Gaysia (37 page)

When I got off the train and walked the back streets towards
Ashok's apartment, I sighed with relief: this was as close to quiet as you could get in Delhi. Instead of the screaming of car horns and the smell of burning, there was birdsong and the sound of lone hammers doing construction work. It wouldn't be this quiet for long. This area was in demand. Older houses were being dismantled all over the neighbourhood in favour of new, full-floor apartments. When I mentioned the development in his street, Ashok nodded happily.

‘Oh, India's just exploding,' he said. ‘It's like gay culture here too.'

Although he was indoors, Ashok wore a full winter jacket and beanie. He lived in a fifty-year-old building with bad wiring, which meant that an electric heater could blow the fuse. But there was a serene quality to his apartment too. He kept two aquariums full of bright fish, bookshelves packed with literature and warm fairy lights strung throughout the place.

Ashok was in his mid sixties, but had a constant expression of wry amusement that made him look far younger. He had an infectious, puckish personality, called everyone ‘darling' and always referred to his male friends by female pronouns. When someone phoned in the middle of our chat, Ashok greeted him by airily asking, ‘And who are you fucking at the moment, you filthy pig?'

Ashok was the first gay man to talk about his sexuality in the Indian press. After he came out as gay in the 1980s, he became notorious and the press endlessly interviewed him about homosexuality. For years, Ashok remained the sole openly gay public figure in India. He founded two major institutions: India's first gay magazine,
Bombay Dost
, and the Humsafar Trust, which remained one of India's peak organisations for sexual health in gay men, MSMs and transgender people. People called him the
godfather of India's gay rights movement.

‘Oh, I'm not the
godfather
,' Ashok said now. He put his hand to his chest, feigning humility. ‘I'm called
amma
, which means mum. And as a mother, I
earned
that title.'

Like Dr Anjali Gopalan, Ashok had also had his fair share of encounters with Baba Ramdev. Ashok asked to see my photos with him. He adjusted his glasses to examine them, made a face, then handed back my camera.

‘I'm glad you spoke to him,' he said. ‘I think he's
weird
. In fact, I'm very sure that he's in the closet.'

‘People do keep saying that,' I said.

‘He only has men around him,' Ashok said. ‘He only nurtures guys. Closet queens. What did he have to say to you about homosexuality?'

I told Ashok that Ramdev has described homosexuality as a ‘bad habit'.

‘
Eeee!
' Ashok squealed. ‘I could slap him! He's a
yoga teacher
. What he speaks on is yoga, and yoga is a physical science supposed to harness spiritual energies. It's got nothing to do with pure spiritualism. I once said to him on television, “You're not even properly Hindu. Most of the stuff you teach is rubbish.” But it is frightening. He's got 80 million followers, most of them total weirdos.'

Queer sexualities were not new to India, Ashok explained. Everyone knew about the
hijras
, similar to transgender men – who dressed and lived as women – also known as the so-called third gender of India. But there were other precedents, like the ancient practice of holy prostitution in some Hindu temples.
Jogappas
, male devotees of the Hindu goddess Yellamma, had dressed in the saris and jewellery of married women and sexually serviced men as a display of their religious devotion. There
was also the obscure Hindu concept of
Vanaprastha
, a stage in the Vedic ashram system where men, in old age, would renounce everything, including their property, wife and family. They'd go to a forest or ashram, get fully nude and stay nude until they died. Ashok quipped that this had been a handy option if you were old, married and closeted. It was British colonialism that introduced new rules and moral structures into Indian society, and laws such as Section 377 made sex largely taboo, even though this was the birthplace of the
Kama Sutra
.

Now the gay scene was expanding quickly, with social groups, fundraisers and parties sprouting up, especially in the wake of the Section 377 repeal. Still, Ashok had reservations about how the scene had evolved. Recently, someone had held a gay party at a Hindu religious hostel about 250 kilometres from Delhi, which had been raided by the police. Partygoers were outraged at the authorities, but Ashok was more appalled at the party's organisers.

‘Gay men take such horrendous risks!' he said. ‘That's my gripe. “Stay out of trouble, guys. There's enough shit on our plate already!” A hundred of them were there! Can you believe it?'

‘Still, it's quite bold of them,' I said.

‘It
is
bold,' Ashok conceded. Then he shook his head as if to add:
but also stupid
.

A lot of the Delhi parties were for the young urban elites, gays with a tertiary education, a full-time job and money to burn, who were looking for a quick fuck. Meanwhile, Ashok pointed out, lesbians were still getting bashed and gay men were still contracting HIV through bareback sex and lack of education. It felt vulgar to him that these parties didn't give anything back to their community.

‘To the guys holding these expensive parties, I ask: “Why don't you collect fifty rupees extra? When each ticket is 400 or 500, surely you can pay fifty rupees extra for one of your own who's been bashed up somewhere? Where is your sense of charity?”'

Tuesdays and Saturdays were gay nights in New Delhi. Since the repeal, the nights had become far more open and, ironically,
less
gay. Gay parties now attracted a more mixed crowd, with many straight women – mainly models and wannabe actresses – rubbing shoulders with fashion designers and magazine editors. To get into one particular club, you needed a special SMS forwarded by a friend. Ashok didn't want to go, but knew the organisers and sent me the exclusive SMS to show at the door. It seemed a little incestuous – a club night where everyone would know someone else – but maybe that was the appeal.

