‘I will miss you,’ Aisha had hugged me and cried on the day I was supposed to leave. She hung on to me for her dear life. I would have changed my mind but the fees had been paid by the scholarship trust and I had to go. Leaving my little sister behind made me sick in the stomach.
The first few days in the boarding school was horrendous, I would cut classes and fake illnesses so I could call Aisha and we would talk for hours; whatever little money I had would be spent on long STD calls. If I could have, I would have gone back in a heartbeat and never let go of my sister’s hand ever again. She was the love of my life.
Slowly, the homesickness wore off and I started to enjoy my time at the boarding school. It was everything a young boy could have hoped for. I was good at sports, great at academics and the teachers loved me, already forecasting my rise to the Head Boy position when the right time came. And then slowly everything came down like a house of cards.
I was thirteen when I realized I liked boys. There I said it. I can already sense the derision in your eyes, the coldness that’s creeping up on you, the sense of hatred and disgust taking over whatever else you know about me. It doesn’t matter if I was a good son or a good brother or a good student, it just matters that I am gay.
I tried denying it at first, forced myself to talk to girls, objectifying them, hoping I would feel something for them, thinking it was just a phase everyone goes through in their life. No. I am gay, gay for life and there was no escaping that.
I started to hate myself. Sooner or later, I knew it was all going to blow up in my face. I was a disgrace, an anomaly, something to be mocked and stereotyped and laughed at in Sajid Khan movies. Luckily for me, I wasn’t feminine. Funny, how people make fun of men who are effeminate. Aren’t their mothers feminine? Aren’t the girls who laugh at feminine gay men themselves feminine? And who the fuck decides what’s feminine and masculine? And look at me, I’m tagging all gay men as feminine even though a lot of them aren’t.
My grades started to drop, I started being sick a lot, like physically sick, like my body was revolting, as if it was disgusted by how my brain worked. Every night I would sleep wishing the next morning would be different, that I would be like everyone else, but nothing changed. I wanted to eat all the time but I couldn’t keep it down and would throw up. Knowing myself better made me nauseous and sick and hateful and vile.
It took me months to accept it. I knew things would never quite be easy for me for the rest of my life. We evolve but do it rather slowly. I was sure homosexuality wouldn’t be a part of our culture during my lifetime, which I often hoped would be short.
But things turned for the better again. On the boxing team was another boy. Big. Strong. And quite popular. Karan and I struck up a friendship and even though I never told him about my ‘condition’, it seemed he knew. Weeks later, I broke down in his arms and told him who I was or what I was or whatever and he said it was okay. He said it was okay! And then, in the changing room of our boxing gym, he had kissed me. That was not the only place we would kiss in. Post that, we started hanging out quite often in dark corridors, deserted changing rooms, and shower cubicles. But soon enough, the jig was up.
Someone started a rumour about the two of us, and it was vicious. It was the half-truth anyway. Karan was the popular one and he controlled the narrative of the rumour. He told people I had begged him to allow me to suck his dick and he had conceded after weeks of trying, that too, just to see how it felt. Which was as big a lie as saying I was straight. People bought it hook, line and sinker, and from then on began the daily crucifixion of Sarthak Paul, the gay boy who begs people to fuck in his mouth. My classmates revelled in my misery.
What followed sometimes seemed worse than death. The students of my class literally would chase me across corridors, laughing, pointing fingers, mocking me; they would draw me (or what they thought looked like me) on the classroom boards with a dick in my mouth, and for two months it looked like nothing else happened in the school. I was hit, slapped, punched, kicked, humiliated, spat on. I was flashed dicks in the dorm rooms, made to parade naked in the locker room and asked to shag in front of the entire class in the hostel.
