India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (37 page)

He liked the English. He found them open and friendly. He hadn’t encountered any racism. On the contrary, he said, everyone at work admired Indians. People thought of Indians as “the brains of the world.” Whenever there was a tech problem in the office,
they came to the Indians for help. “We’re the leaders now,” he said. “It’s just us and the Chinese. Who else is there?”

He pointed to an imposing gray tower overlooking the park. He said it was the headquarters of a major corporation. According to Hari, 30 percent of the employees in the building were Indian (I couldn’t verify this information). It made him feel good to know that—“on cloud nine,” he said. “Earlier, they used to call us ‘bloody Indians,’ and we used to feel bad,” he said. “Now we know what to say. We just call them ‘white trash.’”

An ice cream van rolled up. It was covered with cartoon characters, Mickey and Daffy and Donald, and it was playing a tinny tune from speakers attached to the roof. A group of French schoolkids ran over; they queued, arguing, shoving each other eagerly.

Hari said that when he saw the ice cream van, with the kids lined up, he thought of all the business opportunities back home. “Do you know how little money they started Infosys with?” he asked me, and I said I did. He told me about the founder of a global chain of Indian restaurants who had started with just twelve dollars.

He had decided he was going to start his own business when he went back to India. One day, he would sell his business. He would return to England and buy the company where he was now working.

“What, with the proceeds from your ice cream company?” I asked, teasing a little.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “Anything is possible.”

Hari and I went for dinner to Leicester Square, in the West End
of London. In the Tube station, he showed me how to work the
ticket machines, and he led the way to our train. It was rush hour, and Hari explained the protocol to be followed on crowded trains—how you let passengers disembark before boarding, how you ceded your seat to the elderly and the disabled. He was proud to tell me these things; I thought he was showing me that London was his city.

Leicester Square glistened after the rains. It was crowded: punks with colored Mohawks and tongue studs, men in low-hanging jeans, down to their knees, and women in heart-stopping little outfits that defied the evening chill. Hari and I laughed at the goose bumps on their uncovered arms and backs.

“People here are sexy,” Hari said. “When I walk down a street, there are so many good-looking people. It’s not like in Chennai, where everyone is fat and ugly. Everyone here is white, and they’re fit. They all work out. They all have such nice asses—both the boys and the girls.”

I asked him if he’d met any men. He pointed to a red Porsche. “What a car,” he said. “Expensive!”

“Expensive cars, expensive girls, expensive boys,” I said. “It’s an expensive country.”

“Boys and girls aren’t expensive,” he said, laughing. “They’re free. As long as you know what you want, and you know how to speak, you can get it. You just have to know what you want,” he said. “And you have to know how to ask for it.”

We decided to eat at a Japanese restaurant. Hari had never eaten Japanese food before. The confidence—the worldliness, the ease with city life—he had displayed on the train wavered a bit, but then he just told me to go ahead and order whatever I thought was good. “I don’t mind anything, as long as it’s cooked,” he said.

We talked a bit about how expensive London was. Hari complained about his pay; he could barely live off the small supplement his company was giving him. He said that everyone in London seemed so rich. Earlier, he had talked about returning to India to start a business; now he said he’d like to come back to London, try living there for a longer time.

“Why, for the money?” I asked, and he said: “That, and other things. Not just the money.”

His mood had changed. He seemed sullen. He wasn’t talking as much as he had been in the park. I asked if he’d been in touch with his parents. He said he had. I asked if they were proud of him. “Yes, they think it will get me a good wife,” he said. “But some things they can never understand. Some things about this life I can never explain to them.”

“Like what?”

“Just things,” he said, and he poked at a crack in the table with a chopstick. “It’s difficult to explain.”

I pressed him, and he looked at me as if he was trying to decide what to say. “Like maybe the way people dress,” he said. “If my father saw how some people wear clothes here, especially the women, he wouldn’t be too happy. He wouldn’t be angry, but he might make a face.”

I said I imagined that over time his father would adjust. “Yes, but there are so many other things,” he said. “So many things they could never understand. Clothes, sex, money—the gaps are too big. I could never explain.”

Then he reconsidered: “Maybe they could understand. Who knows? They must have had gaps with their parents.”

“Right,” I said, “it’s not so difficult.”

“I guess I won’t know until I speak to them. I won’t know how they really feel.”

He picked at some tempura; he said it reminded him of pakoras. He ate some edamame and asked what was so special about salted peas. He said Japanese food reminded him of Vietnamese food. He’d been to a Vietnamese restaurant recently, also for the first time.

“Hari, I’m sure your parents would understand the way people live here if they had to,” I said. I told him that I had many friends who had emigrated from India to America. It had been hard for some of them, but most eventually adapted.

“Yes, of course,” he said. He looked down, he played with the tempura. Then he looked up: “Still, if they knew what I was, if they ever knew what I really was, they would be so ashamed.”

“You mean the fact that you like boys?” I asked. “So that’s what you mean is difficult to explain to your parents?”

“That’s the Mount Everest of differences,” he said.

He told me that one day, a few weeks after arriving in London, he’d gone to a park in front of his apartment. It was a Sunday. He woke up late, washed his clothes, and watched some TV. He ate lunch; he felt relaxed.

