India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (11 page)

When he was finally given an office, on the premises of one of
Chennai’s leading research hospitals, it was in the maternity block. He was asked to refer to himself only as a reproductive biologist. He spent the first eight months without a patient. He would sit around his office all day, reading magazines. It was a difficult time. His family’s finances were precarious; his wife was frustrated with him.

Then one day a patient finally walked in. Dr. Reddy said he was so relieved that he was ready to garland the man. His joy was short-lived, though, because it turned out the patient had strayed in only by accident. He and his wife had been having trouble conceiving, and his wife was with a gynecologist in the adjoining office.

Dr. Reddy and the man started talking. The man told Dr. Reddy that he and his wife had been trying to conceive for thirteen years. They had traveled around, tried all sorts of tests, visited doctors in Mumbai and Singapore, but no one could tell them what was wrong. Dr. Reddy asked the man if he and his wife were having regular sex, and the man said they were.

Dr. Reddy thought maybe he’d talk to the man’s wife. She was in the room next door. She was a conservative woman and refused to talk to him. So Dr. Reddy had to find a nurse to act as an intermediary. The wife told the nurse that yes, her and her husband’s sex life was perfectly normal. She said her husband lay down regularly on her, moved around, and then got up.

“But do you feel any penetration?” Dr. Reddy asked the woman, through the nurse, who blushed when he asked the question.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the wife said, and she refused to continue the conversation.

The couple’s doctor had scheduled laparoscopic surgery to see
if she could determine the reason for their infertility. But Dr. Reddy, operating on a hunch, convinced the doctor to postpone the surgery. He said he wanted to conduct a postcoital exam on the patients. He asked them to have sex in the hospital. A nurse took a swab from the woman’s vagina. The test was usually done to determine the health of semen in the vagina; this time, there was no semen. For thirteen years, the husband had been ejaculating between his wife’s thighs.

Dr. Reddy laughed when he told me this story, but he was making
a serious point: he was trying to show me how far the country had come in its awareness about sex and sexual issues. He said that in the nineties, when satellites started broadcasting Western soap operas into people’s living rooms, and as Indians became more exposed to Western cultures and ways of living, the country started shedding its sexual hang-ups.

People became more open, and more aware. The younger generation, in particular, was very liberated. Although not as prevalent as in the West, premarital sex was no longer taboo. It would be hard to imagine a couple today not knowing even how to have sex.

Dr. Reddy said he started noticing a change in his practice around the mid-nineties. Patients were more informed, and they were less shy about seeking help. Women would come into his clinic and complain about their inability to have an orgasm. Young men would talk freely about their homosexuality, and housewives—women from respectable middle-class families—would speak openly about their extramarital affairs.

Dr. Reddy showed me his appointment book. It was crawling with names. He said that often, he saw more than thirty patients a day. He felt he couldn’t do justice to their needs, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn them away.

We talked about Hari, and about the pressure his parents were putting on him to get married. “That’s always the biggest challenge,” Dr. Reddy said. “They have the most difficulty dealing with the marriage problem.”

He said that in some ways, things were easier for gay men today than they had been a decade before. Then, he said, he used to see a number of patients who had already been pressured into marriage. They would come to him, sometimes with their wives, complaining about their inability to perform. They would say: “Somehow help me get a child so I can worry less.” Before the advent of Viagra, he had few options. He could advise the man to fantasize, but if that didn’t work, it often led to serious marital and family discord.

Now, Dr. Reddy said, he saw fewer gay men who were already married, and more men like Hari: men who knew they were gay, whose families were putting pressure on them, but who were facing up to the problem before getting married. Sometimes the men would bring their parents to him. It would be his job to explain why their children were resisting marriage. The news would come as a shock; parents would cry, they’d demand psychological counseling for their children.

Often, even if they were forced to acknowledge their children’s homosexuality, parents would still insist on a marriage. “You know how it is in India,” Dr. Reddy said. “When you meet somebody in a wedding, the first thing they say is, ‘Hello, how are you?’ then, ‘How is your business or practice?’ and then they ask how many
children you have. And if you say, ‘Our son has finished his education and is working,’ then they ask right away if he’s married. It’s our way of picking a conversation. Parents feel really pressurized.”

He told me that if parents kept insisting on marrying their gay children, he would warn them that things weren’t as simple as they used to be. If the bride’s family found out after marriage that their son-in-law was gay, they could register a criminal case, for cheating, against the groom and his parents. They’d demand their dowry back, and they could even demand a jail term for the damage to their daughter’s reputation. He’d seen it happen. In the old days, divorce was unheard-of; now families didn’t hesitate anymore to undo a bad marriage.

“So what would you advise someone like Hari to do?” I asked him.

