Cleaning out my closet (One more time)
Posted by: Zikr on: July 29, 2009
2nd July 2009 was a regular day at work for me. I was busy typing stuff, attending meetings and stressing myself over nothing; until, I got a call from my best friend.
“Congratulations! Being gay in India is not a crime anymore!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I was clueless of what had just happened. The Indian High court had passed a landmark judgement by decriminalising gay sex. I jumped out of my chair. “What??? I don’t believe it.” But of course, it was true.
I immediately picked up the phone to tell mom and was shocked at her mild reaction.
“Really? That’s nice! Did you have lunch?”
My excitement went “THUD” right then. I was pissed off beyond belief. I thought I’d TELL HER AGAIN when I get home. “Maybe she didn’t get it!”
Later that evening, when I got home, (secretly hoping she’d apologise for her reaction and make up for it) she seriously blew up the situation furthermore.
“S-I-L and I are going for a movie. Do you wanna come along?”
“What’s wrong with you mom?” I stormed out of the room and refused to talk to her. I don’t know if I was expecting “too much” and overreacting or mom really didn’t care about it as much as I did. Whatever it was, her insensitive attitude was more hurtful than surprising.
Anyways, it was MOM after all and I couldn’t hold my bile in for too long. When she came to my room at night to talk, I asked her why she was behaving as if it wasn’t a big deal and gave her a melodramatic sermon over how her daughter’s happiness didn’t matter to her anymore.
After I was done blabbering, she hugged me and said “I’m sorry. But I got so excited after you told me, I was afraid I would make it too obvious for SIL and N (my brother). And since you haven’t come out to them yet, I didn’t want them to get all curious and ask me why I was getting so excited over the court’s judgement. It was, after all, ‘just another piece of news’ for them.”
I suddenly felt guilty for what I had put her through the entire day. I remembered she had asked me once if I was planning to come out to my brother and S-I-L.
“It would put me at ease with them, if you’re comfortable”, she’d said.
I knew it was time. I had to come out to the rest of my family. So that Sunday, after lunch, when my brother, S-I-L and I were lying around, talking about random stuff, I figured there was no better time to tell them.
“Guys I’ve been wanting to tell you’ll something for a while now. I didn’t say anything all this time for fear that you guys would judge me.”
My brother raised an eyebrow in anticipation; my S-I-L in excitement. I felt a sudden tension in my chest and my throat began to clog. (All my friends knew about my sexuality, but I never had to OFFICIALLY say these words to ANYONE before: face-to-face.)
“I’m Gay.” “I know you guys know. But I just wanted to tell you’ll anyways. I’m Gay.”
My brother looked surprised for precisely a second and then smiled.
S-I-L, excited like some HUGE scientific theory had just been proven.
“I knew it! I knew it all along. I just didn’t want to come and ask you and make you uncomfortable.”
“Thanks. So you guys cool with it?”
“Absolutely! Now you have to tell me about all the women you’ve dated!” (S-I-L’s the ‘Over-enthusiastic about everything’ type.)
I smiled and looked at my brother who hadn’t uttered a word since then.
“Are you ok? You look a bit surprised.”
“Yeah, I’m ok . It’s your personal life. I’m just surprised you decided to tell us. You’re so secretive about everything.”
“I thought it was time. Everyone I know, knows I’m gay. You guys were the only ones I hadn’t told. So…” (Immediately after saying that I realised it was the meanest thing to say to your family; that they were the last ones to be told, but I don’t think it mattered to them. They both looked happy.)
Just then my brother got a call on his cell phone and he excused himself out of the room. As soon as he left, I asked S-I-L,
“Do you think he’s ok? He didn’t say much.”
“Don’t worry. You know him. He always shies away from such discussions. But I’m so happy for you! They should have passed that judgement long back!”
She also mentioned that she had figured I was gay when she saw K and me together on a trip we had all taken together.
“I loved what you guys had. I don’t think I have ever experienced such love or for that matter seen anyone share something so beautiful.” It broke my heart all over again.
So, all was well. I had to tell them and I did and they took it well. But something was still bothering me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew I had to talk to my brother again. “He cannot just “shy away” from something that’s so important to me.”
So when both of us were alone in the room again, I asked him if I had made him uncomfortable.
“Of course not sweetie. Why would I be uncomfortable?” I was relieved.
