Ever since my mother had pulled it out to prepare for her psychology class some years back, Freud’s complete works had remained on the bookshelf next to the dressing table, too unwieldy to repack into the trunk under the bed. My mother would dust it occasionally, along with other tomes that had found their way there—an enormous textbook on teaching practices, a gossamer-paged compendium of all of Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps it was this quiet presence of Sigmund in our midst that from time to time inspired my mother to tell me about his theories on sexuality. Boys were naturally attracted to their mothers, she’d say—which explained why I was always wanting to kiss and hug and touch her, be so physically demonstrative. Indeed, I enjoyed such intimacy so much that sometimes I got carried away. That’s when she’d caution me about the danger of developing an Oedipus complex—each time I tried to press my face into her bosom or became too rowdy with my kisses.
Now, at the start of my teens, she told me what lay ahead. “You’ll go through a period when you’re attracted to other boys. Something completely normal—Freud says you’ll grow out of it.”
I started waiting expectantly for the start of this phase. Each morning, I took my temperature in this regard—checked to see if I’d awakened with some new feeling towards my classmates. What would this promised attraction feel like? Would it be so strong I’d act on it?
So far, the only “homo” overture I’d encountered had been at the Liberty, where a man sat down next to me mid-movie and placed a hand on my thigh. The contact appalled me, and I fled to a more peopled spot in the balcony to watch the rest of the film. “That’s how they take advantage of boys,” my mother said, more distraught than I’d been.
Clearly, if I hadn’t enjoyed it, I couldn’t have progressed enough along the path through homosexuality ordained by Freud, was my calculation.
Just when I was getting concerned that I might be cheated out of this phase, I awoke one morning from an erotic dream in which I’d been cuddling with Nick Carter. Nick was a spy character whose pulp fiction novels I’d consumed in considerable quantities. I could almost still feel his “firm, masculine lips” on my mouth, his “chiseled and magnificently muscled” body around mine. How thrilling that this was finally happening!
In school that day, I stared at the backsides of all the other boys, to see if I could coax out some new feelings in myself. Frustratingly, I failed. Two days later, though, I had a dream about Michael Pereira, and thought I detected a twinge of arousal when I used all my concentration in class to imagine him naked. Things got rolling once I began admitting Bollywood heroes into my pantheon of fantasy: Dharmendra, the hunkiest of the hunks, Rajesh Khanna, the national heartthrob, perhaps good-natured Jeetendra as well, but not the too-lanky Amitabh. And of course Shashi Kapoor, my mother’s favorite.
But popular literature provided the most inspiration— such deliciously carnal creations as Dax, the hero of Harold Robbins’s The Adventurers. “Men loved him and feared him, women trembled at the power in his loins,” the back cover promised, and indeed, I did a lot of loving and trembling all through his sexual escapades. On a more visual note, Bir Uncle, a mercantile seaman, dropped off a stack of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on a shore visit. My father registered his disapproval, but mostly for form’s sake—unwilling to challenge my authority (and probably curious himself), he didn’t try to throw them away. I found the pictures educational but not titillating; figuring that arousal would come in my next stage, I mentally filed them away. Fortunately, Penthouse had a “variations” section of letters, where I discovered some tantalizing homosexual tidbits.
Thanks to my mother’s words, my same-sex explorations induced neither worry nor guilt. Rather, I tried to delve deep into my fantasies, enjoy them as much as I could, in this Freud-sanctioned phase. But I soon started feeling my isolation. Homosexuality was completely invisible in India back then, so it never arose as a discussion topic either in public or in private. All through my school and college years, I read exactly one article in the Times of India that alluded to it. According to this piece, there was a stretch of the beach at Juhu where men roved through the dark looking for other men to have sex with. I thought several times about venturing there, but it was almost as far as where Krishan Uncle lived.
At sixteen, I graduated from school and started college at Jai Hind, known for its program in science. Campion had been all boys, so this was the first time I had the company of female classmates. I was gawky and tongue-tied around girls, just as I was around the boys I found most attractive. My biggest crush was Anmol, the partner assigned to me in chemistry lab. Initially, I was relieved at his ordinary looks—clearly not fantasy material. But a few weeks in, he suddenly started making my head swim—and I realized it wasn’t because of the solvents we mixed. I visited him at his parents’ house over the holidays, where he sat bare-chested on his bed and asked me to rub cold cream on an itchy patch on his back he couldn’t reach. I almost couldn’t trust myself to touch him, certain my fingertips would linger too long, or press too hard, or otherwise give the game away. That very week, I restarted my long-ignored diary, hoping to sublimate some of my tension through its pages.
When exactly was the next hetero phase supposed to start? Not too soon, I hoped, since the situation with girls was going poorly. All my baby fat had disappeared, turning me gangly almost overnight. I’d developed a persistent rash above my lip, possibly from the eyebrow pencil I rubbed on as a fake mustache before trying to sneak into “adults only” movies. In addition to my looks, I was also self-conscious about an elocution contest talk I’d given to the entire college, in which I’d made an unfortunate joke about grasshoppers. A pack of senior girls, noting my garb of green shirt and green pants at the time, had taken to shouting out “Grasshopper!” whenever they spotted me. I started looking for them around every corner, peering nervously down every staircase. They literally made me jump—my limbs began to feel spindly, insect-like.
Fortunately, my studies were going well. However, almost half my classmates (including Anmol) would leave at the end of the year after taking a nationwide engineering admission exam. Should I sit for it as well? If successful, I could go on to one of the prestigious tech institutes scattered around the country. Perhaps even IIT Bombay, located in a distant suburb—though I’d have to reside there. I didn’t really want to be an engineer or live apart from my parents, but I broached the idea with my mother anyway.
“If that’s what you want, of course—nothing like it.” I could tell she was shaken, so I assured her my heart wasn’t in it. She lay down to smoke a cigarette. “I know it has to happen, but it would be nice to have a few more years. What you love too much is always taken away.”
I kissed her and hugged her, but not for myself this time—I was trying to squeeze her fears away.
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Pages: 352
Price: 699
This excerpt has not been edited by queerbeat.