An Indefinite Sentence Read online

  PRAISE FOR AN INDEFINITE SENTENCE

  “An extraordinary book that triumphs on many levels, personal and social. . . . Above all, it is a sensual and passionate story about the search for love, the ‘endless flowing river in the cave of man,’ that animates all our lives.”

  —SUDHIR KAKAR, prizewinning psychoanalyst and author of The Indians, Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors, and other books

  PRAISE FOR IN THE LAND OF POVERTY: MEMOIRS OF AN INDIAN FAMILY, 1947–1997

  “A deeply illuminating study of poverty in India, seen in concrete detail [and] made vividly real by remarkable descriptive skill.”

  —AMARTYA SEN, Nobel laureate in economics

  “Devastatingly effective.”

  —PANKAJ MISHRA, Times Literary Supplement

  “An extraordinary study of the human dimensions of poverty and development. Destined to become a classic.”

  —SHASHI THAROOR, author of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

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  For Basant Kumar Dube, my marvelous father and friend, who insisted, foremost, that we always tell the truth.

  ONE

  SHAME

  In retrospect, it’s clear that the enduring themes of my life were present so many years back in that single night, which is why I recollect it all with such clarity even decades later. But I could see only with a child’s eyes then, simply, directly, without interpretation, without thought of what it might mean for the future.

  The year was 1971, and I was ten years old. I was at the Grand, Calcutta’s sumptuous colonial-era hotel. The orchestra had burst into a rousing flourish, and everyone moved to the sides of the ballroom as a light-skinned woman, petite but full-bodied, wearing just a shimmering two-piece bikini and a veil, emerged magically from somewhere.

  The woman began to dance her way slowly down the length of the vast, carpeted room, her movements languorous yet purposeful, as she removed the veil and used it as a fluttering prop for caressing and seducing. She was flaunting her near nakedness, the expanse of smooth skin and soft curves magnified by the glitter of her bikini. I was entranced.

  It struck me that, unlike the other striptease dancers I had seen (my parents often brought me along with them so I wouldn’t have to be left with my ayah), this one never pressed herself against the men in the audience. Instead, she held the gaze of man after man for a measured moment, then moved on, almost dismissively.

  She is like a snake charmer, I thought to myself. And indeed, all the men, including my father, standing across from my mother and me, seemed hypnotized by the dancer in a disturbed way, almost as if they were struggling to keep themselves from grabbing her.

  The dancer approached me, and I immediately pressed against my mother, finding comfort in her familiar scent and the soft folds of her sari. In the past, to my burning embarrassment and the amusement of the adults, some Park Street nightclub dancers had done a watered-down version of their bump-and-grind routine against me, no doubt singling me out because I was the only child present.

  But this one just passed us by, shimmied to the end of the room, and then—to a loud, collective gasp from the partygoers—threw off her bikini top to reveal peculiarly small breasts. In another flash, to an even louder gasp from the adults, she pulled off her bikini bottom—and, as she twirled naughtily out of the room, I espied what seemed to be a penis.

  There was silence for a long minute—and then an explosion of clapping and laughter from the adults. But I was in turmoil. When things eventually quietened, I tugged at my mother’s arm and asked, “Mama, Mama, was that a woman or a man?”

  My mother stroked my hair lovingly, and said in a voice bright with amusement, “Yes, it was a man!”

  Though I was unaware of it at the time, the incident marked my first precocious introduction to some of my life’s preoccupations: the beguiling possibilities of gender beyond the conventional bipolarity of male and female, and the mysterious, limitless permutations of sexual desire. It was only as an adolescent, years later, that memories of it came rushing back with unsettling clarity and I realized that I had seen something of myself in that unusual dancer.

  Just a year or two before that striptease at the Grand, I had become aware that I was a girly-boy, a sissy, different from other boys, and despised and ostracized by them.

  I had joined La Martinière, one of Calcutta’s elite secondary schools, at the age of eight. Within a few days, I began to grasp that this school bore no resemblance to my tony elementary school, Miss Higgins, still run by its elderly, eponymous British founder. While her homely bungalow had somehow made me feel at once secure and carefree, the main buildings at La Martinière were forbidding, cathedral-like edifices, over a century old. High walls and gates enclosed the grounds. The towering pillars of the assembly hall and senior classrooms only underscored my puniness. Even the steps that led up to the assembly hall were intimidating, each one so tall and deep that I couldn’t climb from one to the other in a single stride. The whole compound seemed to be designed expressly to humble us children.

  There were no girls here as there had been at Miss Higgins. Not one. They were all at a sister school across the street. I felt their absence as a difference in atmosphere, which seemed more boisterous yet darker than at Miss Higgins. When school ended, I would watch the girls spilling out of the gates on the far side of the street, always looking much happier than we boys did.

  Soon, to my surprise, I became aware that I was not popular with my new classmates. Whenever I sat down next to someone in class or tried to strike up a friendship, I sensed I was being rebuffed. At first I wondered whether this was because our environment was so regimented.