Nothing happened to that boy, Karan. Because, of course, he was the man in the lie. I was the one on my knees, supposedly begging. I was the woman in the relationship that never existed, and aren’t the women always the ones who are at the butt end of everything. If they fuck when they want to they are sluts, if they don’t they are prudes. But why was it happening to me? I was a man. And to think of it, all the abuses hurled at me were misogynistic. But the girls stood watching and even laughed and called me a pussy.
I started spending days on the roof of the faculty building, legs dangling over the edge, thinking of jumping off and ending it all. What had I done? It wasn’t my fault. If it were up to me, I would be the straightest person in all of history. I would be Ghengis Khan and father a billion children. If there was an active God and if this were against religion why would he create me? What did I do in my mother’s womb that pissed him off so much that he made me gay? And what do people think? We are so attracted to a certain gender that we pick a life full of relentless hatred? Does our attraction, or choice, mean so much? Of course not! Because it’s not a choice. It’s not in our hands. We don’t fight for our right to be attracted to the person of the same sex, we fight for our right to exist.
Soon enough I started to think of ways I could die. The only thing that kept me alive was the face my sister, Aisha, how she could cry and bawl at seeing my face crushed against the pavement.
I even wrote an impassioned suicide note. I hoped to God I was the only fourteen-year-old who had to do that because he was made a certain way. And I addressed it to Aisha. My scholarship was rescinded because of my low marks. I survived the year somehow and came back home to join our old school.
I had never been so happy to see Aisha. In the one year I had been away, she had grown into a wonderful woman, while I had been told by my peers that I was no longer a man.
But then the rumours about Aisha started, and I had to step away from her. I would have fought the world for her but I was tried and defeated. I had no strength left. I had done my fighting. I couldn’t take it any more; no matter how much I loved her, I had to step away. I was done being humiliated and laughed at. Call me a coward but I wouldn’t have survived it.
I would have jumped off the roof.
26
Danish Roy
‘Thank you for doing this. This is going to be awesome!’ my brother said as he drove his Mercedes through the choc-a-bloc traffic in Central Delhi like only he can. I suspected he was a trained spy on the side.
I had told my brother I was back on the market and I wanted a shot at Smriti’s cousin, Kanika. He said he would take care of it without making me sound like a complete loser in front of Smriti. This date had nothing to do with Aisha going on her date with Vibhor today. Absolutely nothing.
‘You picked this? Of all the places, you picked this?’
He flicked the keys towards the valet outside the most expensive club in Delhi. It had only been weeks since Verve opened and only rich kids and Bollywood stars and businessmen in gleaming Bentleys visited the jaunt. Well, my brother was one of them now but I was still a lowly school teacher of sorts. And as if he was listening to the monologue in my head, he slipped his black American Express card into my back pocket. He smiled, and shameless as I was, I didn’t protest.
About half an hour later, Smriti walked in with Kanika, and I have to say it took all my restraint to not drool. If Smriti was a strong seven, Kanika was a ten and a half, and I’m saying it despite being vehemently against marking women.
‘Hi,’ said Ankit, and greeted both of them by hugging them.
I smiled at Smriti and did what could be called an awkward cross between a handshake and a hug. Same with Kanika who smelt of fresh roses. Why do women smell so nice all the time?
‘Nice place,’ she said to me.
&nb
sp; ‘He’s paying. He comes here often so they usually have a table for him,’ Ankit butted in and nudged me. Kanika flashed a shameless smile at me.
A quick scan through the alcohol and the food menu was enough to know that our bill would be upwards of fifteen thousand. I felt my back pocket to check if I still had my brother’s card. Four beers later Smriti and Ankit were snogging shamelessly. Kanika and I were yet to exchange a single word other than guessing the next song by the opening music piece.
It was time I made my opening move. I had to have something to share when Aisha would narrate to me how her date went in the next counselling session.
‘So I heard you were a lecturer? How’s that? It’s fun? You always wanted to be that?’
‘Yes, it is fun,’ she said and didn’t say anything for a while. She sat there, swaying her head to the music, scrutinizing every girl on the dance floor, silently judging them.
