India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (10 page)

On workdays, Selvi got home late. But on her days off, she never stayed out past nine p.m. She said that some of her office-mates liked to go to clubs, dancing, maybe even drinking. They went with boys; they flirted with them. But, she insisted, she wasn’t like that, and she never would be.

Her aunt was still worried about her. She called Selvi all the time, asked her what she was doing, warned her not to get too close to any men. Selvi told her aunt about her schedule. She said she worked from lunchtime to past midnight every day, with only a half-hour break for dinner. She didn’t have time to meet men.

She said: “Auntie, you have to trust me. I won’t start any other life. If I meet anyone, if I like any boy, I’ll come and inform you all and you can help me decide. Before anything happens, I’ll inform my dad, because it’s so important that he should like anyone I meet. Don’t worry, I’ll never fall in love.”

“You have to understand, Akash,” she said to me. “I’m not a city girl. My background is different. I was brought up in a different way. I wasn’t brought up to stay out late and do those kinds of things.”

We were sitting in her living room when she said this to me. It was a cloudy morning. It had rained hard the night before, and Selvi had gotten drenched on her way back from work. She seemed tired, under the weather. She had a bit of a cold.

“Yes, but lots of people come to the city with different backgrounds and then change,” I said.

“No, not me,” she said. “I believe the day is for working, and the night is for sleeping. I’ll never change.”

She seemed a bit irritated. She blew her nose into a tissue. She got up and started packing a bag for work. Then she put the bag down and looked right at me. “I’m still exactly the same person I always was,” she said. “I told you already: I’m not one of those girls whose minds can get swayed. I know who I am.”

She had a sharp, direct manner that often made me feel like I was saying or doing the wrong thing. She was schoolmarmish. I thought from the first time we met that there was something determined, even ferocious, about Selvi.

Hari was telling me one day about how he learned to speak English
. He hadn’t spoken it at home; both his parents spoke only Tamil. He said he had learned English from watching television, and from reading books and pamphlets at his mother’s workplace. From a young age, he was determined to be fluent; he knew that English was his ticket out of Tindivanam.

He told me that when he was a boy, he was teased a lot at school for always speaking English. His classmates would taunt him. They would say
“Rumbo Peter vidurai,”
which, with its reference to an English name, was a way to mock someone for putting on airs by speaking a foreign language. Hari said he didn’t care. He’d always been different. He’d always felt apart from other people his age.

It was true that Hari’s English was pretty good, especially for someone who had grown up in a small town. But when he talked about being different, I wasn’t convinced that he was just talking about his affinity for a foreign language. In the time I had known him, I had noticed a few things about Hari. I noticed that he wore pink a lot. I noticed that he waved his hands when he was making a point, in a whimsical, wristy kind of way. Whenever I asked about marriage, he changed the topic, saying his parents were eager to marry him off, but that he wasn’t interested.

I had noticed some things about the coffee shop where we met, too. I noticed that its regular clients were almost all male. They would order a coffee or a tea, and sit around for hours, sometimes with their laptops open, messaging, or hanging out in chat rooms. Many of these men seemed to recognize each other, although they weren’t necessarily friends. They would nod their heads or maybe smile, but they rarely sat at the same table or even spoke.

One day I was there with Nikhil, Hari’s friend, when a well-built man walked in. He sat behind a counter at the other end of the room. Nikhil went over, they chatted a bit, and when he came back he told me he’d had a one-night stand with the man. He said he met the man online. They communicated for a few months, and then later, when they were comfortable with each other, they
met at a coffee shop. They went back to the man’s house. They watched some porn on his laptop; they made love.

Leo, the friend who had introduced me to Hari, told me that he thought Hari was gay—although he wasn’t sure that Hari would acknowledge that, or indeed that he even knew it himself. Hari might just consider his feelings about men to be an extension of normal adolescent behavior, Leo, who had a wide circle of gay friends, said. It wouldn’t be all that unusual for boys in college, brought up in a conservative society where they were denied female interaction, to experiment with each other.

But in Leo’s opinion, Hari was a little different. Hari and his friends, men like Nikhil, seemed more conventionally homosexual. Their relationships with other men weren’t just a matter of adolescent experimentation.

I decided to broach the topic with Hari. We went shopping one day for a cell phone together. The phone was for me; I had asked Hari, whom I now considered an expert shopper, for advice, and he told me he’d take me to his regular dealer, who sold out of a small shopping center in the crowded north of the city.

Hari showed up, in a pink T-shirt and a blue Adidas baseball cap, on his scooter. He led me down a flight of stairs to a basement store stacked with cell phones and other electronic gadgets. I picked a phone, and we came back out. It was hot. We were thirsty. We decided to find a shop where we could get a bottle of mineral water.

On the way to the shop—crossing the street, navigating traffic that seemed determined to kill us—I mentioned to Hari that I had seen someone using a chat room in the coffee shop where we met. I asked Hari if he spent a lot of time in chat rooms. He told me
that, in fact, he was the moderator for one. “But I hardly use them,” he said. “They’re full of fakes.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They’re full of crooks pretending to be gay men. Sometimes old men act as young men. Sometimes I heard they’re not even gay—they just pretend to be gay, and they use the Internet to trick young men and steal from them or even blackmail them. Personally, I don’t know anything. I just moderate the rooms. I don’t have any experience of this. But I’ve heard about it from my friends.”