  We wore identical uniforms of white shirts and shorts, black lace-ups with knee-high socks, and a school tie of gold stripes on black, held in place with our house pin. Mine was a bright yellow, for Macaulay House, named after Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, the nineteenth-century imperial politician who had had an outsize, enduring impact on shaping the minds of India’s ruling elite, snidely known as “Macaulay’s Children” and “brown sahibs.” At morning assembly, we stood in neat rows and sang Christian hymns after we had recited the Lord’s Prayer. In our classrooms, we sat at identical wooden desks and chairs, springing up anxiously when the teacher entered and singing “Good morning, sir!” or “Good morning, ma’am!” in unison, then quickly sitting down in silence. There was little time for fun before or after school hours. Perhaps my friendliness might have seemed inappropriate, given the circumstances.

  However, I soon realized that the class was essentially divided into two groups: a number of studious or quiet boys like me at the front and a larger group of the rowdier kind in the rows behind. While the boys around me were cautiously friendly, the larger group in the back disliked me with a vengeance. In fact, I was the main target of their antagonism. Whenever I stood up to answer a question, they sniggered. When I turned around, I caught belligerent looks. On the few occasions when I ventured into their territory, I was shoved away by whomever I approached while the rest laughed at my humiliation.

  Things continued like that for a few months. Then one day, as I stood up in class to answer a question, I heard a threatening chorus of hate-filled whispers from behind: “Sissy!
Sissy! Sissy!”

  A wave of shame swept over me. They were right to call me that.

  I recalled how silent my parents had fallen when I had recently paraded into our living room adorned with my mother’s jewelry. Not only had I had earrings, necklaces, and bracelets on, I had also secured a pendant in my hair like a Hindu bride. I pranced around like a filmi siren, shaking my hips, stamping my bare feet in Kathak-like movements. I had even gyrated sinuously on the floor in an imitation of the starlets of that era.

  I remembered all the times my mother had found me feeding and cradling my cowboy-Indian action figures as if they were dolls. Or playing nurse with our long-suffering dogs, swaddling them in improvised bandages. With sharp shame, I also remembered how I had preened whenever my parents’ friends remarked what a beautiful girl I’d have made, how I looked just like my luminous mother with my long-lashed eyes and fine skin.

  Me with my first dog

  At that exact moment, standing at my classroom desk and hearing the other boys calling me “sissy,” I began to see myself as a freak. I was overcome with self-loathing as I realized the many occasions on which, unthinkingly, I had shown my parents what a girly-boy I was. Now, much worse, I realized that the larger world saw me as only that.

  Things worsened over the next few years. Of all the boys in my class who got picked on, I became the prime target. There were other victims, who were called “fatso” or “freak,” had pieces of chalk flung at them, or were shoved around when the teacher wasn’t there. But that happened infrequently. I was the only one who was unfailingly the focus of hostility.

  Making matters worse, I became known as a girly-boy in other classes. It seemed to me as if everyone in school had been told to despise me. Older boys shouted “Sissy!” as I walked past or stopped in midconversation to stare at me with distaste. A few times, when I inadvertently caught someone’s eye, things got uglier. The taunts got louder and louder: “Sissy!” “Sissy! Sissy!” “Girly girly girly!” “Go to the girls’ school!” The bullies would move threateningly toward me as I tried to beat a retreat. Though the incidents never escalated into physical violence, they were enough to make me feel constantly apprehensive.

  My mother soon noticed that I wasn’t enjoying La Martinière. She didn’t question me about it, no doubt because she assumed that I was merely facing the routine challenges of school life. Moreover, given that she was facing struggles of her own, she probably no longer had the emotional strength to be as attentive as she had been earlier: her marriage to my father, once a powerful romance between strong-willed equals, had begun to unravel. My father relished Calcutta’s cosmopolitan life and had risen meteorically in the prosperous tea industry. But my mother, ascetic and serious-minded, was a misfit in this “brown sahib” world of elite British mores and corporate wealth, with its constant round of parties, golf, and polo matches. Her fears that she was losing him to one or another flirtatious memsahib tipped over into unrelenting suspicion.

  By this time I had become my mother’s staunchest ally in their conflict, viewing her as the wronged victim and my father as the philandering offender. Still, in spite of my closeness to her, I couldn’t discuss with her the daily humiliations I faced at school. Given my worsening antagonism to my father, there was no likelihood of turning to him. And more than anything else, I wanted to avoid drawing their attention back to my shameful problem. I felt it was I who was despicable and needed to change, not the boys who hated me.

  I found my own ways of coping. I would arrive at school only when classes were about to begin. I kept to myself and avoided getting in the way of the boys who taunted me. I didn’t react to their stares, their comments, or the chalk they flung at me. Shaking with apprehension, I would try to appear calm and walk away unhurriedly, as if I were doing so out of choice and not fear. That act of defiance helped me salvage some sense of dignity, despite being near tears and achingly aware that I was an outcast.

  It was a difficult transition because, despite the eroding of my parents’ relationship, my childhood had been happy and almost carefree until I joined La Martinière. I had not given a thought to whether I was boyish in my mannerisms and looks in the cheery mix of boys and girls at Miss Higgins, where I had found myself quite naturally at the center of most things.

