Ode to Lata (24 page)

How ironic, I thought while meekly busying myself with a newly purchased
Los Angeles
magazine in the corner, and fighting over my guilt in letting Salman deal with the awkwardness of discussing sex with an Indian.  We came from a culture that wrote the book on sexual relations, that practically invented the art itself.  A culture that immortalized not only sexual liberty, but also its diversity on the faces of temples such as Khajuraho.  Various sexual positions, group sex, homosexual practices, relations with animals – they are all there and are justly famous.  Legend told that the sculptures protected the temples from lightning, and we had become a culture that is ashamed of sex.  A people that, through gradual regression, fear lightning will strike at the mention of it.  Parents unable to speak to their own children about the risks involved.  Grown men insulted at being approached on the subject unless in jest or boasting about conquests.  And us, here, at a 7-Eleven on Santa Monica Boulevard, struggling to educate an Indian.  How did a period of great civilization and liberty evolve into one of the most backward cultures in the domain of sexuality?

How, I asked myself, peering over the pages of the best restaurants in the city and hearing Salman excitedly tell the cashier that coincidentally his name was Aziz as well, had the culture of the Kama Sutra been reduced to one of such incipience on the subject? 

When did we lose our identity as the pioneers of eroticism and become a people paralyzed by shame?

I had missed the tail end of their exchange, but before I knew it, the cashier was hollering at Salman, who grabbed me by the elbow and began to pull me out of the store as if a bomb was being detonated.  “You go right now, you listening?  I don’t want your filthy business here, okay?  Go!  Go!
Gandu, haram zade, pata nahin kahan se ajate hain!”
 

In the car, I didn’t ask Salman exactly what he had done or said to provoke Aziz but I suspected it had been more than just the imparting of preventive information; perhaps it had been the lethal, ironic mix of safe sex education with the relentless visual hold on his crotch that had unnerved poor Aziz.

As we drove over to the Vortex, where Salman and I hoped to encounter more unsuspecting Indians and also steal some pleasure for ourselves, we turned Lata down to a whisper and discussed what it was like to be Indian.  And sex.  We acknowledged that Indians were much more than delectable curries, over-the-top Hindi films, the Taj Mahal and Eastern philosophy.  They were the founders, the monarchs of the ancient legacy of sex.  Indians were to sex what Rumi was to mysticism. And now this same culture had appointed a tyrannical censor board, which would not allow even a simple kiss in Indian films for fear of overexciting its public.  When was the last time two Indians had been seen kissing on the lips?  At home, on the street, anywhere?  Did they ever?  No.  It was all about shame, shame, and more shame.

“India,” Salman said, “our dear motherland, is a raped woman. Come to think of it, the continent even looks like the shape of a woman, standing there in a sari with one hand on her hips, her elbow jutting out,
no?
Anyway, what can you expect after your mother’s been gang-raped?”

I was confused.  “Okay, it all sounds very profound but what the hell are you babbling about?”

Salman reached out and turned the stereo off completely, clearing the air for his surprisingly well-contemplated analysis.  “First she was raped by the Moguls,” he began didactically. “And then by those snooty British bastards who decided we were no better than dogs. You know what those two had in common?”

I fumbled at first.  “Moguls and British…well, the Moguls were…Muslim and the British…oh, Puritans!”

“Oh,” he sighed. 
“Meri beti kitni akalmand hai!”

Suddenly it all became perfectly clear.  Two very different cultures with one very virulent trait in common – Puritanism – had ruled India.  An epoch of lavish sexuality had been expunged by the conviction that the very quality that had exalted India was now the cause of its denigration.  This attempt to redraw her face by the rulers that held her captive continued down the centuries, at the hands of the heroes who sought to alter her into what they thought she should look like instead of what she had always been.  Luminaries who, in making philanthropic strides for economic and racial matters, reduced her into docility, forever obliterating her progressiveness.

