Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (55 page)

For the first time he looked to me like an old man. I had seen him as an oppressor, but we were trapped in roles and fantasies of each other that had to be demolished before we could begin anew.

"I always thought of you as my princess," he said. "I imagined your wedding would be the happiest day of my life."

It was the first time I saw him cry.

My mother burned through her anger till it wore her out, when she gave up and tried to learn to accept. My father's peacemaking yielded results. I grew up; we all did. After those first months of arguments, we never talked much about my sexuality. Somehow we came to an uneasy truce, and began reaching across the divide.

A month or two after Christmas, when I found my first post-college journalism job and moved away, my mother packed me a spice box so I could keep the tastes of home, and sent occasional care packages of Divali sweets, spicy fried
puris,
and mango pickles. That spring my parents invited the boyfriend to their house. My father asked him if he intended to marry me. Poor guy—he explained that he had proposed to me, but I had refused on the grounds that I was a lesbian. Later my parents met my serious female partners, cordially, politely.

Once or twice a year my mother, on the telephone, would mention that so-and-so's parents were
inquiring
about me. "I told them, I don't think my daughter's interested," she'd say. A pause. "Right?" And that little speck of hope, the rise in her voice, made me want to cry.

"That's right," I would say—firmly, I hoped. And gently, I hoped.

A wall still stood between what I thought of as my real life and what I shared with my parents on visits home or on the phone. To avoid constant conflict, I felt a pressure to blend in again: to reassimilate with their community's values, to disappear my sexuality, to continue to look and act like the good Indian child of the Hinduism workbook, even if it was a façade.

And yet, as I met other lesbians and gay men of South Asian heritage, dozens and then hundreds, I began bit by bit to integrate my warring selves. Integration: as different a model from assimilation as junior high school is from adulthood. We organized workshops, discussion groups, conferences. Those of us who had survived our childhoods and adolescences by whitewashing, suppressing, and wishing away our cultural difference explored new ways to reclaim it. Those of us who had been told our queerness was a Western disease began to retrieve our own histories, unearthing millennia of evidence of same-sex relationships in ancient South Asian cultures in stone, in text. And some of us began creating new texts, works of mythologized autobiography or poetry that spoke to the tension in our hearts. We took back or reinvented rituals; in 2002 I attended one of the first lesbian Hindu weddings in the United States, complete with holy fire and Sanskrit-muttering priest and a buffet banquet of delicious vegetarian fare.

Every queer South Asian conference featured an emotional session called Coming Out to Parents, or Relating to Our Families of Birth, or even
Dear Mummy & Pappa.
But the main purpose of our gatherings was often affirmation: to tell ourselves, against all assertions to the contrary, that we could be both Indian and lesbian, both Pakistani and gay, both Bangladeshi and bisexual; that we were neither traitors nor deviants nor heretics but merely humans trying to love. Among these peers, some of whom became close friends, I felt that perhaps I had found my own people—my home.

We continue to find one another. In 2007 I was thrilled to meet, at a conference, women who were overcoming great odds to organize and support lesbians in rural Gujarat, near my family's ancestral villages. From them I bought a poster, tricolor like India's flag, that proudly declares "Indian and Lesbian" in English, Hindi, and Gujarati. It hangs in my living room, framed and under glass like a precious artwork, or perhaps a mirror: totem, reminder, proof that I—we—exist.

I no longer wish to be Ann, or Marie, or even Gita. After half a lifetime of subtly Americanizing the pronunciation of my name, in the past year I have begun to say it the Gujarati way: Minal,
mee-nalr.
The vowels have a specific, rolling intonation; the final letter is a consonant that does not exist in English, somewhere in the borderland between
l
and
r.
Each time I say my name this way, I have the sensation of integrating language itself.

I have come to understand that queerness is a migration as momentous as any other, a journey from one world to the next. My earliest sense of alienation feels, now, like a source: a dual, twining root of both my queerness and my writing. For it is in such a splitting that the self becomes a constant observer, of both itself and others—first as a technology of survival, then as amusement, curiosity, habit, and finally for its own sake. And, observing, solitary, one cannot help developing ideas, critiques, leaps of explanation and imagination; narratives.

To write this book I traveled the world interviewing relatives, after more than a dozen years of keeping all my relations at arm's length. For one of my generation to be interested in the old-time ways and stories sometimes brought tears to my elders' eyes. It brought questions, too, including the ones I began dreading as soon as I bought my plane tickets:
When are you getting married?
followed shortly by
Why not?

Mostly I evaded the questions with a simple "It's not for me." Repeated once or twice, it was usually enough. Sometimes I added a Gujarati saying,
Sukhi jiv dukh maa laakhe;
loosely translated, "Why throw a happy life into suffering?" and, usually, everyone laughed. Sometimes I resorted to my parents' well-worn excuse: I was busy with my work. On a couple of occasions I came out to relatives who I thought would understand, cousins and aunts to whom I could explain in English; I kept hoping the news would reach a key person who would tell everyone else, so that I would never have to come out again. But it seems I was unskilled in working the family gossip machine; and the truth is, I often passed up opportunities to out myself. Like any journalist I did not want to become the story I was reporting; I did not want my interviews to become focused on me. A combination of this desire, the language barrier, and simple cowardice stopped me. As a result, the questions continued.

In South Africa, a distant aunt took me on an after-dinner excursion to her sister's house, where no one spoke to me and I was not introduced. My aunt spent ten minutes chatting with her sister, and then we left. I gave the mysterious interlude no thought until another uncle asked if we had been there, if a certain young man was present. Without knowing it I had been up for marital consideration.