But then he quickly added, “Besides, whatever you do inside your bedroom is no one’s business but yours. If it makes you happy, I’m happy.”
Ok now THAT, I wasn’t expecting.
Even though I know what he said was sweet and all, but I was in half a mind of telling him that being gay is not just “something I do in the bedroom.”
But I didn’t. I tried to focus on the part that he had always been the most supportive, most accepting and understanding brother anyone could have ever hoped for. He just never had his way with words. “Coffee?” he asked as he flashed his regular shy smile.
“Why not?”
I was happy. I was officially out to EVERYONE who mattered to me. I don’t know why I was making such a big deal about my brother’s or my mother’s reaction. I think I was expecting at least some measure of – well – *something* – not total and complete instant acceptance and gratitude that I’d told them. Nothing! No questions, no concerns. What is a girl to do if her family won’t even condemn her a little, or at least show some type of reserved horror? It was all so incredibly casual – by the end of the conversation, we were all joking over how my S-I-L was already thinking of hooking me up with one of her friends.
It’s almost a month since I’ve told them and I keep thinking that everything’s changed; but I have to check myself every time – nothing has changed. If anything, my relationship with my family has gotten better since I’ve come out to them. Now if I’m going on a date and Mom or someone asks about it, I can tell them my date’s name! I can even use gendered pronouns! Everyone at home watches the latest on 377 more enthusiastically than I do. All the bloody time. (And there’s always something about it on TV!) ACK!!
My sexuality is SO out in the open, sometimes I feel I was better off in the closet. The grass always seems greener on the other side, doesn’t it? But when I read hundreds of posts everyday about fellow gay people wanting to come out or looking for acceptance after coming out, I feel blessed that I have a family and friends who’ve supported me even when I’ve lost all hope and who’ve accepted me JUST the way I am.
I guess it’s going to take me longer to accept their acceptance, than it has for them to accept me. 
Why doesn’t everyone have it this easy?! Shaking my head in wonderment.
Gay sex decriminalised in India
Posted by: Zikr on: July 2, 2009
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A court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ruled that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act.
The ruling overturns a 148-year-old colonial law which describes a same-sex relationship as an “unnatural offence”.
Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence.
Many people in India regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate. Rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.
Delhi’s High Court ruled that the law outlawing homosexual acts was discriminatory and a “violation of fundamental rights”.
The court said that a statute in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which defines homosexual acts as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and made them illegal, was an “antithesis of the right to equality”.
‘India’s Stonewall’
The ruling is historic in a country where homosexuals face discrimination and persecution on a daily basis but it is likely to be challenged, says the BBC’s Soutik Biswas in Delhi.
It also promises to change the discourse on sexuality in a largely conservative country, where even talking about sex is largely taboo, our correspondent says.
Gay rights activists all over the country welcomed the ruling and said it was “India’s Stonewall”.
New York’s Stonewall riot in 1969 is credited with launching the gay rights movement.
“It [the ruling] is India’s Stonewall. We are elated. I think what now happens is that a lot of our fundamental rights and civic rights which were denied to us can now be reclaimed by us,” activist and lawyer Aditya Bandopadhyay told the BBC.
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“It is a fabulously written judgement, and it restores our faith in the judiciary,” he said.
Or is it that I have nothing left to say?
Posted by: Zikr on: June 3, 2009
Where has it gone? I wonder.
It’s been busy stripping soft, pulpy mangoes off its golden skin.
It’s been incessantly clicking, capturing, putting aside – all life’s moments.
It’s been typing, typing, typing up notes, journals, contacts and unfinished stories.
It’s been scaling the deep ends of the frets on my guitar.
It’s been sprinkled into 1-inch holes in the ground, along with Gulmohur and Arjun and Chamomile and Wheat Grass.
It’s been writing out checks for banal things like health insurance that I can no longer risk not having.
It’s been scrolling excitedly through news on the politics and peoples’ movements.
It’s been printing out photos and holding them up to the light, to look for memories that passed too fast, being all too back-to-back.
It’s been attached to wide arms wrapped around old and new friends from whom I’ve been gone too long.
It’s been folded around steaming black coffee cups, sipped silently with unearthly appreciation.
It’s been sipping neat whiskey on starry balconies full of favourite people and knee slapping laughter.
It’s picked up the remote once a day to watch repeat telecasts of Friends.
It’s carefully inspected the petals of the orchid who’s opened eight blooms since I’ve planted them.
