The first time I saw Jiten Vaswani, on a hot Kolkata afternoon of the 1990s, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. His short hair combed neatly to a side parting, a crisp handkerchief clasped in his hand and that deer-in-headlights expression. It was during a lunch break in the first week at a new school in Kolkata. I was the boy from Nagaland, an exhibit that flummoxed even the teachers. So far, they were too blinded by the exotic factor to notice that I was different. I didn’t have the swagger of the boys my age, I had this habit (which teachers later dubbed annoying) of dabbing my face with a handkerchief every now and then, I would also pull back invisible strands of hair behind my ears whenever I was nervous. I was a bit too polite for my own good too. In other words, I was effeminate.
When I spotted Jiten, it felt like I was looking into a mirror. He was new to the school too. I knew I needed a strategy to survive this new school where boys my age used expletives that I was not familiar with. I needed an ally. Jiten was my answer. Soft-spoken, pink-cheeked and lost Jiten, who was greeting every hello with a nervous giggle.
I befriended him. Two effeminate boys found each other.
In retrospect, I realise it was a shrewd decision. Even then, I knew I could always hide behind him. Jiten, who was so himself, was substantially more bulliable than me. He would always attract the ire of teachers for something or the other. Mostly, for existing. “Why are you giggling Jiten?”, “Jiten speak louder!”, “Jiten, why do you move your hands so much?”, “Stand straight Jiten!”.
During lunch breaks, our classmates would echo the sentiments more crudely. His tiffin was always a subject of ridicule, his fondness for cream biscuits was equated to his effeminacy. His surname was distorted to Vas-Rani (queen), and later just clipped to Rani. Jiten Rani. Jiten was always getting in people’s way, landing in trouble. He stood out like a sore thumb. Once, he slapped a female classmate because she asked him to gyrate to a popular Helen number. Our class teacher chastised him by saying he cannot hit a girl. “But Ma’am, he is a girl,” the class replied in unison. The girl who was slapped laughed. Our class teacher smirked.
I would lend him a sympathetic shoulder and thank my stars that I was not him. Jiten dropped out of school by the time we were in Std VIII. The bullying got to him. No one bothered much, certainly not the school authorities. It was like he never existed. By that time I had learned the most important life skill a gay child could possess, the fine art of blending in. Something Jiten could never master.
Jiten joined his father’s garment business when he was only 13. I kept in touch with him through occasional phone calls. Mostly to discuss our Bollywood crushes. Jiten would unabashedly express his admiration for hirsute Bollywood heroes. That would give me the courage to express myself more freely too. I would acquire old issues of film magazines like Stardust from shops at Free School street, and he would come over to my place to collect them once I was done with them. Together, we would spend afternoons cutting out photos of shirtless Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty and Anil Kapoor from these glossies. I would paste them on the walls of my room, my single mother would mostly let us be, he would collect them in a secret scrapbook that he kept with me, to keep it away from the prying eyes of his mother. As I grew older and more sure about my sexual orientation, Jiten would mostly shut down when it came to such topics. He would gladly sexualise men but would get all holier-than-thou when I talked about sleeping with them. After I went to college, we slowly drifted apart. But there were once-a-year calls. Speaking to him took me back to my adolescence. He would, in hushed tones, want to know all about my life. My sex life in particular. The ocean of men I seemed to be swimming in, the ocean that seemed so far from his reach. When I would ask him about his escapades, he would claim he is straight. And then he would talk about the times men felt him up in buses, or the time he was propositioned by a client during a work call. His response to all this would follow a textbook Bollywood template. In his retelling, he would always rebuff the male attention. The younger me would fight this hypocrisy. Not understanding why it was so difficult for him to come out to his conservative Gujarati parents.
We would not speak for years in between, but I would eventually reach out because of this compulsion to know what was happening in his life. In almost a way one is drawn to inevitable tragedies. Fate has not been kind to Jiten. After dropping out of school, he assisted in his father’s small business, eventually taking it over. The business didn’t take off probably because Jiten had a paralysing fear of technology. To this day, Jiten is afraid of coming anywhere near a laptop. He gets his sister to maintain his Facebook page. He doesn’t own a smartphone. Correction. He cannot afford a smartphone. I remember once, almost a decade ago, after he had acquired one of those JIO phones, I had helped him open an FB account. The next day, my feed was flooded with risqué photos of gay porn actors that he had shared. When I called him, he claimed his phone had been hacked. Years later, he admitted to having shared those pictures without realising what he was doing. He has sworn off social media since then. I would often ask him, almost daringly, if he would ever want to get married to a woman. When he was younger, the answer, most disappointingly, was in the affirmative. He claimed he would get married when he is financially more stable.
I met Jiten after almost a decade after the pandemic. He looked visibly smaller than I remember. He had lost a bit of hair. But his cheeks are still as rosy, his spurts of giggle still light up the room, and he still carries a crisp handkerchief in his pocket. He blushes when I ask him if he has ever been with a man or a woman. He has not been with either. He is 43. Does he plan to get married to a woman now? “Kisiki zindagi nahi barbad karna (I don’t want to spoil anyone’s life),” he says. He wants to meet queer men, but doesn’t know how. “He should be tall, dark and handsome and he should take care of me. He should have a great sense of humour too” is his 1990s Bollywood heroine-like reply when I ask him what kind of man he wants. I roll my eyes.
He wants to know about all the men I have been with. He wants to see their pictures. He grades them on the basis of their hairiness. Whenever we are together, we are like two giggly 13-year-old gay boys lost in our own private jokes. We are almost mirror images of each other. Except we are very different. I can walk out of the bubble and lead the life of a 42-year-old out gay man. He cannot.
If you are facing emotional distress due to your gender, identity or sexual orientation, you can reach out to Safe Access for a confidential and free Peer Support Service at http://www.safeaccess.co.in/peer-support-service/
premankur.biswas@indianexpress.com
