g_b Growing up Parsi and gay in Bombay

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Growing up Parsi and gay in Bombay 


Published: Sunday, Jan 22, 2012, 11:15 IST 
By  <http://www.dnaindia.com/authors/hoshang-merchant> Hoshang Merchant |
Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA 


Ten years of a Parsi Purgatory. But that still did not prepare me for the
American 'Paradise'. In 1958, in the proverbial sexual encounters of
Bombay's fast trains, I came to know about sex. We lived in Bandra, school
was in Churchgate.

So every morning, I had undiluted fun for a full half an hour. I had a first
class train pass but I'd prefer to travel second-class, thinking the proles
would be more obliging. Wrong! I looked an upper-class kid, and the
'aam-admi' was more afraid of the 'saheb log' back then than they are now.
Looking back, I had an easy run. In today's metropolis, I would be murdered
as that poor boy Adnan was a few years ago, when he went on a blind-date
rustled up on the internet, only to encounter the local bully and death. I
was seduced in class VI. I couldn't tell my older sister till class XI. I
had no one else to confide in due to fear and shame of being outed.

So there be pros and cons. I am Parsi. So let's start with the pros. Parsis
then as now were Westernised. So I was sent to a psychiatrist instead of
being beaten up by macho elder men in the family as they do in Hyderabad. Dr
Vahia secretly told my father, "Your boy is highly intelligent. And it will
be hard to change him. Anyway, it is almost impossible to change homosexuals
to heterosexuals. Just let him do what he wants." I came to know about this
only two years ago. Of course, the psychiatrist blamed me and not my parent
who was paying his fees. Then it was the Freud oedipal paradigm that ruled.
Now, homosexuality is considered to be genetic. I lived for 20 years under
the guilt bred by the Parsi religion. I understood when I was in Iran that
Zoroaster was pro-life. So dead bodies, menstruating women and homosexuals
were taboo. Dr Dasturji Kooka's book on Zoroastrianism in English explained
to me at 30 the meaning of the 'Jashn' ceremony performed in our fire
temples. The initiate (young priest) holds the flower of evil, but forsakes
it for the seven flowers of good, strikes the waters of experience nine
times for the nine directions, and having experienced evil and chosen good
returns to life (the older priests). Zoroastrianism is a mature religion.
Its interpretation is narrow.

Of course, patriarchal religions and societies breed machismo. Men are men;
women, women. Zoroaster was no metrosexual, god forbid! So my mother became
my enemy when she found out that her son was a 'sissy'. This was an
unbearable cross to a sensitive boy who loved the mother that shielded him
from a disciplinarian father.

I am giving you the anatomy of a Parsi household of the '50s, which bred
social and sexual hypocrisy. Men had mistresses if they could afford them.
But for social occasions, the wife always came first. Discovery led to
social humiliation. I saw this in the case of my father. So I decided early
on that whatever I do, I'd do openly. (As a single man, I could afford the
decision that householders cannot.) Growing up under India's then-Victorian
laws, a homosexual's testimony counted for nothing in the Parsi Matrimonial
Court - even if he was honest and an eyewitness to a crime, as I was during
my parents' divorce trial. Under such a regimen, it is hard to love yourself
and grow up guiltless. Strike down clause 377(b) of the Indian Penal Code, I
say!

In a small in-bred community, adolescent homosexuality thrives (among
cousins; schoolmates) but conversely, it also encourages subterfuge and
silence on the issue due to naming and shaming by community busybodies and
gossips. Hence the conspiracy of silence: Don't ask/Don't tell. I was
disinherited for being gay. Relatives use this as a moral excuse to veil
their own greed while depriving gay children of their patrimony. The
coming-out ritual of America is a typical Puritan truth-telling - very
in-your-face. It does not allow for the 'letting-be' and the delicacy of
social compassion of older societies.

America, by contrast, lives by ghettoisation. Jewtown/Fagtown/Indian town
actually exist in Chicago. Fagtown became upmarket due to the Pink Dollar
and Jewtown became Indian-town when the upwardly-mobile Jew moved out of the
ghetto to the suburbs. My American brother-in-law took my sister dancing to
Chicago's gay clubs 'for the new music' but could not brook me, a queen, for
a brother-in-law.

I myself am no paragon of virtue. When Dina Mehta published both Firdaus
Kanga and me in the now-defunct Kaiser-I-Hind in the mid-'80s, I refused to
meet poor Firdaus. Being a lover of beauty like my mentor Anais Nin, I
quoted her on my fear of "ugliness". I decided to write my book not only out
of a queen's exhibitionism but also out of a Parsi sense of do-gooding,
because even now, young gays routinely commit suicides.

Hoshang Merchant is a poet and author. His latest book is The Man Who Would
Be Queen

 

 

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