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Contents

Ark Erotica endpapers

Anirban Ghosh

Foreword

Vikram Doctor

Introduction

Pity that Blush

Annie Dykstra

Dreams and Desire in Srinagar

Michael Malik G.

Perfume

D’Lo

Jewel and the Boy

Abeer Hoque

Give Her A Shot

Msbehave

Soliloquy

Chicu

Shadowboxer

Nilofer

The Marriage of Somavat and Sumedha

Devdutt Pattanaik

All in the Game

Iravi

The Half Day

Doabi

Upstairs, Downstairs

Nikhil Yadav

Conference Sex

Ellen L.R.

I Hate Wet Tissues

Satya

Screwing with Excess

Vinaya Nayak

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Vikram Doctor

W
hile browsing among the few booksellers that still cling to Mumbai’s pavements, if you dig below their piles of Mills & Boons novels, self-help books and the accumulated works of Chetan Bhagat, you will often come across American pulp novels from the ’60s and ’70s. Most of these have covers featuring macho men and barely-clad women along with weapons, cars and piles of cash, but just occasionally the covers will show two men, or two women, and in positions that suggest they have more than playing chess in mind.

Titles like
When Love Must Hide, The Strange Women
and
Journey to Eros
make it clear that they are examples of samesex erotica that made their way to India at a time when an anthology like this could hardly have been imagined. I find these books oddly compelling, not for their lurid artwork and variable writing, but as signs of gay and lesbian life from past decades in Mumbai, when it may have been relatively repressed, but yet stubbornly endured.

It is true, of course, that such lesbian erotica was often written and read by men looking for a different kind of titillation, but there is always the possibility that some women may have found it here and recognised feelings within themselves that they might not have otherwise articulated. ‘It is through desire that many people first know of their sexuality’, write the editors of this anthology, and this is where erotica becomes a catalyst in helping you articulate what might have otherwise remained unacknowledged, even unnameable. Even those men getting turned on by the ladies, while hardly signs of a conventional queer sensibility, still unwittingly provide evidence of how sexual attractions can fall beyond the normative heterosexual frame.

The stories collected here provide ample evidence of such non-normative attractions, not just gay and lesbian, but bisexual and even beyond the simply sexual, as with Satya’s story of a transman’s desire which goes to a more essential, bodily level. There is also the woman in Doabi’s story who wonders at the end whether the sex was better than the bowl of rajma her lover has just fed her, and if this seems flippant, you haven’t tasted how satisfying a bowl of rajma – a recipe is helpfully provided – can be!

That rajma is also proof of how these attractions are expressed in specifically South Asian terms. This is rarer than it might seem. The one thing that hasn’t changed from those days of American pulp erotica is how we still seem to take our overt sexual stimulation from abroad. Indirect stimulation abounds of course, from Bollywood bromances to girls acting ‘tomboy’ on Indian reality TV shows, but actual South Asian erotica or porn has tended to be too depressingly sleazy to allow for any real appreciation (and when it just might, it is soon shut down – as with the Savita Bhabi strips).

There is real pleasure then in reading of desires couched in specifically familiar terms, and interest too – I had never considered the erotic possibilities of sari pleats until reading D’Lo’s story of the seduction of a school teacher! The rhythms of traditional story-telling used by Devdutt Pattanaik for his tale of Somavat and Sumedha may seem subversive, down to its amusedly voyeuristic cow, until you remember the uninhibited spirit that runs through so much Indian folklore and mythology, unquenched by the prudery often imported, like those pulp novels, from abroad.

Pulp, in fact, is always an adjunct to prudery, and the fact that a collection like this, which is the opposite of pulp, can come out openly is a hopeful sign of how we might be moving beyond prudery as well. But if by this, browsing book buyer, you are expecting a raunchy read, think again. The stories here might be explicit, but they largely avoid the prurient spirit of pure porn. They are, of course, erotic, which means they deal also with the subtleties of suggestion, the explorations of eye-contact, the imaginations and recollections of intimacy, rather than merely with full, fleshy details.

Don’t put this book down in disappointment, though, because its pleasures are real, and rarer. Porn, after all, is available with a few clicks, but the erotic has become harder to find. The stories here present it in different styles and settings, showing how it can creep into the drawing rooms of Nikhil Yadav’s and Vinaya Nayak’s stories, which mix social satire with sex, as well as into the humdrum bus ride of Chicu’s story, where the protagonist, who fears what a surprising revelation might bring, is surprised in turn by the response she gets.

That story also illustrates how this anthology differs from so much other queer writing. The genre has been dominated by a few narratives, such as that of coming out and of the violence, loss and shame this often brings. This collection is refreshingly free from these. Violence is displaced by attraction responded to, or even just calm acceptance – as in Michael Malik’s story set in Kashmir which shows something rare in queer fiction, though perhaps more common in real life than we imagine: the acknowledgement of attraction, but an equal acceptance of different realities where queer and straight worlds meet.

It is an adult story in the real sense, and eroticism is an adult emotion, not made ‘for adults-only’ in the sense of the x-rated, but made by adults encountering and accepting the possibilities and limits of attraction. This is an adult anthology, enjoy it that way.

Introduction

Meenu and Shruti

W
hen we pick up a book of erotica, what magic does it hold for us? It may excite us, arouse us, perhaps even pique our curiosity. The appeal of erotica lies in its ability to capture our sexual imagination, in the promises it holds of pleasures and possibilities. It is to this appeal of erotic possibility that we hope to speak in this anthology, as we present contemporary literature about queer sex lives, erotic experiences and passions. This book is an attempt to explore the less visible zones of queer sex writing from South Asia and bring it into the public domain, thereby making queer lives apparent in compelling new ways.

It is through desire that many people first know of their sexuality. In most cultures, sexual expression is seen as valid only if it is contained within heterosexual, married, monogamous set-ups. What then becomes of people whose desires mark them as different, whose stirrings are turned into a pledge of silence? A lifetime could go by without even knowing that the pleasure one seeks is also sought by many others. Every day, people are living sexual lives that step outside the normative, but their lives and stories are usually kept secret or hidden. The shame and silence accompanying their desire makes sure that normative sexuality remains unquestioned. Given this context, we as queer feminists believe it is critical to work towards a world where all sexualities can be equally expressed, where non-normativity, fluidity and multiplicity is abundant. This is what we understand as queer – a perspective and political identity that confronts the heteronormative ideal
¹
and the respectability it offers. For us, queerness knocks down the assumption that everyone is heterosexual and shifts the notion that only two genders, fixed at birth on the basis of biology, exist. Instead, queer foregrounds sexual and gender diversity and celebrates the plurality of sexualities, genders, sexual expressions and lived realities.