And it continues on bud watch, for the three on standby.
And it probably spends too much time dancing on the face of my PSP and iPhone appeasing my inner tech geek in scout of the most exciting new app.
It’s been wrapped around my nieces and involved with amazing discoveries of watching them grow.
From heavy green, to pure gold, then brown, soon after fallen,
To strings of seeds and bulging buds.
I guess those are the places my writing has been.
And perhaps if my writing hadn’t been anywhere else, it would take no joy in the simplicity of what it’s doing.
But it’s been everywhere. It’s been all over the world. And thus it knows.
It’s happy right where it is.
Home.
Well, you know…
Posted by: Zikr on: March 31, 2009
That I need to write. Because there hasn’t been an update for months. I know. Totally absent. Apologies friends and family. Sometimes life just hits ‘Fast Forward’ on you and the button sticks. For the first day in weeks, today I hit pause.
Let me collapse on the couch for a few. I promise my fingers will soon warm up. In the meanwhile, sharing a piece from one of the most amazing books I’ve read – The Prophet.
On Love
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor.
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
That’s how far it went
Posted by: Zikr on: February 15, 2009
We never should have even met, much less become lovers. In fact, we never would have met, had it not been for my ex lover, AD. Three years had passed since the break-up, and I was lost, broken-hearted, and lonely, still. I felt out of place, surrounded by all of AD’s friends at a party. K couldn’t help but notice the scars left on me after the break-up. The first time we noticed each other, I couldn’t get my eyes off K. She looked up to find me looking innocently bemused at the whole situation. I was embarrassed. She smiled. And there started a series of encounters, some planned, some unplanned.
Later one winter night, after everyone was gone, K and I curled in close together and spoke for hours. I was burning with fever and traced K’s face with my fingers. We marvelled at the strange luck that had brought us together, and our kisses were heroic attempts at conveying a magic that was impossible for either of us to voice.
Impossible, because it was the kind of magic that neither of us really believed in. Impossible for K, because she had never experienced this kind of love before. Impossible for me, because something must fail.
And because we were both staunch realists, and in stern agreement about the impossibility of these feelings, the beginning of our relationship was necessarily marked by a sort of bizarre hesitancy, a combination of passion and reasonability whose ultimate result was an insanely heightened romanticism. Every touch we exchanged became fraught with tension, the tension of wanting to scream, “I love you, I love you, I love you!” and the determination not to give into such longing.
K always came with a time-limit, a cut-off date, after which she would have to go back to her world – a world where we were not meant to be together. A world where a love like ours did not exist. And even if it did, it would never have the courage to lift its head up and breathe.
I never seemed to care about those deadlines. Somehow, I knew it was meant to be and always managed to make K feel truly and unequivocally loved. It was strange: there was so little on the surface that we had in common, and yet I never failed to feel a rush of deep emotion in K’s presence, something comforting and terrifying. K found herself laughing at nothing, unsure if she was doing so because she was uncomfortable or because everything was just so delightful now. And I never talked about it, dodged the traps of sentimentalism or irony, instead just loving K the way I had never loved: as part of what made the world beautiful and interesting, nothing more and nothing less.
Our friends fell in love with us as a couple, and we laughed, and accepted the compliments, without making too much of it.
How do you make your peace with something too good to be believed? I found myself seized sometimes with the most furious fears and doubts: “what if I die today?”, “what if K just stops loving me?” “God, what if I just stop loving K?” And then K would be there, to laugh my worries away with a pragmatic, “Yeah, what if? That’ll suck!” There came to us, a richness in personality, the richness that comes with feeling like enough. Together, we realized the subtle difference between self-confidence and egotism. Small slights went unnoticed; all those tiny annoyances of daily living sliding off of K and me like sand.
We laughed and cried together. We fought. We made up and made out. We loved, respected, understood and trusted each other. It was simple, and real. It was enough. We were madly in love with each other, and that’s how far it went.
A little lesson on homosexuality and stepping out all over again!
Posted by: Zikr on: January 12, 2009
A few weeks back, while my S-I-L was still in labour, and all of us were anxiously waiting for her to deliver the babies, mom and I stayed up an entire night at the hospital lobby, catching up. We spoke about the terror attacks, the books we’re both currently reading, how our lives would completely change after the babies, how my brother and I were as babies (I love to hear that story over and over again) and then homosexuality in general. Anyways, so late into the night, over a couple cups of hot coffee, my mom popped a question, I least expected her to ask.
