‘Thank you, sir.’
I got hammered on the football field that afternoon. I was pushed, trampled on, called a girl/pussy/wimp, and punched in the gut. If it were any other day, I would have crawled off the field but not today. I had to stand up and run, to prove I was nothing they wanted me to be. They tried hard to run me over, have me beg for mercy, concede defeat and walk off, admit I was weaker. Because gay is weak. It’s feminine. ‘Well, fuck them!’ I said in my head and ploughed through the match even as my heart pounded and I tore at least a couple of ligaments. Back in the changing room, I got out of the shower and saw the entire team standing in front of me, still in their gear.
‘What?’ I said, my guard up again.
Something bad was about to happen.
Vibhor stepped up. ‘You’re gay, dude. You stayed in our midst and didn’t tell us the truth. You’re a fucking traitor, man,’ he said murderously.
The others nodded.
He continued, ‘We can’t compete with you on the team. We can’t have a gay defender in our team and get laughed at. You have to leave.’
‘Why don’t we let the coach decide that?’
Vibhor laughed and mimicked a girl’s tone, ‘Why don’t we let the coach decide that? Fuck the coach. I decide what will happen on this team.’
And then at his command, the guys stripped me. They were too many of them. I connected a few punches, broke a couple of noses but they overpowered me soon enough. Five of them held me down, one of them stuffed an underwear in my mouth, and Vibhor and the striker, dug their studs repeatedly on my knee and my ankle till they were satisfied I was damaged enough. They took my clothes and peed on me, asking me if this was what I liked. Before leaving, Vibhor spray-painted the words ‘GAY’ on my chest and my back. He clicked a picture and threatened to make it public if I didn’t drop out of the team quietly. He whispered in my ears just before leaving, ‘That’s what you get for dumping me. I fucking love her. Ask her to call me back.’
They locked the room and they left me, bleeding and writhing in pain on the locker room floor.
*
I heard Aisha scream outside.
After fifteen minutes of trying, she managed to break the lock with a spanner she’d borrowed from the guard.
The door opened. She stood there, aghast. I staggered towards her, leaving footprints of blood behind me, and took the clothes I had asked her to bring. I quickly wore the clothes and cleaned up the wound on my knee the best I could.
‘Can you take me to a doctor?’
An hour later, my wound was stitched up and tended to, and we left the clinic. The doctor had given me a crutch to use for the next three weeks. We stopped at the Haldiram’s close to our house. She stood in line and got two plates of papdi chaats for us; back when she was younger she used to drag us down here every Sunday for it.
‘Why did they do this?’ she asked, her face white as a ghost’s.
‘You know why.’
There was no point in hiding it from her any more.
‘We need to register a complaint against the entire team. We need to do something about this. This is not done, Sarthak. They can’t do this to you.’
‘No, they can. I’m gay.’
‘Don’t you feel like doing something? We need to do something.’
‘Did you listen to what I said? I’m gay, Aisha,’ I said.
‘We need to—’
‘I’m gay, Aisha.’
‘I will talk to—’
‘ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME, AISHA? I’m gay—’
‘YES, I AM! I HEARD THAT!’ she shouted.
A few heads turned.
She whispered, ‘I know that! I have always known that. So what if you’re gay? The President of Ireland is gay!’ She banged the table.
‘Wait? You have known? Since when?’
‘Since the time I knew what being gay meant.’
‘Then why didn’t you talk to me about it, ever?’
‘I didn’t think it was important,’ she said. ‘And you never talked about it so even I stayed shut.’
‘. . .’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I laughed and she thought it was the trauma.
I said, ‘You remember a boy in your class? Eighth standard? Ramit?’
‘Yes, I do, the guy who was a little—’ Her voice trailed off.
‘The word you’re looking for is gay. Yes, he was effeminate and you used to proudly bully him, call him names,’ I said.
She stared at the glass of water, guilty.
‘How was I supposed to tell you I was like him? I didn’t want you to hate me.’
‘I’m sorry. I . . . I just bullied him . . . I wanted attention. I didn’t mean any harm,’ she said, started to cry and threw herself at me, mumbling apologies.
‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I was just stupid and—’
‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’
Having her in my arms was unequivocally the best thing ever. Just then, her phone rang. It was Vibhor.
‘Are you going to pick that?’
‘No.’
‘Good. You can do without him,’ I said.
I didn’t tell Aisha about Vibhor’s threat and him asking me to tell her to call him back. It was for the best that she stayed away from him. How wrong had I been about him?
We ate in silence.
40
Aisha Paul
My voice didn’t matter.
Who would listen to me? I wasn’t strong enough to fight the rumours. It was they who had all the power. Who was I but a slut? The sister of a gay brother who had jerked off the entire football team. That’s what they said and everyone readily believed it. Victims of assault remain victims for long even after the assault is over, their wounds are constantly picked on. Accusations and fingers hover over them like flies over a septic cut.
‘You should complain,’ said Namrata.
The school corridors were hostile, littered with little landmines in the form of vicious teenagers and their caustic words, so we spent our lunch breaks in the basement.