Hari asked me if I was happy with the phone I’d just bought. Then he started talking about the war in Iraq. He said it was a disaster; he asked how America could have been so foolish to get involved. He wondered about the British, too; he’d always thought they were smarter. He seemed to want to change the topic.

Walking back to Hari’s scooter, I asked him about marriage. Then he told me that his parents were harassing him. They wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept telling them he wasn’t ready, but they wouldn’t give up. In fact, he said, there had just been a huge scene at home recently, when he went there for a long weekend.

It happened in the morning, while Hari was relaxing in his old bedroom. Some guests showed up and Hari’s mother called him out of his room. She told him the visitors were the parents of a prospective bride. She’d found them through a matchmaker.

Hari got worked up. He threatened to pack his bags and take the next bus to Chennai. His mother managed to cool him down. She convinced him to come out and meet the parents. They showed Hari a picture of their daughter. She was slim and fair-skinned and, he said, not unattractive. But she was too young, just a student, and anyway, he knew for sure he wasn’t interested.

Hari’s mother forced him to sit and make small talk. The girl’s parents were full of questions—about Hari’s job, about his salary, about his life in Chennai. His father started telling them Hari’s life story. Hari interrupted. “Father, please,” he said, and his father stopped. There was silence.

After the guests had gone, Hari shouted at his parents. He threatened to leave home. He said if they ever tried to trick him like that again, he would go away and never come back. His mother started screaming. She said the moment had to come; Hari couldn’t put it off forever. “No, the moment will never come,” Hari told her, and he stomped out of the room.

The whole ride back to Chennai, in the bus, Hari felt anxious. He was upset about all the questions, and he was upset that the guests had been so inquisitive. He valued his privacy; he didn’t want people from home, people who knew his parents, digging around his life in Chennai.

One evening not too long after that episode, Hari’s office received some visitors looking for him. Fortunately, it was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so he had the day off. But the visitors spoke to the company’s security guard, and later the guard told Hari they’d asked a lot of questions about him. They told the guard they were there “about an alliance.”

Hari called home right away and asked his parents what they thought they were doing. He told them that if anything like that ever happened again, they would lose their son. His parents told him he was being unreasonable; they said he was holding up the line, that his younger sister couldn’t get married because of his stubbornness. They said he would ruin the family’s reputation.

Hari shook his head when he told me that story. We were
standing at his scooter. He said that he had been really, really upset. “I don’t want people coming to Chennai and finding out about me,” he said. “I don’t want them to know who I am.”

“Why?” I asked. “What don’t you want them to know?”

He didn’t say anything. I asked if he liked men. “No,” he said. “I love women. I grew up surrounded by women—my mother, my cousins, my sisters. I was very close to my grandmother. I love girls.”

He fiddled with his handlebars; he played with his hat. “The only thing is,” he said, “that maybe I like both men and women.”

I wasn’t at all surprised by Hari’s reticence. Tindivanam wasn’t
exactly a hospitable environment for a gay man. Hari would have grown up with parents and friends to whom the very concept of homosexuality would have been alien. Nobody at home knew about his sexual orientation, and he had no intention of telling them. He said his father would never accept him; he’d probably ask him to leave the family. And it would devastate his mother; he couldn’t do that to her.

Technically, homosexuality was illegal in India. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, dating from British times, criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” The law was rarely applied, though, and when it was used, it was usually as a form of harassment or blackmail—an attempt to extort a bribe, perhaps, or to settle an unrelated score.

The media was full of reports about a budding gay scene, especially in urban India. I had several gay friends, but they had all
either spent time in the West or were born into Westernized families. I had never met an openly gay person who had grown up, like Hari, in a small town, with traditional parents.

On a summer day in Chennai, I visited Dr. Narayana Reddy, a leading sex therapist—or “sexologist,” as he referred to himself, eschewing what he felt were the insufficiently holistic labels usually applied to his profession. I thought he might be able to help me better understand Hari and his conflicted feelings about his homosexuality.

Dr. Reddy was a short, bald man, with a soft-spoken manner. He worked out of a first-floor office in a residential building on a quiet side street. It was an unflashy setup, just the kind of place, I thought, where someone would go if they had a problem they wanted to keep private.

He had been in practice since 1982. In a way, he was at the front lines of India’s cultural transformation. In an office adorned with lifetime awards from sexual organizations around the world, and with a couple nervous men sitting outside in his waiting room, he told me that his profession had changed beyond recognition.

When he first started, he said, people thought he was crazy. Friends and family wondered why he didn’t go into a respectable profession like cardiology. The media wouldn’t write about his work (once, a newspaper referred to a conference of sexologists simply as a meeting of doctors), and the medical fraternity didn’t take him seriously. Dr. Reddy knew he would have to attach himself to a hospital—people would be too shy to visit a stand-alone sexual health clinic—but no one would give him a position or a place.