Even Mahatma Gandhi had sent troops to tear down the erotic images on temples.  And it was the socialist government of Nehru that for the first time in history prohibited what they considered acts against nature through article 377:  No more sexual relations against nature with a man, woman or animal, whether the intercourse is anal or oral.

Mutual consent was not even a consideration in this edict.  And whose nature were they referring to?  Pandit Nehru’s nature?  Gandhi’s nature?  We must all have sex the way
they
had deemed it natural, these self-proclaimed sovereigns of morality.  Suddenly what was natural had nothing to do with our ancestors – they had become a source of shame for us with their wanton lifestyles.  Centuries of history were suddenly consigned to oblivion.  Disowned.  Exported to the West.  There was a new India, and it wore that tyrannical face of puritanism.  India and her legacy had been prostituted not only by outsiders, but also by her own children.  They had reduced her to a commercial about pungent spices, Gods and Goddesses with multiple limbs and heads, and Bollywood.  They had hoped that we would forget what few cultures had dared to represent, and they had been right.  We had forgotten.

“We’re all screwed up,” Salman declared.  “No wonder we’re all screwed up!  We are the children impacted by their shame.  Unable to take anything to this arena but a funny accent and a fucking dot on the head!”

We continued to drive in silence for a little while, and I thought about what he had just said.  He’s right, we are all screwed up and lost.  All of us.  The Indians back in India, the ones that make it on
20/20
for dousing brides with kerosene and setting them ablaze all for women with bigger dowries, and us here in L.A., on our way to a sex club to feast on a banquet of cocks for a five-dollar admission.  A new generation of Indians that have never even been to India; Indians who have become multicultural, not even knowing where they belong anymore; Indians who brought to the table the nostalgia of a home incongruent to the color of their skin, the syrupy lyrics of
filmi
songs, and the vague knowledge that the wanton images on the bottles of erotic massage oils were indisputably Indian, but contrary to the conservatism that they had experienced as Indian.

How could the members of such a culture, ignorant to an alarming extent of their contribution to sexual progression, truly fare amidst a seemingly fearless community marching down Santa Monica Boulevard in a flurry of shirtless musculature and pink feather boas?

We have no answers and no role models, not unless we wanted to consider the eunuchs in India, clapping away in celebration and pelting out songs in hoarse voices; or the brutish husbands who give in to blowjobs in toilets as role models. 

“Everything!” Salman said.  “Why does
every
fucking thing about being Indian have to be so complex!”

I grunted.  “You’re right, you know.  Everything Indian is complex.  The food is complex with all its spices, the clothing is complex with all the layers and layers, the continent is a virtual curry of languages and tribes, and the emotions, ha!  Watch out!”

“That’s why it gives me such satisfaction to do what we’re doing,” he said, turning the volume up on the stereo and letting Lata sing her little heart out. “Oh, this is one of my favorite songs!”  And he sang a few words,
“sheesha ho ya dil ho, akhir toot jata hai…
I know you like this one too. It’s so-o-o tragic!” and then just as suddenly he switched back. “There are other Indians out there who really need a support group, you know?  They really need to know that there are others like them.”

“Yeah,” I chided.  “I wish they’d been here tonight to see how you changed Aziz’s life.”

“Ar-e-e, kuti!”
  He gave me a playful slap on my shoulder.  “Don’t give me a hard time!  I’ve worked my ass off trying to knock sense into those thick-skinned Indians. After all, I’m a lonely woman too, not Mother Theresa!”

GOSSIP

I called Salman and was momentarily stunned by the greeting on his machine.  After almost a year of being accosted by various
filmi
sirens – and Salman ebulliently maintaining that he was the hub of
Saath
– his nonpartisan, conventional “Sorry, I can’t come to the phone” felt like a slap on the face.  The message was now a cold, businesslike rebuff, a portentous sign.  I dispelled my worry as the beep came through and left a terse message that responded to the reserve in his greeting.  Rather than the usual,
“Ay
, bitch,
vashiah
, where are you? 
Ay
, Gulnar, this is your dear sister calling,” I left a proper, “Hey, it’s me.  What’s up with the greeting?  Call me back, okay?”