I just laughed.
Just the day before, Vibhor had shared the picture I had sent him in my towel (amongst others) to a few of my friends, and of course, they hadn’t kept it to themselves. Word went around that even though we had broken up (because I was a temperamental, high-maintenance, moody bitch, I think that’s what women who don’t want to get raped any more are called), I still had the hots for him, and that I gave him secret blowjobs in dark alleys, behind dumpsters, and in movie halls.
Namrata would cry a lot for me during those times, because unlike me, she had a flickering hope for her voice to matter. But of course it didn’t. None of us mattered. We were of the wrong gender and the wrong orientation.
‘How’s your brother’s preparation going?’
‘Good. He doesn’t come out of his room.’
We went back to class.
Luckily, my brother was shielded from all the humiliating insults and rumours dished out on a regular basis. He had deleted his Facebook and Twitter profile during the preparatory leave for his board exams.
I rarely saw him during those days. He would only emerge from the room to go to the washroom. He filled pages after pages in his beautiful handwriting, committing everything to memory.
The board exams started and he was probably the most well prepared student in all of history. He was always the last person to enter his classroom during the exams. He would make sure he was the first person to leave after the exam as well. After every exam, he and I would go to KFC and have the chicken bucket, and it was a sort of purging for the nonsense he had to learn for every exam. The dysentery which followed was quite annoying though.
We got back home after the last exam to see a big cake with candles lit up in the living room and my father standing there, eyes twinkling, arms wide open.
We hugged our father. He said to Sarthak, ‘You w
ill do great.’
We cut the cake and ordered Chinese food like we used to whenever Dad was in town. Our order always remained the same—American Chopsuey, chicken fried rice, garlic chicken—and as usual, my mother pretended to be full and ladled most of it in our plates. I remember it to be one of the happiest days of my life. We clicked a few pictures though my mother pretended to be busy clearing the dishes. Once full, we settled in front of the television and watched a re-run of an old comedy show, and that’s when I told my parents about Sarthak’s decision to study abroad. Sarthak hadn’t told me about it but I had seen the brochures and the acceptance letters.
‘What? When?’ my father gasped.
Sarthak was clearly not ready for the conversation yet so I butted in.
‘They give full scholarships to only three students every year. He doesn’t even have to wait for the board exam results! It will be so good for him. He was waiting for the right time to tell you.’
My mother was already crying. She took Sarthak’s face in her hands, cradled it, and kissed it over and over again.
‘You did it all by yourself. We are so proud of you,’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen where she cried in peace. She wouldn’t see her son’s face for months at a time. First our father and now the son.
My father read through the acceptance letter, the boarding facilities, and his scores on the scholarship exam, and smiled proudly. He was crying too, well okay, his version of crying, which was to have his eyes filled with pools of tears while denying that he was crying.
‘This is good,’ he said. ‘But—’
‘It’s so far,’ my mother said, emerging from the kitchen, devastated. ‘How will I see you?’
‘Skype, Maa. We will Skype every day.’
‘As if he talks, Maa. You can keep a picture and talk to that. It would be more communicative for sure,’ I said and my mother slapped me on my back.
‘And you’re leaving in a month. There’s so much packing to be done. We will have to buy so many things . . . it will be so cold there . . .’ her voice trailed off. She stared at her feet and tried hard not to sob.
My father, usually not an expressive man, shook Sarthak’s hand and told him how proud he was of his achievement. My mother said she needed to make kheer to celebrate it and disappeared into the kitchen again. I followed her and saw her crying more than she had done when I had found her in the bathroom, almost dead. I patted her back for around five minutes before she gained control of herself.
‘I’m happy for him,’ she said. ‘So happy.’ I nodded. ‘Finally he will be happy to be away from here.’
‘Mom, don’t say that. He’s happy here too,’ I said and hugged my mother from behind as she kept working.
‘He’s not,’ she said, and gave me one of those looks only mothers possess, the one that says I know what you’re hiding, I always know what you’re hiding.
She finally said, ‘I know he likes boys.’
‘What! Are you crazy? No, Maa.’
‘I know. You don’t have to lie,’ she said, and kept working like it wasn’t her or any parent’s biggest nightmare ever.
‘How . . . how did you know? You’re okay with that?’
‘I’m okay with whatever makes him happy. I know why he’s going to that side of the world. I read the newspapers.’
Yes, she does, and to think of it, she couldn’t read a single word of English when she got married. She learnt it when my father taught Sarthak. We didn’t even notice when we went from ordering an English newspaper and a regional newspaper to just one newspaper.
‘It doesn’t matter to you?’ I asked.
‘His happiness matters to me. It’s uncomfortable but I love him and I will get to see him. That’s what matters. What would I get in being angry with him?’
‘Since when have you known?’ I asked and kissed her on her cheek and she swatted me away like a fly.
‘Ever since he was little. I waited for him to tell me. It’s okay though. He must have been scared.’
‘Does Dad know?’
‘I told him last year.’
