India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (39 page)

“What happened?” I asked Hari.

“That was then,” Hari said. “The job market was different. Things were hot then. But the times have changed. The world has
changed. Do you watch TV? Do you see what’s happening? I guess we have to change accordingly. We have to go with the flow.”

His phone rang again; he screened the call. “People also change,” he said. “I guess I’m different now. I’m not the same Hari I used to be.”

I had stayed in touch with Dr. Reddy, the sexologist I visited soon
after meeting Hari and Selvi. We e-mailed every now and then, and I kept track of his activities in the newspapers. He called me one day and invited me to a conference at which he was speaking in Chennai. It was a conference on homophobia. He remembered that I had asked a lot of questions about homosexuality; he thought I might be interested.

I asked Hari if he wanted to come with me to the conference. I said I’d introduce him to Dr. Reddy. He scoffed. “Why would I want to meet a doctor?” he asked. “You seem really angry,” I said. “You’re upset. Maybe he could help.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Hari said. “I need a job.”

The conference was held in a concert hall with dusty cement floors and fake wood paneling. Dr. Reddy sat on a stage with another sexologist and several activists. The activists talked about coming out, about their experiences with discrimination at home and in society. Dr. Reddy talked about the difficulty of eliminating homophobia; he said it was deeply entrenched, fed by a general neuroticism in the country about sex. “We have to get this sex thing out of the closet,” he said.

After the conference, I asked Dr. Reddy if he’d consider seeing
Hari. I told him a bit about Hari’s situation. I said I thought he could benefit by talking to someone. A little while later, I found myself back at Dr. Reddy’s office, this time with Hari, waiting while a woman and a man (a married couple, I assumed) rotated in and out of the counseling room without looking at each other.

While we waited, Hari told me his situation was getting worse. He said he’d been hit by a “tsunami of problems.” His mother had consulted his horoscope and seen his bad luck. She had assured him things would be better in a few months. Hari put little faith in that; his mother didn’t know the full extent of his problems. Even his scooter had broken down. The engine had seized, but he didn’t have the money to fix it. He had to get around the city by public transport.

“If this goes on, I’ll have to move back to Tindivanam,” he said. “I’ll just have to run back to where I came from.”

Dr. Reddy and Hari sat at opposite ends of a black table in the counseling room. Dr. Reddy made small talk for a while. He asked about Hari’s education, his family, his parents, their backgrounds, his work life. Hari told Dr. Reddy he’d come out to his friends recently. He said he had told them “what I am,” and Dr. Reddy asked: “What do you think you are?” Hari, wrinkling his nose but looking straight at Dr. Reddy, said: “Gay.”

He told Dr. Reddy about his first sexual experience with a male. It happened in school, when he was about fourteen years old. He said he had felt shameful and guilty after the encounter, but comfortable and happy while it was happening. Later, when he started having more encounters in college, the shame dissipated. What he was doing felt natural. It felt right.

Dr. Reddy asked Hari what he was hoping to get out of their
discussion, and Hari talked about his trip to London, about the gay friends he’d made there, and how he’d felt when he returned. He said he wanted to come out to his parents, but he didn’t know how.

“Do you think they already know?” Dr. Reddy asked, and Hari said he didn’t think so, but sometimes he wondered about his mother. Just the other day, she had turned to him with a sad look in her eye and asked: “Hari, why are you so different now?”

“No, Mother, I’m not different,” Hari said. “I’ve always been this way.”

“No, something’s changed in you since you left home,” she said.

“No, I’ve always been this way,” he said. “Don’t you remember, at school I was the only one who was able to talk to girls? I was always comfortable with girls. I’ve always been so comfortable with women.”

“You didn’t used to be this way,” his mother insisted, and she turned back to the book she’d been reading. Hari wanted to pursue the conversation. He wanted to ask her what she meant. But the moment had passed.

Dr. Reddy told Hari that if he did come out to his parents, he should expect a huge scene. He warned Hari that it wouldn’t be easy. First, Dr. Reddy said, his parents would probably refuse to believe him. They might try to take him to a doctor, to cure him. They’d say it was a state of mind. “It’s not a state of mind!” Hari said, indignantly. “That I can tell you—it’s not just a state of mind.”

Dr. Reddy said Hari’s parents would surely emphasize the social problems he would cause his family. They would talk about the family’s reputation; they would talk about the difficulty his siblings would have in getting married.

“That’s the one question I can’t answer yet,” Hari said. “That is
the only question that’s still bothering me. For them, society is so important, and I don’t know what I can say to my mom if she raises that issue.”

“Not just society,” Dr. Reddy said. “Your relatives also won’t keep quiet. That pressure is going to be there. You and your parents will have to face incessant questioning from relatives.”

Hari said his relatives had already been putting pressure on his parents, asking why their son wasn’t married. The questions had been going on for years. He knew the situation was difficult for his parents; he knew it made them tense, and maybe a little sad.

As Hari spoke to Dr. Reddy, I thought I saw some of the anger he had previously displayed toward his parents ease a little. He seemed more mindful of their situation, concerned about the difficulty he might cause them. Still, he said, he’d made up his mind: he was going to tell his parents. He’d been thinking about coming out for years, right since his college days, but he’d always been scared of the consequences. Now, after his time in London, he was sure who he was, and he was sure he was ready to tell other people. He just needed to find the right time, and the right words.

