It’s all in the motive

Schooling and my adventures at Modern School Vasant Vihar, Delhi, continued and, within a year or two, I had forgotten about that ill-fated early summer day when I was judged a failure. The scars left by hurtful yet innocent classmates had healed and become a distant memory. The gossip and pointed conversations that relatives indulged in, with every intention to put my parents and me down, stopped bothering me. In my failure I had started seeing the making of my dreamscape and my future. I found new meaning and purpose, and I found a connection to those teachers, relatives and neighbours who had stepped up and taken on a higher moral ground and shown empathy and comforted me when I was at my lowest.

As I graduated from Grade XII and made my way to Bombay to study at the Sir. J.J. School of Art, I faced hostility that stemmed from a society torn apart by caste and class. We knew that fetching admission at this prestigious institute was difficult for a Delhi resident, but what we hadn’t foreseen was the ugliness that would welcome me as I traversed my way in a school populated with students looking at someone very different from them. My classmates found my facial features, my skin colour, my lisp, my being gay, my dialect and diction in Hindi and English, my comfort in speaking Marathieven if with an accent, deeply unacceptable. Even though my mom was well aware that these kids were bullies who were too cowardly to accept someone different from them, she encouraged me to see my classmates as products of their circumstances and a young nation coming of age. Mom helped me forgive those who hurt me and rid myself of shame and disgruntlement that could have haunted me for a lifetime had I allowed those hateful exchanges to flourish in my mind, body and soul. In freeing me from being owned by the hatred of another, she freed me from the pangs of anxiety that would own me if I let myself be affected by the issues plaguing my classmates.

I came out a couple of years later, and Mom flew to NYC — where I was attending the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan — hours after that difficult telephone conversation in which I bared my story to my father and to her. During those early days, when I was tearing myself apart even as I was freeing myself of the shame and doubt of remaining closeted, Mom’s was a voice of love and caring, comfort and support. She became curious about the whys and whens of my journey as a gay kid becoming an out and proud man. As she questioned me, she exposed her fears and her concerns, and with each question, bared her truths and her maternal instincts of protecting her child and wishing the best for him.

The 25-plus years in Manhattan and at our farm in upstate New York gave me much to be grateful for and much to be scared by. My time in the city of my heart brought me personal fulfillment and professional success. It also exposed me to the vagaries of the world and the transient nature of love, sorrow, success, and failure. When I was at the top of my game, and my world crashed, and the life I knew crumbled, leaving me hapless and hopeless, it was Mom who saw a future for me and in me. Even as I was giving up on myself, it was Mom who encouraged me to look at the setbacks as life asking me to “take a sabbatical” and to come back “home” and “give life and living a restart”. She understood New York City was my oxygen, yet she also knew at that moment there was no future there if I was not saved by her care in Delhi. So, I came back “home” to Delhi and got that much needed rest and healing.

What Mom told me in not telling me the truth when I was sick was that white lie that indeed has me living today. In not telling me the truth then, she gave me a new lease on life. When I prodded her about why she didn’t tell me that she knew I loved NYC more than Delhi, she said, “What good would it have done you to know what I felt, if I couldn’t assist you in having a future to reflect upon these questions of existence?” And so here I am at 50, living in New Delhi, the nation of my birth, my homeland, my new stomping ground. My NY bestie, Dr. Manjula Bansal, who was at our home the other day, asked Mom how I was liking Delhi. Mom answered, “What do I say, and how does it help? He has to make his peace and do as he wishes.” And just like that, once again, she gave me perceptively insightful and prudently discerning schooling on life and living. Her lessons continue to teach me about the gravitas attached to truth and the hope that can come with some little white lies.

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