‘. . .’
‘He was way angrier than I was,’ she said and smiled a little. ‘He stopped calling. But you know your father,’ she said and giggled, ‘he Googled and searched everything about being gay. He called me one day and said, “Our son is all right, he’s just unhappy, and that’s our fault, not his.” And since then, we have been waiting for him to tell us.’
‘Maa, you two are too cool for your own good.’
‘YOLO. And I’m dying anyway.’
‘Maa? What are you watching these days? And please, you’re not dying, stop being dramatic,’ I said, and wrapped myself around my mother who knew what YOLO meant. Like what else can you ask for in life?
We, sons and daughters, we underestimate our parents’ capacity to love us the way we are. I felt ashamed and so would Sarthak if he knew. Maybe that’s what it was really like to be a woman, to have the capacity to love and sacrifice and learn and change and stand up for the right, and maybe that’s what I should have aimed to have. I should have become my mother. She had done everything right.
The kheer made, we went outside where my father and my brother were going through maps on the Internet and Sarthak showed him pictures of his college, the football grounds and the libraries.
We all had the kheer, and I whispered into my mother’s ears, ‘Why don’t you stop him? He has family here.’
My mother smiled like I was a seven-year-old, ignorant about the ways of the world and said, ‘It’s time he makes some friends. We love him and he knows that but he needs to be loved by a great many more and who are we to take that away from him? We will love him, and he will love us, but there’s more to him than just us. He’s finally going some place where they would accept him, applaud him, and embrace him.’
I slumped on the sofa and imagined my brother being greeted by other gay brothers who knew what he had been through, a mystical land of equality and love and acceptance, and wondered if there was any place on earth where women received the same warmth. My Google search yielded nothing. A women is raped every minute even in the US and the UK.
Where’s that country for women?
A month later, my brother left, looking for happiness, friends and a voice, leaving my mother behind who pretended she was dealing well with it, my father who had never spent enough time talking to his son, and me who had to go back to school in three more days and face everyone.
Where could I run to?
41
Danish Roy
It was in the newspapers first.
Both my parents stayed at home that day, frantically calling Ankit who kept cutting their calls. They called his hotel in Mumbai as well without any luck. Furious, my father threw his phone, which landed on my mother’s favourite vase, smashing it to pieces. My mother kept reading the newspaper article repeatedly. It said in bold letters, ‘TranferB.com CEO asked to leave the company over irreconcilable differences over company policies. Resignation expected today.’
Not having built anything on my own, I didn’t know what it felt like to lose anything. The way I saw it, my brother still owned 15 per cent of the business valued at 80 crores, which meant he still got to pocket 14 crores which wasn’t bad for a twenty-one-year old. The only casualty in the whole ordeal was me—I would no longer get the HR job he had promised me.
‘I have got you the tickets,’ my father said, tapping on his phone. ‘I have sent you the address of the hotel he’s staying at as well. Go and talk to him. Ask him not to resign. Ask him not to let go of his company.’
‘Ummm . . . okay,’ I said.
I checked the tickets he had just sent me—business class. I tried not to feel happy about it. I was the worst brother ever.
‘You have to leave now! The flight leaves in two hours,’ shrieked my mother.
Five hours later, I was knocking at my brother’s door. I knew he was inside because I had checked with the
hotel staff. ‘Open the door, Ankit.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You have to know that I travelled business class today and it was fun. I got at least three forced smiles from the flight attendants.’
I heard the door click. My brother opened the door, hair in disarray, shirtless and definitely hungover. Smriti was there, too, wearing his shirt, and she waved at me.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi, Smriti. Aren’t you supposed to be working somewhere? Running a company? How are you always with my brother?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I should be leaving,’ she said, got dressed, kissed Ankit and left.
The hotel room was rather opulent and over-priced. I took a ridiculously expensive coke from the minibar, settled at the lounge chair near the wall-to-wall window overlooking the pool and said, ‘Mom and Dad sent me and asked me to tell you to not resign.’
‘I knew they would do that,’ said Ankit.
‘And you don’t want to.’ He nodded. ‘So what do you want?’
‘I want to start over. Work on a new idea. Do something exciting!’
‘Why would you want to do that? Why would anyone?’
‘See, this business was fun in the beginning but then the money came in and they started dictating what should be done. Those fuckers—’ He took a bottle of Absolut vodka and drained it into the commode. ‘They are paying for the hotel room. Anyway, it got really boring, Danish. I’m so glad they want me gone. I want myself gone.’
And then he opened his laptop and showed me a few business plans he was working on, all with complex, incomprehensible graphs and projections. Though I didn’t understand anything, I knew now how Ankit got the funding for his businesses—his excitement was palpable and I could feel his passion course through my veins even though I didn’t understand a single word of what he said.
‘I think you should resign.’
‘Right? Right! Mom and Dad would never understand,’ he said.
‘You do own the equity, right? That’s a lot of money.’
‘Dad would want my name in the papers again and that’s a long journey, Danish. They will have sullen faces till the time that happens again, if at all it does.’