Ode to Lata (23 page)

Between sips of his Bloody Mary, Salman declared, “Fuck them all!  They’re going to see that I don’t give a shit anymore!”  He was talking not about society but of his own family back in Los Angeles, who he hoped would catch a broadcast of this asseveration.  He hoped they would make all the appalling assumptions that Mummy had made when confronting the images on public access.  He danced the
rasra
, his body swaying and his hands clapping away fervently in an arch from the sky down to his knees and then up again.  To emulate his idol, Benazir Bhutto, he had draped a shawl over his head and wore a long cotton
kurta
that expertly downplayed his rotundity.  “Today Benazir Bhutto shall walk these streets to protest the injustices delivered to all of us.  Let that bitch sister and my mother see me on TV!
Mein azaad hoon!”

The air vibrated with the infectious remix of a popular
filmi
song from the PA system of the gargantuan float behind us, and we all knew the lyrics.  Some of us sang them with heartfelt joy and others laughed with nervousness and excitement.  Everyone took turns holding up the ends of colorful saris and dancing down the street under its tinctured sky.  When Salman tired of dancing, he threw his arm around me and I felt an unparalleled kinship with him. We passed the elixir in the plastic cup back and forth between us like a gourd of blood ritualizing our unspoken brotherhood.  A brotherhood that now stretched to the hundreds of Indians who I had never met before, people who had come from all over the country to march that day.  We were all tied together by an invisible cord, a family of Indians strengthened not only by color and ethos, but also by a common persuasion.

With my arm firmly around Salman, I thought that
this
couldn’t be what had appalled my mother.  If only she could have been here, standing right by my side instead of watching what was fed to the masses on TV.  If she could have seen other Indians like myself uniting in this demand for fairness, grown men and women who in her eyes would still appear like boys and girls, she would not have been appalled.  I wonder if she could hold up a sign in the air, remonstrating in front of God and against all those who deemed it necessary to oppress her child and deprive him of dignity. I knew in my heart that even with some difficulty she would have done so, and I thanked God for her and for the understanding we’d reached.  I felt my heart overflow with love for her as we marched down the streets, bypassing a sequestered group of protesters who appeared, at least for now, to be a disgruntled minority.  When they caught Salman’s eye, he broke away from our embrace to dance once again, shaking his shoulders vigorously in a kind of flamboyant cabaret move, inciting them even further.  A woman in the crowd cried out her curses.  Even more abated, Salman flicked his tongue like he was about to perform fellatio on her cringing male companion.  I thought, this is something Sunjay would’ve done.  Vivacious, unbothered Sunjay, who had performed a memorable cabaret in Bamburi, claimed men never liked to pay for it, and died several years later in a car accident.  Taking a hefty gulp of my cocktail, I threw my own hands up in the air and danced too.  I danced for the new family of friends that I had found here and for those who had gone ahead and left us behind to endure the travails of the living.

Perfect moments never last, but perhaps if we absorbed them, we could rekindle their memory to lighten the moments of darkness that would inevitably come.

MARKS ON THE BODY

When I was a child, my mother and I used to play a game of moles.

In Indian films, the double role plot has always been popular.  Twins separated at birth, grow up apart, and then meet in adult life, where the evil one somehow takes over her innocent sister’s life and nobody’s the wiser.

“What if someone took me away from you and then this other woman claiming to be Parin came to be your mummy?  And she looked exactly like me!  Then what would you do?”  she’d ask me.

Terrified, wide-eyed and gnawing my fingers, I would look straight at her and proclaim, “I will hate her!  I will hate her!”

“Then you must remember certain things about me,” she would say, putting her index finger to her lip in a gesture of secrecy.  She would tuck the wisps of hair behind her ear and reveal a tiny mole on its crest, or sometimes point out the mole on the finger of her own little hand.  “See?  This is how you’ll be able to tell that it’s not me!  And what would I do if someone took you away and brought me another Ali?”

By then I would practically be in tears.  Anger would rage in my heart for anyone who would do something so hateful.  With eyes full of adoration and childhood possessiveness, I would look up at her, the kidnapping suddenly imminent.

“How will I be able to tell?”

Flustered, I would squeeze my hands together, unable to offer her the keys to identifying me, the knowledge of my body’s trademarks still an uninvestigated mystery to me.  She would take it a little further by looking perplexed, agonizing me more.  “He would look just like you, you know?  And then how would I know that this isn’t my little sunny boy?  How?”

My eyes would look up at her hopefully, expectantly, imploringly.  Surely you
must
know!  You’re my mother, you
must
know! 

“
This
is how I would be able to tell,” she would finally say, her face brightening, revealing a mole on my wrist, granting me permission to breath again.  “And
this
is how,” she would offer proof again, lifting my shirt and touching another one on my abdomen.  “And I would know that this impostor is
not
my little Ali!”

Relieved, I would throw myself into her arms, convinced that no one could take us away from each other.  My mother had knighted the irrelevant marks on our bodies as guardians of our identities.  Insignificant little moles were transformed into mysterious little conservators of my parentage. 
Always remember the marks on the body.  They will lead us to each other. 

Finally, I would crane up from the cradle of her arms and inquire, “But after I know she isn’t my mummy, then how will I bring you back?”

INDIAN

Salman’s Honda trumpeted down Santa Monica Boulevard, the broken exhaust competing with the loud
filmi
music inside the car, appearing like the moribund chariot of a banished god condemned to wreak havoc on earth’s disobedient mortals.
Here I come
, it seemed to announce in sputters,
prepare for intervention!