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s a job,’ she said. ‘You like yours? Talking teenagers out of drugs and sex?’
I could sense the condescension in her voice. ‘I like it. They need guidance.’
‘Teenagers are teenagers. They won’t listen to you.’ I shrugged and said otherwise.
‘So you plan to do this your entire life?’ she asked half-heartedly while she tweeted ‘Having a good time at Verve’ with six hashtags dedicated to the good life.
‘I can’t think of anything better. So what do you like to do? Other than teaching?’
‘Nothing. Just go out. Eat. Party once in a while.’
Silence again. She looked into her phone and liked a bunch of Instagram pictures of curtain patterns, baby animals, and watched a couple of vines. So I started the conversation again. ‘So, you just broke up, right? Dealing with it well?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any recent books you might have read?’
‘No.’
‘Movies?’
‘Yeah, watched one. Don’t remember the name though.’
She refreshed her Twitter account and tweeted ‘drunkkkkk, biatches, Sachurday Nite!’
‘Did you win a spelling bee contest when you were young?’
‘No.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘So what do your folks do? Do you have siblings? I love the dress you’re wearing. Where did you get it from? What kind of music are you into?’ I wanted to see if anything mattered to her at all.
‘Huh? What were you saying? I just saw this on Facebook. It’s a slow motion window of a cat yawning!’ she said and thrust the phone in my face.
‘That’s probably the most enlightening thing I have seen this month.’
She got back to her phone. She wasn’t even listening to what I was saying.
‘You’re a slut!’ I shouted.
‘What?’
‘Not for you. I was just saying the lyrics of the song aloud.’
‘Oh, okay.’
I chugged another beer to make this conversation more bearable. This was the reason why I had hardly ever dated. I don’t have the requisite charm to make anyone talk. She was looking into her phone again, this time laughing at GIFs of cute pandas falling asleep.
She would take breaks from looking into her phone to deride a random girl making out on the dance floor, or tell me about a dress she wanted to buy, or how she really liked a new club that opened in GK, or how much she hated people from East Delhi, or how a friend of hers is a total slut, and how a guy friend got a terrible haircut. I still knew nothing about her. She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking at me. Like you shout at the television. They were just bits and pieces of information about other people. How was I supposed to know her better? By which new store had opened in a new mall? Or by listening to her story of how her friend was dating an ugly guy? Or how desperately she needed to change her car? It was boring. She was like a tabloid newspaper. Maybe I was expecting more out of this dating thing.
A little later, my brother and Smriti dragged us to the dance floor. And suddenly, it was as if Kanika had been pumped with an adrenaline shot. She danced, and sang, and gyrated, and updated her phone thrice, clicked fifteen pictures, visited the washroom thrice to fix her hair, and danced a little more. She asked me to charge her phone, and then had five shots. I wondered how Aisha was faring in her date.
The night almost over, all four of us went back to our table, and the cheque arrived. It was for 18,000 rupees. Ankit passed on the cheque to me and I took out my own card instead of his. I wanted to pay because I wanted this to be a reminder to myself about spending time with women who couldn’t do me the simple courtesy of answering my questions. Now, I might not be smart, or funny, or charming, or even worth talking to, but I do expect the person in front of me to answer my questions or at least state their disinterest in talking to me in clear words. If this was what dating meant, then I was glad I wasn’t dating anyone.
We left the place at three in the morning. Later that morning, Kanika texted me that she had fun and we should do it again. Yeah, right. Next time I feel like dating, I will make sure that I go out with my phone.
27
Aisha Paul
It was a great day, wasn’t it! Yes, of course it was.
The picture Vibhor uploaded of him and me that morning already had seventy-two likes. People were congratulating us for looking good together. Because that’s what matters—looking good together. He was so kind to do that, parade me as his girl in front of the entire school, branding me like a cow, shouting to the world that he was now officially off the market. He was committed. The bad boy had settled down and I was the one who’d managed to make him do that.