  Moreover, at home, I had felt no different from my brothers, Pratap and Bharat, and despite being the youngest—they were four years and one year older than I, respectively—I had confidently established my boundaries. While usually happy to follow my brothers’ lead, I would get notoriously feisty whenever I felt that they were treating me unfairly. My brothers still take pleasure in reminding me that my standard comeback was “Yeah, so?!”—in other words, “What are you going to do about it?” My brothers christened me “Yaso,” and though it no doubt honored my fighting spirit, it also made me sound truculent.

  But on joining La Martinière my once headlong approach to life turned into an unrelenting battle with self-consciousness. To protect myself from further ridicule and shame, I began to ferociously weed out every girly trait that I could see in myself. I desperately wanted to be a regular boy, left with no damning evidence of who I actually was.

  The psychological conflicts set into motion at this juncture of my life might have been even more traumatizing if, like some gender-atypical children, I had desperately longed to change my sex. But, looking back at those childhood years, at least as far as I can tell through the complexities of my own mind, I never clearly felt “that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” as the great British writer Jan Morris—who was James Morris before a sex-change operation—wrote in her pioneering 1974 memoir, Conundrum.

  Nor do I recall experiencing any of the other feelings that strongly gender-atypical children experience: disgust at their own genitals, the conviction that they will grow up to be the opposite sex, and a strong desire to do so. While I relished some stereotypically feminine behaviors—wearing women’s clothing, dancing, or beautifying myself with makeup and jewelry—I never felt the urge to pursue them all the time. I was passionate about many conventionally boyish things, such as playing with model racing cars and fighter planes, for instance; my keenest desire as a child was simply to go swimming or to play with our dogs.

  So, though I doubt that I ever wanted to change my gender and sex and become a girl, I am equally sure that I would have blossomed in a setting free of gender-prescriptive prejudice and fears, like the one I was in before joining the boys-only La Martinière environment—where I could be a carefree child of an amorphous, undefined gender and not have to feel ashamed and anxious that some of my actions were “girlish” and hence taboo.

  Yet, even while living through those difficult years of my life, I didn’t actually think of myself as unhappy or victimized. My stoicism was rooted in the childhood survival trait of attempting to live in the here and now using every psychological stratagem possible. I coped with the persecution I faced at La Martinière as well as the bitter battles between my parents by daydreaming about a peaceful enchanted place, populated only by noble wild animals (especially tigers and elephants) that lovingly protected my mother and me. Once safely back home from school, I blanked out all thoughts about my hours there, my fears returning only when I woke the next morning.

  My mother was another great source of calm. After school hours, she and I spent much of our time together. With my brothers away at boarding school, we became even closer. Because of the problems at home, my father absented himself for increasingly long periods of time, touring the tea plantations in Assam and north Bengal. I savored being with my mother and was never bored, even when we spent day after day by ourselves.

  It seemed to me that she had a magical way with animals. Our dogs would willingly do everything she asked of them, their eyes fixed intently on hers to see if they had succeeded in pleasing her. In the garden outside our Lord Sinha Road apartment, dragonflies seemed to choose to settle on her outstretched hands. She would ti
e a fine thread to their tails, so that I could hold them for a while—imagining them to be pet fairies—before she released them unhurt. At the children’s section at the nearby Calcutta Club, the chital stag—who had been brought there when he was still a fawn—would unfailingly come to nuzzle her, though he would ignore me. Our shared love of nature kept us happy, poring over encyclopedias about pets and wildlife.

  I spent a lot of time immersed in books. Every few days, we would replenish our stock from the libraries at the Calcutta Club and the British Council. I loved books about animals: Tarka, the otter in the English countryside; Flicka, the American mustang; and White Fang, the heroic wolf-dog. My two favorites were set in the wilds of India: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Chendru: The Boy and the Tiger, an illustrated book about a real-life adivasi boy and his pet tiger cub.

  But I also read everything I could lay my hands on—at the age of ten, I was reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series and Frank Richards’s Billy Bunter series, and, because my mother did not censor my reading, westerns by Louis L’Amour and potboilers by Harold Robbins. Jacqueline Susann became an enduring favorite, first for her tribute to her poodle, Every Night, Josephine!, and then for the steamy Valley of the Dolls.

  I openly read novels by Daphne du Maurier and Georgette Heyer, thinking that my mother would assume that I liked them for their literary qualities. But in my bathroom, with the door locked, I read her Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boon romances. I loved the unceasing romance and the handsome, complicated heroes. I read them in secret because I now knew that only girls were supposed to like them. I began to spend so much time in the bathroom that my mother wrote on the door, in indelible red paint, “This is not a library!”

  Our isolation was punctuated twice a year, when life reverted to a close approximation of the glorious earlier years of my childhood: before my brothers went off to boarding school, before my parents’ relationship began to disintegrate, before I joined La Martinière and became ashamed of myself. Those were the holiday months, every summer and winter, when my brothers returned from school.