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure what mom?”
“That you’re gay?”
“Hell yes! Why do you ask?”
“Just. I wanted to know if you’re really SURE.”
“Would you be disappointed if I said I was REALLY SURE?”
“No ways! There’s no question of being disappointed. I’m just curious. How can you be so sure? Have you ever been with a man? I know you’ve dated B.”
“Yes I’ve dated a boy. But that was back in school. We were school-sweethearts. Just the holding hands and going for movies type – you know? I never really loved him. We’re best friends since kindergarten.”
“I know. But what if, hypothetically, you fall in love with a man in future?”
“That’s never gonna happen!”
(Then I tried a more sensitive approach.)
“Mom, I never said I don’t get attracted to men. I do. I mean you give me a Richard Gere or an Eric Bana and I’ll be drooling all over! But seriously. I like men. I just don’t see myself with one.”
(Convinced) “When did you know you were Gay?”
“When I was 2, I guess. (Smiles). I had no clue there was any such thing as Gay or Lesbian back then. But I’ve always been attracted to women. Since forever. When did you realise I was gay?”
“Pretty much around the time you did.” (Winks and smiles).
The conversation went on for another 4 hours. We talked about the women I’ve dated, my friends who she didn’t know were gay too, all the people I’ve come out to (almost everyone I know, except my family), I told her about Gaysi, etc, etc. I told her how K and I fell in love with each other at first sight. She went “Awww”. Then I told her why we broke up. I told her about AD (my closest friend and also the first woman I’ve ever dated, that too for four years). AD’s very close to mom. She was a little surprised to know that AD and I were dating (considering AD’s getting married soon) although she said she always “somehow” knew.
She asked me why homosexuals are tagged ‘Queer’ and heterosexuals ‘Straight’.
“I hate these labels! What’s so straight about straight people anyway?”
“I don’t know mom! That’s what “they’re” called!”
We both laughed.
Anyways, what surprised her most was the fact that all the women I’ve dated are (so to say) “Straight”! – Dated men before me. Dating men after me. “What can I say? I have a thing for straight women I guess.”
I think she got a bit baffled and started questioning the whole – sexual orientation thing in general. I tried to explain to her Freud’s and then Kinsey’s theory on bisexuality and how Kinsey believed that an individual’s sexual orientation exists along a continuum as they move through time. Someone may feel that they are exclusively heterosexual, and then at some point in life find themselves attracted to someone of the same sex. They may or may not choose to act upon those feelings, but that has no relevance to their actual position on the continuum. “In the end it’s about love mom. When you fall in love, it doesn’t matter who or what the object of your affection is. And shouldn’t that be enough? Just love?”
“Of course!” She hugged me. Obviously she was convinced.
Now, she’s asked me if I’d be comfortable coming out to my brother and S-I-L. She says it’ll put her at ease with them (I think she feels bad they’re not part of this “big secret” of mine. LOL.) and that she’s sure they’ll be supportive as usual. “Hmmm. I was planning on telling them anyways” I said. And I’m gonna have to step out of the closet all over again! Phew!
A Happy New Year, it is!
Posted by: Zikr on: January 8, 2009
And my BIG NEWS is!!!!! I’m an AUNT!!!!!!! My brand new nieces were born 22nd December – and I’m head over heels in love with them! *Shouts out over cyberspace* “Great job N and L! Thank you for bringing them in this world! They’re perfect!”
My nieces are *SO* keeping me on my toes (explains the long lull at the blog) and I’m absolutely loving it!
Here’s wishing everyone a very very very Happy 2009!
For the first time
Posted by: Zikr on: December 21, 2008
I’m over the moon right now!
I’m going to be an aunt (for the first time) any day now! My brother and his wife are going to be parents (for the first time) to IDENTICAL TWINS! I’m going to be a “Buaa” (for the first time). I’m going to have a different name/role/identity (for the first time), rather than being plain ole (insert name here)! And what’s most exciting is that the babies may come on Christmas! (Fingers crossed).
I totally and completely and absolutely ADORE kids. Of course the thought of howling, puking, peeing and pooping babies in the house (for the first time) freaks me out (and my family leaves no opportunity to rag me over it) – but I’m so excited, it keeps me up at night!
Can’t wait!