We had just completed outreaching to three completely confounded South Asians in the last hour and were headed to our final interview for the evening.  By convincing me to volunteer for an outreach group that educated sexually ambivalent Indian males about AIDS – an experience Salman promised would be mind-blowing but not for the reasons I suspected – he unveiled to me a community that had thrived in this city for decades and yet appeared untouched by its inducements.  Unwilling to adopt anything foreign except the land itself, they sanctimoniously went about their lives and viewed everything that sprang from the West as morally weakening.

“We have a responsibility,
nah?”
he had said, one hand whipping in the air with conviction. “To ensure all Indians know condoms are for fucking little boys and not to blow up as balloons on
Diwali
and birthdays.”

The Asian Aids Intervention Group, a government-subsidized agency located in a run-down part of downtown, had created a South Asian program for this purpose.  Under the management of Mr. Chen, a sometimes intimidating, balding Chinese man in his forties (“he has little wee-wee” Salman giggled as soon as he turned his back on us) and his young flamboyant assistant simply known as Red (“
hunh
, just a wet tampon!”), the South Asian program became a kind of politically correct appeasement for the powers that be; a way to demonstrate the integrative nature of this Asian intervention team.  In Salman’s capable hands, this namesake program came to be known as
Saath
, meaning unity.  There wasn’t a doubt in any one’s mind that Salman certainly had all the expertise – if not the practicality of being an open homosexual – to make this project work.  

As a social health care worker for UCLA, Salman had always worked with people and championed causes like breast cancer.  After being alienated from his family, he began to boldly extend his gift for communal intervention with less decorous causes.  “To hell with cancer of the
booblas!
” he decried, referring to breasts in the comical Kutchi term.  “It’s time to get down and dir-r-r-ty,” he said.

Since I was one of the few openly gay Indian men he knew, he believed that I had an obligation to educate this disturbingly repressed community, to go out into the trenches of ignorance with him, to gas stations, convenience stores, spice markets, nightclubs – wherever an opportunity presented itself.

So, armed with a box full of condoms, safe sex pamphlets and questionnaires, we hit the road and approached the envoys of the South Asian diaspora at nightfall.  Most of them turned out to be Bengali.  It felt strange when, despite the similarities in the color of our skin and features, we were unable to communicate effectively.  Bengali was the one language that neither Salman nor I spoke, and most of them only knew perfunctory English.  From behind the counter of their franchises, they would narrow their eyes and survey us suspiciously when the clipboard and pencil came out, and instead of purchasing beers we asked questions about sex.  The mere mention of AIDS made them tense up. Like they’d suddenly realized that we were wielding a gun or, worse, that we were homosexual and instead of leaning over the counter and pillaging the cash register, we just might grab their balls in a bizarre ritual of homosexual camaraderie.  Sometimes after sneering, they turned away from us to find a fellow worker with whom to laugh derisively at our unwitting admittance to being connected to what they considered a gay disease.  In such cases, a simple business card would sometimes qualify us for some solemnity.  Business cards always impressed peasant folk.  In their minds, a two-by-four piece of printed card somehow legitimized our enterprise more than the rectitude of our intention.

Whenever we stumbled upon someone who was more forthcoming and able to overcome the language barrier, he would never failed to express that none of these diseases had existed “back home.”  The land that he had renounced to seek a better life was suddenly transformed into some kind of Utopia where no disease or injustice could possibly prevail.  He would confidently boast that now that he was married with children, this AIDS thing was of little concern to him or his family and dismissed us.  Upon this stance Salman often turned to me to roll his eyes or give a wearisome nod,
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.
  We knew the condoms and pamphlet that we were resigned to leave behind would be tossed out the moment we turned out backs to walk out. 

And then there were the other ones. Salman told me how many a times he had gotten men off in the bathrooms of 7-Elevens and Mobil gas stations during their ten-minute breaks.  The same ones who vaunted about their homemaker wives, their two-point-five children; men with the glint of a gold band on the very hand that clawed into his hair as he buckled under them, Salman’s fingers raking down their mat of curling chest hair.

“So much cheaper than going to the Vortex.  Once in a while they might even let you take a free Slurpee with you!”

He generally preferred Muslim men and insisted they utter to him in guttural Arabic while carrying out the act, almost none of which he understood.  Sometimes he recognized their utterances as derogatory, but instead of feeling insulted his excitement escalated.  I laughed, visualizing this.  Salman observed that all of them, Muslim or Hindu, married or single, resisted anything more than a blowjob.  At the end of it, they always expediently zipped up and fled, leaving him there on his knees with his mouth agape and full of their misspent seed.  It was as if, up until that point, they could still return to their counters feeling relieved and yet preserve their identities as heterosexuals.  “Indian men are like British men,” he claimed.  “All of them –
gay!”

This time as luck would have it, the man we approached was especially attractive, and I became petrified as I imagined Salman hoping that we had arrived in time for his break.  Salman’s eyes drooped seductively behind his spectacles, his body swishing to the counter, his heft in jarring contrast to the sleekness of his behavior. His questions and tone of voice carried the weight of expectation, and his head danced in the intoxication of desire and challenge.  I had to remind him of our purpose for being there as discreetly as I could.

“Hanh, hanh
, I know, okay?” he shushed me, tearing his name badge off his shirt.  “What do you think I’m doing,
rani mata?
  I’m
reaching out,
literally!” 

Muffled, I found myself purchasing some magazine in the hopes that the attendant would be more tolerant of us, outreach workers who had rushed in the moment he’d been available and slapped him with questions about the one thing that Indians are most squeamish about: sex.  And that Salman would not fall to his knees and beg to give him a blowjob right then and there.

The cashier said, “You hold on for one minute, okay?  I putting some ice in the machine now.”

Salman smiled and gave him that look that said, I’ll wait all night if I have to.