A piece from the BBC website by Firdaus Kanga on growing up gay in Bombay. Firdaus is an amazing guy and hugely entertaining. His book, Trying To Grow, is one of the most funny, warm and lively books about growing up in Bombay. It was also pretty much the first Indian book I read which openly talked about the sexuality of the narrator (obviously a thinly disguised Firdaus).
For much of the novel Brit, the narrator feels he is gay and is attracted to his very hunky neighbour Cyrus. Cyrus tries reciprocating, but can't really, and after that, for some reason, Brit's homosexuality also sort of evaporates and he finds a female lover in Cyrus' girlfriend Amy, who ditches Cyrus for him. To be honest, the moment this happens the book loses a lot of its energy and Amy is easily the deadest character in a book otherwise full of very vivid ones. I wasn't in any doubt that the author of the book was gay and this helped me hugely, though Firdaus would not be too flattered at the reason (though when I met him and told him he was gracious about it). Which was simply because if the writer was as disabled as Firdaus was, but didn't have problems dealing with his sexuality, I had no excuse for being so repressed about mine. Not the nicest argument from a disabled rights point of view, but an honest one. Anyway, Firdaus would be the last to care much about this sort of political correctness. He told me that when he went to the UK he was received with delight by activists there because he seemed to score a triple round in the minority sweepstakes - he was gay, disabled and Asian. But they reckoned with Firdaus who is a Parsi conservative monarchist to the core and Margaret Thatcher was his heroine. "I told them I was fine with being gay and Asian, but I HATED being disabled and didn't see that as a reason for pride." Rout of activists. I only wish he came back to visit Bombay more often. And also that Ravi Dayal, his publisher, would shake himself out of his customary lethargy and re-issue the novel, which is now impossible to find. I know that Penguin had agreed to reprint it, but unless Firdaus and Dayal get things going its not going to happen, which would be a monumental shame. Hopefully it might be out by the next time he comes to India and we can invite him to GB to read and talk about it, Vikram from bbc.co.uk: Broken bones and a broken heart Firdaus Kanga Throughout South Asia, homosexuality has been a taboo subject. There are signs in some areas that gay people are now becoming more open - but that is not always the case. In the latest in a series of articles about gay people from the region, Firdaus Kanga reflects on his life. Born into a Parsi family in Mumbai (Bombay), Kanga now lives in London where he works as a writer and actor. As a child he was diagnosed with a rare bone disease. There were many things I could not do as a boy - the most absurd of these was not being able to break a biscuit. There was something about the sound, the snap that always reminded me of those moments when I would crack a rib or break a hip, which happened almost as often as the festivals that sprinkled the Indian calendar. We were the Parsis of Bombay which meant we could celebrate Eid and Diwali and Christmas with as much pleasure as our own Navroz (New Year) we had brought with us from Persia so many centuries ago. And I really did suffer frequent fractures. I was born with brittle bones, could never walk or go to school with sturdy little boys who might break my tiny body with a friendly slap on the back. I stopped growing at about four feet. I first knew that ordinary friendship was not what I had in mind when I saw an attractive man and something inside me flew with a freedom and delight that I had never known. Homosexuality was the different part of me that gave me pleasure, allowed me to hug my body - if rather gingerly - rather than fear it, fear the pain it brought me, an unwelcome present I could not refuse. For many years I could only see and smile at and touch my lover in an imagination that had brought him alive as God was supposed to have made Adam. After all, this was Bombay in the early 1980s. In all the time I was growing up I had never heard anybody talk about homosexuality. I certainly knew no gay men, except in the sublime stories I found and read - those by James Baldwin, E M Forster and Iris Murdoch. Perhaps in some strange sense I was fortunate - my idea of gay love slept in relationships rather than in frenetic and furtive encounters in the dark. It was not until I was in my twenties and I had written a novel that was being published in London where I came to live that I met someone who could amuse and annoy me and drive me fast and furious around the hairpin bends of passion. Coming out was easy for me as I had been stared at all my life - now I turned heads for happier reasons. My mother, I think, was secretly relieved - she would never have to suffer "the other woman", the dreaded daughter-in-law who stole so many Indian sons from their mothers. My beloved aunt, in an original version of what, I was only later to discover was an old Jewish joke, asked me to promise her just one thing - that I would settle down with a good Parsi boy. That first relationship ended in the kind of pain that I had never known. At least this time I did not need an X-ray to confirm that something had broken very badly inside me. To my surprise, other relationships were to come. I do not intend this to be a potted history of my love life. Nevertheless, there was one very special love that I was to find with someone disabled by that still unexplained condition, Tourette's Syndrome. No, he did not, as some most people think, swear compulsively. But there were many other things, all benign, that he felt compelled to do. Sometimes just being able to sit down took him the best part of an hour. Somehow we found the comedy between that and the fact that I could never stand up. We also found a tenderness that I have not known before or since - tenderness and desire fulfilled. Even there, there was to be no happy ending - perhaps it is all my fault - or my excuse. I don't write happy endings - I find them too contrived, even boring. And they do not grant us the liberty to look at life and weep. Group Site: http://www.gaybombay.info ========================== This message was posted to the gay_bombay Yahoo! Group. Responses to messages (by clicking "Reply") will also be posted on the eGroup and sent to all members. If you'd like to respond privately to the author of any message then please compose and send a new email message to the author's email address. Post:- gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com Subscribe:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Digest Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] No Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Individual Mail Mode:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact Us:- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives are at http://www.mail-archive.com/gay_bombay%40yahoogroups.com/maillist.html Yahoo! 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