He sighed; he said there was no easy solution. Even though things were better, more open, India was still a difficult country for homosexuals.

“Well, at least he moved out of his small town,” I said. “I imagine it’s a lot easier for him here than in Tindivanam.”

Dr. Reddy said it probably was. But he added that ultimately, the important thing was for someone like Hari to face up to the fact of his homosexuality and accept it. Otherwise, he said, the city could pose its own dangers. He’d seen many men—and women—who had moved to the city with unaddressed issues. They lost their way. They turned to drugs or alcohol or pornography; they couldn’t control their shopping, they got into debt. They succumbed, he said, to “compulsive masturbation.”

“It’s not easy for these people to move to a place like Chennai,” he said. “The city changes people.”

“Does it always?” I asked. I was thinking, now, of Selvi.

“In my opinion, yes, it will always have some effect. People have to adjust; they have to adapt to the city.”

He went on: “It’s true that some people resist change. They refuse to change. I may have a bias, but my sense is that they have a personality disorder, and ultimately, they will get damaged.

“See, in India it’s considered a virtue to be rigid, to resist change at any cost. Most politicians cry themselves hoarse about ‘culture, culture, culture’ without understanding the meaning of the word. Today, where is Indian culture? Even in small villages you find hundreds of restaurants serving Chinese, Tandoori, Mughlai dishes. The Chinese have taken over India through gastronomy more effectively than they ever could through political or military might. And today so many girls, even in the villages, wear
salwar kameez
in Tamil Nadu even though it’s supposed to be North Indian attire. So where’s our culture?”

Dr. Reddy’s phone rang, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” He excused himself, and when he came back, he continued: “People who resist change do it at a detriment to themselves. It produces tremendous conflict—frustration, depression, jealousies, sexual problems. If you don’t change with the times, you will ultimately pay a price for that.”

Where, exactly, was Indian culture? It seemed like a fair question
. When I visited the cities, when I met people like Harsh or hung out with Hari and Selvi, it was hard not to wonder what it meant to be Indian at the turn of the twenty-first century. Their worlds
were so different from the one in which I had grown up, and indeed from the one in which I was still living. For all the change—all the troubled modernity—in the countryside around me, the villages sometimes seemed to exist in a different nation than the cities.

When I first started spending time with Hari and his friends, I did so because I was drawn to what I didn’t know. Like an anthropologist (or like a writer), I found myself studying their lives, hoping to understand the country in which I was trying to build my own life. Slowly, the sense of unfamiliarity lifted. I started having little flashes of recognition—moments when their world seemed a lot less strange than I had thought.

The world occupied by many young Indians was familiar because it reminded me of the country in which I had recently spent twelve years. This was a funny thing. I had left America, in many ways fled America, but in modern Indian culture (and particularly modern urban culture), I began to see traces of America.

It shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. The types of companies that lined Rajiv Gandhi Salai, and where people like Hari and Selvi worked, were the most visible manifestations of a new closeness between India and the United States. In the years since India’s economic reforms, commercial ties between the two nations had flourished: America was India’s largest trading partner (it would be overtaken by China in 2008), its biggest export market, and its second most significant source of foreign investment.

The United States was also a role model of sorts, a source of inspiration for much of corporate India. Many of the country’s leading entrepreneurs had been educated or worked in America. They returned animated by an American-style work ethic and
faith in meritocracy. The businesses they built were like bridges between the two countries—infused with American habits and attitudes, and even with shifts that ran late into the night, and holidays for Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, operating on American time.

I began to see that India’s new economy was in many ways thoroughly Americanized. Inevitably, this Americanization rubbed off on the employees within that economy—on men and women like Hari and Selvi, who found themselves interacting every day with American clients, who attended orientation sessions where they learned about American culture, and training seminars where they were taught to make small talk about the weather in America.

At work, young Indians were given American aliases, presumably on the theory that Americans were more likely to buy something from a person called Harry or Sally than Hari or Selvi. Hari spent much of his time analyzing corporate reports and SEC filings from the United States. He knew a surprising amount about the options structures and bankruptcy filings of American companies.

Young Indians were learning to speak like Americans, too. They attended accent-training sessions at work. It was disorienting, and sometimes vaguely troubling, like hitting a nerve, to chance upon a sudden American twang under Hari’s otherwise thick Indian accent. I had to laugh when young Indians called me “dude,” or when they told me that a person—in this case, one of Hari’s coworkers—was someone’s “bitch.”

Even television advertisements had changed. I noticed soon after returning that the old polished English accents had given
way to angled American voices. The aspirations of Indian consumers had shifted; the old longing for the colonial metropolis had been replaced by the temptations of a new empire.