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Journalism of Courage
As June comes and people brandish the rainbow flag, what comes to mind is that the journey of being gay, of accepting one’s homosexuality/queerness, is not an easy one. It comes with heartbreak, marginalisation, despair, bigotry, and all kinds of otherness that is destructive and, sometimes, self-destructive. In my own journey of acceptance, at the very beginning, I hated myself. I was different. I loved in a manner that I believed was an aberration.
My earliest memories are ones of unrequited love. From popular Hindi songs in the early years of Bollywood to movies I had never seen but whose songs I heard at parties and at school and from Papa, who was fond of a few and sang those well; from Urdu ghazals and nazms that my grandparents, aunts and uncles and my parents enjoyed and I learned to sing from a young age, to Hindi and English poetry and prose I memorised and read while in school, I learned of a love that wasn’t returned in kind. It was this love that haunted the memoryscape of my childhood. I wrestled mightily with the age-old question, is this kind of love better than no love at all?
My love for music and poetry, for reading and writing, my being gay in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s in India – all ensured that my mind and heart were sensitised to attraction that would find no reciprocity. My earliest crushes were closeted and had no visible signs for the beloved to sense or the world to see. This fear of the truth of my identity and my sexual preference made me feel a deep shame and look at love through a dark and twisted lens.
It was when I met my first lover, an American visiting India from Paris, that I realised my silent cues could elicit a positive response from another. The night I took this American-born Parisian curator to the red-light district of Mumbai to watch nautch girls dance to Bollywood songs was the first time I felt hope and realised that all wasn’t doomed for me. As this foreigner reciprocated my feelings readily and in abundance, I saw a sliver of a silver lining in those painfully memorable childhood nights I cried myself to sleep. In our being able to connect, in the longing and tenderness that we felt and expressed, I saw come alive a world very different from the one that had haunted and broken me from my earliest years.
That fateful night in 1991 was the first time I realised that I too was special enough to find love. Our lovemaking, our shared dreams about our united future, our concerted efforts around enriching the world we inhabited through our pooled efforts – these cemented our bond of love and friendship. We wished to cohabit and create a world not too separated from the married lives of our heterosexual counterparts. And so I decided to leave Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai and seek admission at School of Visual Arts in New York City. It was Fall 1993 when I arrived in Manhattan, young, confident at heart, brimming with love and everything that entailed. All too soon I realised that I had lived up to my end of the deal but my lover was finding it difficult to move back to the United States, and before the year ended, our long-distance romance had ended as well.
One chance meeting over a dinner in Mumbai had led me all the way to Manhattan. It was not my studies or the city that never sleeps that brought me to America. My American dream was my desire to become whole in myself, to be able to share that me with another person, and in our togetherness bring fulfillment to one another and find a loving union where our older years would be blessed with companionship, friendship, affection and deeply felt love. That my American-Parisian lover, a man almost my mother’s age, couldn’t be that perfect lover was heartbreaking to me. Losing him and what had been my first and only experience of love tore my world apart, and even as I was setting up my life in Manhattan, dealing with full-time college and full-time work, I was dealing with full-time emotional trauma. Trauma that broke me for sure, but also again connected me to songs and poetry, my nation and its culture, and to new friends and family. All shared a common voice that spoke of those we love who never love us back.
One can go from being broken to loving and living again. It wasn’t too long after that heart and gut-wrenching breakup that I found myself with a lover who adored and admired me enough to have us set up home together that we cohabited for eight years. Too long for some who knew us well, and too short for those who couldn’t see the challenging greys between what was beautifully black-and-white.
After that I found myself in a two-decade-long relationship that was truly a dream come true, and in many ways the American dream that I might have been sent to Manhattan to live. We created homesteads in half a dozen locations across two states. We cared for 78 acres of farmland and countless, sundry animals with an abundance of love. We shared our lives and careers, our emotional ups and downs, the loss of our grandparents and friends. We supported one another through the loss of jobs and other treacherous realities of life. Both of us had come out of relationships that had their fair share of issues, and both of us worked hard to give to the other what had been missing before. We created magic together, we found joy and harmony; we parted before we might have found little decency in the breaking of a relationship.
Where do you go from having loved so wholly? What do you do at 50 when you are on the wrong side of the age conundrum? Suddenly you realise you are now that age your parents were when they were living the life of empty nesters without the need to be hunting for new love and companionship. You realise how love is as essential as oxygen, and you crave it more than ever before. While I was wanting to love and be loved in my twenties, I now want it still more because I have been on both the giving and the receiving end of an affection that is all encompassing and most fulfilling.
And so, once again, I read poetry, recite ghazals and smile as others play the longing, melancholic Bollywood songs I heard as a child. I have not yet given up on love. Despite the pain it brings my way, I can savour, appreciate, treasure, and celebrate the love that I have had and the love that I might still find, when and if I am able to be the person it is meant for. For me, the age-old question has been answered. I would much rather be left hoping love will be sent back my way than live a life with no love at all.