The park was busy. It was filled with people walking their dogs, kids on Rollerblades, and men playing football. It was a clear day. The grass was green, well maintained. Hari walked around a little, and as he was walking, an idea suddenly hit him: “What if it was actually easy? What if I told my parents, and they just understood everything? What if they accepted me?”

He had seen the way gay people lived in London. He had seen the way they went around holding hands, hugging, even kissing in
public. In the nightclubs they danced together; in the parks and gardens they leaned against each other, lay side by side. All of this had made him think: “Everyone here is so free. Everyone lives however they want. People can walk down the street without being harassed. What if it could be the same for me back in India?”

He knew his father could never accept him, but he wondered about his mother. Maybe she could learn to tolerate him. He said—and now he was talking, opening up like he never had before—that he felt lonely sometimes. He corrected himself: “Not lonely, but it’s like a burden, something I’m always carrying around, something that I have to hide from my parents.

“It’s very strange, you know. Your parents know everything about you until you are a teenager; they know you inside out. And then it gets harder and harder. You start to have secrets; you have to hide things. It all started with me in school. I knew I was different, I knew I had to hide it. Now there are so many things my parents don’t know anymore. In a way, it just feels wrong—it feels wrong that they don’t know this thing about me.”

He wondered how he could tell them. He’d been thinking about it a lot. Should he tell them in a single day? Should he break the news slowly, over time? He worried that they would throw him out of the house, but he felt that eventually, they’d take him back in. He was terrified that someone, maybe a family member living in Chennai, would find out and break the news to his parents before he got the chance.

One thing he knew for sure: It had to remain a secret until his younger sister got married. If people found out, it could ruin her chances of getting a good match.

I said I found that silly. He said I didn’t understand: Reputation
was everything. I told him about Selvi, and about her shame over Sudha’s death. I said she, too, had been worried she would have trouble getting married. It seemed ridiculous to me.

“Society does that to you,” he said. “You can push to be yourself, you can be so bold. But finally it gets you and makes you dumb. It flattens you.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What has it done to you?”

“I can be myself, I’m strong enough for that,” he said. “But no one can ever know who I am.”

Hari went to London in April. He stayed there through the summer
. It was cold when he landed, and warmer when he left; there was more blue in the sky. He was hoping his stay would be extended, he would have enjoyed a few more months in the city. But his company brought him home, and by late July he was back at the same desk, in the same office, living in the same apartment, in Chennai.

I talked to Hari a couple weeks after he returned. He said he was still tired from his trip, jet-lagged, and I thought it was a way of holding on to his time in London, delaying his return. He was busy for a while after that, helping two cousins organize their weddings. He told me he was their “fashion consultant”; he traveled around the city to jewelry and clothes stores, helping them choose outfits.

I finally met Hari a couple months after he got back. He came down to Auroville to visit another friend, and we met at a coffee shop on the East Coast Road and went for a walk on the beach. It was the afternoon, sunny, and Hari was worried about his complexion.
He didn’t want to get too dark. So we sat in the shade of a fishing boat, in the sand, surrounded by the stench of drying fish.

He complained about how boring nightlife was in Chennai; he said he missed London. He’d gone out a lot there, to nightclubs and pubs, to restaurants. His favorite pub was called The Edge; it was in Soho. He said the clubs in London were “two hundred percent” better than in Chennai.

He’d made a lot of gay friends in London. He learned a lot from them. He’d seen how they were open and proud. They didn’t hide who they were; he felt he should be the same. One friend told him about his struggle to come out. He’d waited for years, afraid of his parents, but then, when he finally told his mother, she said: “You’ve been gay all this time and you’re only telling me now? You poor thing, you should have told me earlier.”

“Can you imagine that?” Hari said. “She not only accepted him, she encouraged him!”

Hari seemed to have returned with a clearer sense of identity. He told me he had decided he wasn’t bisexual. He wasn’t attracted to women, only to men. He knew, now, that he was homosexual. When he told me things like that, he didn’t speak in euphemisms anymore. We didn’t have to talk about “that thing” or “it” or “the way I am.” Hari was able to call himself “gay,” to speak about himself as a “homosexual.”

He’d come out to seven close friends in Chennai since returning. They were all shocked. “But you’re such a flirt, you’re such a playboy with girls,” one told him. “Why? Why did you choose to become that way?”

Hari told his friend: “Because I like it. Because I like it that way.”

Coming out to his friends had been easy. Hari was still trying
to decide how to come out to his family. But in any case, he said, that would have to wait. He had more pressing concerns right now. He was in financial trouble. He had big debts.

He owed more than four lakhs, a sum equivalent to almost two years at his current salary. Some of that was credit card debt accumulated from his shopping sprees. Some of it was because he’d been forced to buy a new laptop and cell phone after his old ones were stolen. Also, he’d borrowed a significant sum to help a friend whose mother needed heart surgery. The friend had promised to pay him back, but then he’d gotten into a motorcycle accident and lost a leg, and now whenever Hari visited him the friend just stayed in bed, depressed. It was terrible; Hari felt he couldn’t possibly ask for his money.