And then it occurred to me as I hung up that maybe his mother had suffered that massive heart attack that the songs on his machine had been intended to deliver! 

At least once a week for over a year now, we had converged at either Salman’s or Farida’s house under the pennant of
Saath
.  Of the six who comprised the core of this group, only two were completely out of the closet: Riyaz and myself.  Notably, we shared the circumstance of living far from our families in Kenya.

Ten years ago, Riyaz had come to Los Angeles on a student visa and had never gone back.  Too far away to pass judgment on his sexuality or to discover that their son was trying to find spiritually through hallucinatory drugs, Riyaz’s family was the suspended clan of every son who left home to pursue freedom in a country in which he would remain imprisoned.  Only after digging into his flesh with a syringe of LSD while Jan Garbarek or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan scored out of his Magna pan speakers did Riyaz escape the castigation of his sexuality and the lonely choices it had compelled him to make.  Only then could he float outside of his own body and descry on the adversities in his life with bemused detachment.  To escape from the confinements of being an illegal alien.  To travel abodes of consciousness that didn’t require an American passport or a green card.  On such days we would not hear from him.  Although he was out among the worker ants of L.A., he kept himself away from us – from other Indians – giving us no cause to express concern, only reason to gossip about him when he had failed to show up to a gathering.

For Indians gossip is as staple like chapattis and basmati rice.  No one was ever spared from this customary avocation (participated in innocuously and disguised as a form of concerned colloquy), which succeeded in hurting feelings all around.  One could always count on being the topic of the evening if one didn’t show up at a barbecue or at some insomniac coffeehouse where the group was meeting.  Everyone in the group had their idiosyncrasies: 

Ay, you know how Ali gets with his drinking!  Oh,
Khudda!
  I know we’ll be attending his liver transplant party in the near future!  He’s just wasting all his talent away.  Give him disco and drinking and it’s a done deal!

That Farida is such a lesbo!  I’m just so sick of going to Palms with her every time Chastity breaks up with her and listening all night about how badly that bitch’s been treating her.  I think that after Farida’s mother died, Chastity really took over, you know?  Typical codependency syndrome, neh? 

Oho-ho!  She just will not stop calling me, you know?  Ten bloody times a day!  You know, I told her,
“Hunh
, look, please,
hunh!
  Stop hounding me at work with your pussy problems.” 
Yah Khudda!
  What came over me, can you tell me, that I was stupid enough to give her my work number?  She has climbed on my head and become a real pain!  I don’t know what to do about her.  She’s such a giving person, you know?  I told her she needs to stop trying so hard.  She needs to stop feeling so insecure about Chastity.  But will she listen, that psycho?

Yeah, well, Chastity does get lots of attention, you know?  If Farida spent less time looking like a house and running to Artesia for
mithais
and videos, she might do a little exercising!

House?  She’s an entire zip code!

Dear God, you know Riyaz with his drugs!  There are so many holes under his sleeve, it’s like a
machar-dani!
  A mosquito net!  I told him, “Riyaz, this is really crazy,
henh!
  What is all this experimenting with all these drugs?”  And then you know, he’ll start with his
bhashan!
  Lecturing away all that crap about spiritually discovering himself through drugs and all that
ganda-wera!

Oh, God, those
bhashans
of his!  Sometimes I want to poke him with his needles to make him shut up!

He’s almost forty!  When the hell’s he coming out to his parents, when they’re dead? 

Salman’s not forty!  Salman is thirty-three or something like that!

Hanh, hanh,
same thing, okay!  What kind of a role model can someone make if he’s in the closet after thirty? Closets are for clothes, stupid homo, not for people!

Yeah, you’re one to talk!  You’re also in the closet yourself!