Later that night, I showed my phone to security guards and paid a 500-rupee (eleven US dollars) entry fee, which was steep for this country. The place was packed with young men and as dark as blindness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw these men were uniformly young, twinkish, educated professionals, including IT specialists and film-makers, engineers and media types. Beers started at 250 rupees and went right up to 500, a colossal price in India, where you could pay a rickshaw driver a mere twenty rupees for a fifteen-minute drive home.

It wasn't long before I was monumentally drunk. Older men shouted me drinks and demanded in unsubtle terms that we go back to a hotel and fuck immediately. Strangers kept plying me with liquor, lighting my cigarettes and dragging me to the carpark because they had something very important they wanted to tell me in private, which was always a fervid plan of
fucking in a hotel room. One guy – an aeroplane engineer in his thirties, who wore a black jacket and blue paisley satin shirt – became smitten with me and asked, over and over, to see my bare feet. The attention was flattering, but soon the place was nightmarishly packed, and I felt I was either going to pass out or vomit. After pushing my way out into the night, I hailed an auto rickshaw and headed back to Hotel Express 66 alone, my face going numb with the cold. After I paid the driver, I looked in my wallet and realised I'd spent hundreds – possibly thousands – of rupees on alcohol. Ashok was right: Delhi's gay parties had become freer since Section 377, but the gay nightlife existed only for the people who could afford it. And in a country like India, that wasn't many people at all.

From Delhi, I took a south-bound train to Bangalore to move closer to the equator. I needed to defrost my bones. The train route cut India down the middle like a scalpel, and the entire ride would take over thirty hours.

I had already experienced some of what India's vast rail network had to offer. When travelling from Baba Ramdev's Patanjali headquarters to New Delhi, I had mixed up my tickets and ended up booking a last-minute journey in standard passenger class. The experience was so searingly uncomfortable that it became comical. Children hid and slept in the overhead luggage compartments while women spat peanut shells directly onto the floor. In the toilets – which were somehow worse than I could ever have imagined – there was a brown smear of
something
on the mirror. At each stop, men threw themselves violently into the carriage and smashed their bodies into impossibly small spaces,
as if playing a human game of Tetris. Strangers asked to sit on my lap, got angry when I said no, then sat on my lap anyway.

For the thirty-hour ride to Bangalore, I decided it was important to book an air-conditioned sleeper carriage. Once on board, I found the toilets were relatively clean and unexpectedly fun. You could choose from either an Indian squat-style or a Western toilet, but both had the same wonderful capacity of emptying directly onto the railroad tracks. You sat down, let the wind caress your naked butt and then happily watched as everything flew out into the open air.
Whee!
I squealed. Perhaps I'd incurred brain damage from Delhi's cold, but I felt like a kid again.

My carriage companion was a young guy in his early twenties with a sunny face and a chubby body, his hair and beard clippered like peach fuzz. After I forcefully shoved my backpack under the seat facing his, we smiled at each other and I extended my hand.

‘I'm Benjamin.'

‘Hello,' he said. ‘I'm Harsh.'

Harsh actually introduced himself by his real name, but later asked me to change it to the moniker he used in online chatrooms. Harsh was an only child, had never left India and was desperate to get out. He was studying French so he could visit Paris. He knew everything about the Netherlands because he wanted to live in Holland. When he asked to see my passport, the look on his face as he scanned the stamps was a mixture of awe and grief. He passed it around to our neighbouring passengers and people whistled.

Harsh was too enthusiastic and talkative not to be gay. During the train ride, he also displayed a catty streak that could momentarily stun me into silence.

‘You don't take very good pictures,' he said, flicking through
my digital photos. ‘You don't plan ahead very well,' he said, after I explained my itinerary. ‘Your wallet is ugly,' he said, looking at my leather billfold.

Struggling to find some common ground, I looked at his stack of magazines, including the Indian edition of
GQ
. Harsh was studying to be an engineer, but he had zero interest in the field. His dream was to work in fashion.

‘Would your father have preferred you be an average engineer or an incredibly successful fashion designer?'

Harsh didn't blink. ‘Average engineer,' he said, still smiling.

The names that obsessed Harsh were those of the block-buster designers showcased in
Vogue
and by labels such as Versace and Burberry.

‘Tom Ford,' he said, almost sighing. ‘He is a very good designer.' Harsh cut eye contact and spoke very softly. ‘He is gay, you know.'

‘Yes,' I said slowly. ‘A lot of male fashion designers tend to be.'

‘Marc Jacobs,' he said, lowering his voice again. ‘He is gay too.'

I nodded, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you have any gay friends, Harsh?'

That was all it took. Harsh leaped out of his seat like he'd been burned, his eyes wild and bulging. He shook his hands wildly around his mouth, a clear gesture for me to
shut the fuck up.
He turned around to see if the passengers across from us had heard.

‘You!' he said, whispering violently, leaning back in his seat so he couldn't be seen. ‘You are also …' He mouthed the word:
gay
?

I nodded.

Harsh snapped the curtains to our alcove shut. He looked as if he were about to explode. At first, I thought he was angry, but
when I examined his face properly, he had an odd expression: as if he'd just won a lottery but couldn't tell anyone in the room in case they stole the money from him. What were the chances? Of all the people on the train, we had found each other.

‘You,' he said again, whispering, ‘are gay.'

‘Yes,' I said, grinning. ‘You too?'