That’s got to count for something. I spent the last evening with Vibhor Rana, captain of the football team. My brother vouched for him when I told my mother about the impending date. She frowned, complained, asked a gazillion questions about him, his family, his interest in academics, talked to him on the phone, and then finally let me go.
How was it? Well, it was different from what I had learned from my practice date with Danish.
‘You’re late,’ Danish said as I knocked and entered his room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a while, a little haggard, and a bit angry.
‘Vibhor caught me in the corridor. Sorry,’ I said.
‘Oh yes. Big date yesterday? What did you do? Was it fun?’ he asked.
‘It was great! What did you do last night? You seem like you didn’t sleep.’
‘I just went out with my brother on a double date.’
‘Great.’ Words dried up in my mouth immediately. Someone had fun, like I did, and I wasn’t happy about it. I continued, ‘He took me to this really nice terrace restaurant. It was beautiful.’
Danish asked me, ‘So did my training date help?’
‘Yes, most certainly. Thanks,’ I lied.
I was glad I wasn’t dating Danish. He knew nothing about dating.
*
Last night, Vibhor picked me up in his dad’s Skoda Superb and we drove to Hauz Khas Village while he blasted his favourite songs, and told me how pretty I looked. He had dressed up for the date. He looked gorgeous, almost like a movie star in his crisp white shirt, which strained against his veiny forearms, blue trousers and light brown Oxford shoes, a sharp contrast to my pyjamas. I had thought from my practice date that it was okay to go to a date in pyjamas. But Vibhor stopped at a mall near my house and bought me a beautiful yellow dress, saying it was more appropriate. He couldn’t take his eyes off me when I emerged out of the changing room and even winked at me when I twirled in my new, little yellow dress. I blushed so hard it felt I would melt into a little puddle.
‘See, so much better. We will steal the show,’ said Vibhor. ‘No one’s going to look at anyone else today.’
‘Are you sure we aren’t dressing up too much?’
‘This is Delhi.’
We left the mall and resumed our drive, his hand constantly on my right
thigh, giving me goose bumps all over my body. No one had ever touched me like that before.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Sure, Aisha.’
‘Vibhor? How did my brother react when you told him about us?’
‘He didn’t. He was pretty chilled about it. We have known each other for years now.’
‘Okay.’
‘You seem disappointed. Isn’t that a good thing?’
‘Yes, it is but—’
‘Damn! Look at that car,’ he said and pointed to a red Gallardo at a distance. ‘I asked one from Dad but he said it will be an open invitation for the tax guys to mount a raid.’
Vibhor even brought a gift for me, a perfume. The price tag was cut out but later I Googled and found it was quite expensive. It was so sweet of him; he really knew how to be with a girl. He then held my hand during the entire drive, my clammy, sweaty, nervous hands, and never complained once. Sometimes, he would drive with his eyes on me, glittering in the reflection of my yellow dress, tell me how great I looked, and it would totally freak me out. He was a bad-ass in a traffic violation sort of way. Megha would have really liked him. The restaurant was beautiful and despite my feeble disapproval, he bought me a large cocktail which was so pretty and colourful and fruity that I couldn’t help but taste it. It was very alcoholic too and I almost spat it back into the glass. He goaded me into having another sip, and then another one, and I finished the drink. I was then what I guessed people call ‘tipsy’. He ordered my food as well. I really wanted to have biryani but he wanted to share food so we ordered for a pasta for me instead. He told me again that I looked pretty.
‘She will have another one,’ he said.
‘No, I won’t,’ I said. The tipsy feeling had given way to a slight nausea and it was getting worse. But he remained adamant and another tall drink came flying to our table. Luckily, a little later he went to the washroom and I drained the glass into a flower pot. ‘It was the last drink I am having today! I think I’m totally sloshed,’ I said brightly when he came back.