Dr. Reddy steered the conversation away from coming out. He and Hari discussed a wide range of issues about homosexuality in India. They talked about cultural and religious norms toward homosexuals, and they talked about Section 377, the British-era law that had criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” and that had recently been overturned by the Delhi High Court. Hari said he had a copy of the judgment on his laptop.

Sometimes, their conversation became fairly technical. Dr. Reddy spent a considerable amount of time delving into the biological differences between transvestites, transgenders, and
transsexuals. He asked Hari why he referred to himself as gay rather than homosexual. He asked if there was a difference between the two words.

Toward the end of the session, Dr. Reddy asked Hari whether he had found their time together helpful. Somewhat to my surprise, because they had spent so much time talking about issues that seemed tangential to Hari’s interest in coming out, Hari said he had, extremely. He said Dr. Reddy had given him a lot of new information. “You’ve opened new ways to consider it all, you’ve given me new ways to talk about it,” Hari said. When he did come out to his parents, he’d be able to “categorize and tell.”

Hari stepped out of the room, and I asked Dr. Reddy why his conversation had been so free-ranging. He said: “You see, there’s actually not much I can do to help him. There’s no way I can avoid the scene that will blow up at home when he tells his parents. One way or another, it’s going to be a big trauma—for him, for his parents, for everyone involved. So all I can really do is arm him with information. I can make him confident, more sure of himself, and hope that he can stand his ground. I’m just trying to empower him.”

As I was leaving, Dr. Reddy said: “You know, he’s really very self-confident. I’m not sure how he ended up like this, but I can count on my hands the number of men I’ve seen who are so sure of themselves and so comfortable talking about it.”

Outside, in the advancing evening, Hari was waiting on the road, leaning against a compound wall. He seemed contemplative, but he was in better spirits than I’d seen him in a while. He said all doctors should be like Dr. Reddy. They should listen and give their patients information. He said he felt he understood what it
meant to be a homosexual, and especially a homosexual in India, much better now. He was sure it would help him when the time came to tell his parents.

“So, when do you think that will be?” I asked him.

“Who knows,” he said, and his face dropped. It was like watching a shadow come over him. “First, I have to sort through my mess,” he said. “No job, no money, so many debts—it’s not the right time to add to my difficulties.”

I lost track of Hari for a while after that. When I next heard from
him, a few months later, things seemed to have turned around for him. He told me he’d come out to one of his sisters. She was the first person in his family to know, and she’d accepted him. That was a big load off his back. He’d found a new job, too. He was living in Bangalore now, marketing for a company that offered software services to American clients. He was getting paid substantially less than he’d hoped for. But it was better than nothing; it allowed him to pay off his debts.

Hari was living in a suburb far outside the city. He commuted into town on weekends. He had a wide circle of friends, many of whom he’d met over the Internet. He was enjoying Bangalore’s gay life. He went to meetings and get-togethers sponsored by gay rights associations.

We met one afternoon when I was visiting Bangalore. Hari took the long bus ride from his suburb, through the city’s chaotic traffic, to the center of town. He was almost two hours late.

We sat in a restaurant by Cariappa Park, not far from where I had
first met Veena. The restaurant was noisy, full of conversation about venture capital and stock options and new start-ups. Hari ordered garlic bread he didn’t seem too happy with, and apple pie and ice cream he liked better. He told me about life in Bangalore. He said it was like living at the center of India, the place to be if you wanted to make something of yourself. He seemed ambitious again. He had that old lightness, that joyful, carefree quality that I remembered from when we’d first met.

He told me about coming out to his sister. She sent him a text message one day asking when he planned to get married, and he replied: “I can’t get married. If I do, I’ll spoil a girl’s life. I’m gay. I don’t want to live a lie.”

His heart was pounding after he sent the message. His palms felt cold. His sister wrote back almost immediately, saying she had suspected that he might be gay, and it was fine with her. They met a couple days later. She said he should live the way he wanted. But she asked him not to tell their parents.

Hari was relieved. “I was scared,” he said. “She’s my sister and I didn’t want a gap between us. It’s like a big rock has been lifted from my head. But still, I feel a lot of pressure. When will I tell my parents? One rock is gone—a whole mountain remains.”

I asked Hari about his debts. “They’re still there,” he said, laughing. He said money was tight, but he managed to make his monthly payments. He was sure it would work out, somehow. I asked him if he was saving, and he said he had the same opinion he’d always had about that: he didn’t like the concept of saving, he still didn’t see why he should have to.

I asked about the job, and he said things were slow at work. He’d been at his company for several months, but he had yet to
make a sale. He said no one was making sales. Things were really hard in America; no one was buying their services.

He told me some stories about approaching American customers. He could hear the tension of the bad economic climate in their voices. A man he called recently yelled at him. He told him to “get your fucking business out of my face.” Hari had the man on speakerphone, and everyone in the office laughed and clapped when he hung up. Hari needed to “reset” himself after that conversation. He stepped out for a cup of tea; he played some solitaire.