhood had always been to be fucked by the men I was attracted to—but now, with Tandavan, I found I loved to fuck even more than being fucked, though being fucked gave me the most all-consuming orgasms.
There was physical pleasure beyond my comprehension in the sex—and there was communion. We had to possess each other and ejaculate inside each other for our union to strengthen, to be fertilized.
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