There are people in my extended family who will read for the first time here that I am a lesbian. They will think that they do not know any other gay people, that there have never been any in our community, and they will be wrong. They will think my parents' hearts must be broken, and they will be only partly right. There will be a minor conflagration perhaps, a worldwide ripple of gossip and conjecture and rumor, and any number of personal comments and questions so odd I will not know how to respond. And then it will pass, and the next community scandal will take over: someone swindling someone, or someone's wife running off with the pool boy.

Someday I expect that a cousin of a cousin, a distant niece or nephew, or a close one, will come up to me and say,
Me too.
Until then I suppose a certain kind of loneliness will persist, alleviated by the new family and community I have made and by the gifts that have come my way. Grace, joy, love, gratitude: these too are elements of my path. When I touch my lover's hand in the dark, I know what the goddess wrote for me.

On the trip I also became curious about my destiny, and sought out an astrologer in India. He and his family were renting the house where my father grew up, which my grandfather had built with the proceeds from Narseys back in 1937. The date was engraved on its façade; it was still the family homestead, though none of us had lived there for decades. Inside, old photographs of my ancestors hung from the moldings. I sat in the front room among them, before a dark wooden desk where the astrologer saw his clients.

He wore a patterned silk shirt, his tools laid out before him: eyeglasses, calculator, pen, datebook, ruled legal paper. More businesslike than mystical, his manner was somber and polite. He looked at the chart he had drawn up, based on my birth, and gave me bad news. The name I had been given was the exact opposite of my
raasi,
or name-horoscope, a factor that leads to rage and volatility. To repair it, I ought to go back to something like Gita.

Astrologically, I was stubborn by nature, he added. I had probably had great difficulty in my education and failed several times, but had eventually succeeded by the grace of god. Having missed the most auspicious window for marrying early in my twenties, I ought to hurry. Probably I would marry a pale-eyed man, and we would have many fights. Also many children, mostly boys.

I could make a lot of money on the black market. And I would do well to open a gas station.

Somehow, as I walked away from my fate, I managed not to laugh out loud. Perhaps my parents were right, at least about astrologers.

A year later, the last of my father's brothers in Fiji was preparing to emigrate. Cleaning house, he came across artifacts from my grandparents, including my first horoscope: the one commissioned by my grandmother when I was born. It arrived in the mail, and of course I could not resist. My father sat with me to translate.

On a red printed form under an etching of Ganesh, a seer in India had sketched out in blue ink the position of the stars at the time of my birth: 7:42
P.M.
July 12, 1971, America. This was translated to Samvat year 2027, day 5 of the waning half of the month of Ashaad. I was born under the moon-sign of Kumbh, the word for a water pot, roughly equivalent to Aquarius in the Western zodiac. Based on the stars, the astronomer suggested five names for me: Saroj, Sashpu, Sudha, Gauri, and Gita. Mars was prominent in my chart, signifying a stubborn and difficult nature. My element was copper, and my footprint was auspicious.

I told my father I was curious what my destiny would have been if my parents had followed this horoscope. If I had been this girl named Gita.

He blinked.

"But
dikraa,
" he said—dear one, daughter—"your fate could not have been any different than it is." What is written, by the deity and based on one's own karma, is written.

I felt a slight choking in my throat, as by this I knew that, even if he disapproved or had trouble understanding, he accepted my life.

Every migrant constructs, or spends her life seeking, a new definition of home. For me it is a word with many edges, multifaceted as a crystal or a goddess of a thousand and one names, an infinity of arms. It is the queer planet where I live, filled with gay men and lesbian women, the tattooed and the pierced, sissy boys, butch girls, people born with indeterminate genitalia, women who pass as or identify as or have become men, drag queens, interracial couples of all genders. It is the hearts of my lovers and friends, the created family that all free queer people know, the one we construct far from our original homes: filled with joy and true acceptance, not merely grudging tolerance, a safe place to name and learn to fulfill our truest desires. In one sense this queer tribe is on the leading edge of society, language, and medical knowledge; yet in another, we are the most ancient sort of village, a way of organizing our needs and relationships—human life and its elements, all of its purposes.

Home too is again my first family, to whom the others might all be freaks, my mother's cooking and my father's ideas, the web of relations and traditions that surround us on holy days and in times of crisis or celebration. And it is the home that exists only inside me, which encompasses and unites all that is held together by my fragile skin, and which consists of a constant, prickly sensation of traveling between worlds that seem forever irreconcilable.

But perhaps this gap is itself the illusion.

In my mother's village in India, in a hut that seems to be located at the very center of the crossroads, lives a person born male, who never married and who refers to herself exclusively in the feminine. Gujarati is a gender-inflected language, in which even the simplest sentences reveal the speaker's sex, require a choice. Duliyaa, as she is called, lives with her mother and has never married. She seems to have a soft spot for children; the day we met, she was holding a small child, and she remembered my mother, who was seven years old the last time they had met. And they embraced warmly.

Far from any queer movement or urban politics, far from academic theories of gender, lives a possibility, a true heritage of tolerance and integration. Among a people who can and have absorbed so much, whose gods are many-limbed and multigendered, whose lives are filled with all manner of suffering, sexual identity is the least of it. I do not know how Duliyaa would "identify," were it even possible to translate and define the terms from my world—gay, queer, queen, transgender, transsexual, let alone the newer and more exotic "genderqueer" or the brilliantly cynical "genderfucked." All I know is that this tall, lanky, biologically male exterior holds a being who somehow, for more than sixty years, has quietly asserted, in a place as remote from radical gender politics as we can imagine, the truth of her own pure being.

Where are you from?
asks the white woman at the bathhouse, March 2005.

It is a first, natural question.