That little monkey boy Bunny was older than me. Once, at the kotha, he was caught kissing me when I was five or six. I was lying under his weight in an empty room that belonged to a tawaif, who was probably out shopping. He was sitting on my stomach. Another tawaif spotted us and reported us to our mothers. His mother beat him. I did not understand why. What horrible thing had he done? He must have seen someone do it, maybe in a movie? His kisses were not violent. My mother beat me as well. I did not understand why I, too, was being whacked. I could not have possibly seduced him at my age. Thereafter, when the boys played hide-and-seek in the afternoon, Bunny and I hid behind a curtain and kissed. It felt great when another boy fondled me. This was an early indicator of my orientation. Those who opposed it, our mothers, were violent with us. But when we found an intimate space, it felt good. So we did it even more frequently, perhaps as a form of resistance against those who punished us for it. Did that make us children masochists? I was experiencing and expressing my sexuality quite early. Playing with the girls also involved some perfunctory kissing in the kitchen-set game or the doctor-doctor game, where we would touch our private parts and giggle, but that did not thrill me so much as what was forbidden and done secretly with the boys behind curtains and under quilts in pin-drop silence—as if this was illegal to engage in publicly.
In the beginning, my sexual experiments must have been a reaction to the violence. I did not seek it, but when a boy initiated it, I did not deny its sensual pleasures. It was around this time that the secret games of the kotha slipped into my quilt in the hostel and continued to be a pleasurable game to me. A handsome boy my age, Vaibhav, who played football, sneaked into my lower bunk bed from his bed across. He told me a story about a romantic couple. Most likely his parents. A fairy tale, he said. Do you know how they kissed? he asked. How would I? This part was not in the Hans Christian Andersen books. No, I said. He re-enacted it with me. He then pulled my pyjamas down. What are you doing? I asked. Sssh, he said, I am showing you how they loved each other. We rubbed our bodies together. It was exciting and dangerous. What if a matron walked by and caught us? We had to be absolutely silent, like the stars winking at us. We became night-time lovers like the moon and the clouds outside the tall French windows in the dormitory, giving us both light and shade, hide-and-seek. He said we could play husband and wife. I was going to be the wife—but naturally, I had the shy and quiet demeanour for it. I was the girlier boy of the two—he, of course, although in my eyes fair and pretty, was a stud on the football field. Clichéd times, I suppose, the uninformed ’80s. I did not mind the role play. I was all set for pregnancy through a kiss. A senior student caught us snogging on a weekend afternoon in bed. He did not complain to the teachers. Instead, he asked me to meet him behind the canteen. He tried to kiss me. I resisted. I will tell everyone, he said. I ran away and informed my studly husband. Vaibhav challenged the senior boy, saying he would inform the teachers that the senior was harassing the two of us. The senior backed out. Vaibhav had some solid conviction there. Sadly, he stopped sneaking into my bed at night. The marriage was short-lived.
Young boys my age who were fondling me at the kotha and now at the hostel … what must have been on their minds? Did they see me as a girl? A substitute for a girl? I was not making cow eyes at them. I did not have sexual thoughts. How did it start? My equal and consensual participation in these acts of passion … where did that stem from? I did not know right from wrong. I responded to and embraced their touch. However, I never initiated it. I never took the first step. Does that mean I was enacting the passive role of the traditional girl, who only responds to the advances of a boy? And what about the fact that it was towards any and every boy who approached me softly, gently, lovingly? When the senior boy demanded it, I refused.
At the kotha, Chaman, the wastrel adult brother of the skinny Meena Bai, had begun ambushing me in the dark gully and forcibly kissing me. His spiky beard dug like porcupine needles into my cheeks, turning them pink. That I did not like. He was rough. I complained to my mother. She told him to stop troubling me. He laughed and said he was teasing me. He did not stop. I dreaded stepping out. The young boys who played cricket in the gully in the afternoon began teasing me. Some called me a chhakka, a derogatory term for a trans or intersex person; some called me naazuk, another taunt for a feminine boy; some called me a girl; and some called me a randi ka beta, son of a whore. What had I done to provoke them? In these narrow lanes, where the courtesans of Calcutta thrived, and where a messiah had not reached to protect them, the words boomeranged in the air, as if someone had announced the title of a new grindhouse thriller: Shaitaan Ka Beta, Jungle Ka Beta, Aladdin Ka Beta, Randi Ka Beta. I was never pleased about the radio broadcast. I walked as far away from the din as I could, scraping my shoulder against the wall of a house to avoid inviting violence. The hubbub of insults would die out soon when the boys grew up, or if I had the temerity to approach them and cup their fuming crotch. In which case, I would not be alive to be writing this. Verbal abuse made me unflappable—the more they laughed, the more resilient I became. It is not bravery—just a kind of surrender that is equal parts cowardice and fait accompli triggered by being branded a randi ka beta, I suppose.
The kotha was a dilapidated fort that protected me from the prying eyes of patrons who could have been potential predators. The same prying eyes that bore through the women’s artifice of sequinned blouses and scented gajras could not find a trace of me when they entered the courtyard. We were tucked away when the mujras began. Porous musical notes floated out to the streets in the evening, stirring the hearts and loins of louche men. Roadside ruffians who mocked me wished that I would lead them to the mujra dens as their sycophant pimp. They used to beckon me with sharp whistles and hoots when their wallet and groin were tumescent with their desire for a randi ka beta as a substitute for the real thing. An effeminate pimp’s waggish manners might have suited me, but it was a job I never applied for, despite my unimpeachable qualifications in their eyes as a randi ka beta. Women, young girls and me—it seemed we were the only targets. A tawaif’s brother, or an older child, was never seen inside the kotha. They preferred to hang out with the street rowdies instead of with the womenfolk at home. The boys were not training to be pimps, but to be men of honour. They were trying to groom their own macho identities away from the illicit world of their fussy mothers and sisters. Their worthless lives had no place in the contentious society outside the crumbling walls of the kotha, where they were welcomed as a randi ka beta.
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 216
Price: 499
This excerpt has not been edited by queerbeat.