Adam, I'm No Madam

by NINAD JOG

"Ma'am, I'll be with you in just a moment," said the man behind the counter as he attended to the customer ahead of me in line.

I was peeved. How could the man have mistaken me for a woman? Granted, I was wearing a long winter coat and a fur cap as I battled my second winter in Washington D.C. But I thought my outfit made me look like a frail version of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, than that of his wife Raisa.

I decided to forgive the man behind the counter. He will know in a moment who I really am, I figured.

I didn't have to wait for long. "Ma'am, what can I do for you?" he asked when it was my turn.

I angrily took my fur cap off and thrust it into my jacket pocket. "My car has a flat tire," I said brusquely, in the deepest and most gravelly voice I could muster. "I need it fixed." I didn't tell the man his remarks had also punctured my ego and knocked the wind out of my sails.

"We'll take care of it, sir," said the man. "Give me your car keys and take a seat."

I retreated to the waiting area of the tire store, a large bandage over my ego.

***

This wasn't the first time I had been mistaken for a woman. The previous occasion had been more than a dozen years earlier, when I was eight.

"Is that your daughter?" a woman had asked my father. "She's so pretty!"

"No, that's my son," my Dad had explained. "He looks like a girl because his head is covered with a shawl. I'm taking him to the doctor, since he has fever."

Being mistaken for a girl was the last thing I needed when I was sick. I had felt like giving the woman one tight slap on each cheek. But all I could do was squirm in the scooter's sidecar and hope the woman would leave.

***

Bad as it was to be mistaken for a girl, being teased for being girlish was no better.

"Ninad, let me tell you something," the drawing teacher told me when I joined a vocational high school in Mumbai in eighth grade. "If any boy ever hits you, just pick up a rock and lob it at him."

I laughed heartily, for never could I have imagined an adult would give such bizarre advice. Only later did it dawn on me that the drawing teacher had been half-joking, for he had surmised that I was too girlish to withstand any bullying, beating and rough-and-tumble play.

***

While people have mistaken me for a woman over the years, I too have mistaken a few women for men. But thankfully, I've always managed to avoid the gaffe of calling them men to their faces.

Back when I took a public transport bus to high school at seven in the morning, I would run into a cute guy at the bus stop. Effeminate that he was, he appeared to be a year or two older to me. We smiled when our gazes met, but we never spoke to each other.

I saw the boy's mother accompany him to the bus-stop one morning, and overheard them talk to each other. I was surprised that the boy had a girl's voice, and was even more surprised when his mother kept using the female form of Marathi verbs while talking to him. Only then did I it dawn on me that the feminine guy whom I had a crush on was actually a masculine girl.

I'm not sure if I was feeling drowsy that morning, but I do remember that the realization made me wide awake.

***

Years later, when I told my parents I was gay, my mother did her best to persuade me to marry a woman and have kids. The mid-twenties was a perfect time to start a family, she said. My mother and my grandmother weren’t sure if I was truly homosexual or whether I had been brainwashed by someone who had forced himself upon me against my wishes. But they couldn't comprehend how I could use my homosexuality as a reason to refuse to marry a woman. To them, it was no more than a lame excuse. They told me my ability to sire my own kids was too precious a resource to waste.

I could see why my mother insisted that I have kids. India has no Social Security and no social safety net, so having kids is an essential investment for the future. One’s own children are the only ones who can take care of people in their old age.

I explained to my mother that I wasn’t physically attracted to women; in fact I was physically repulsed by them.

But it was a while before she understood that being homosexual meant being attracted to masculinity and being repulsed by femininity. "Why don't you marry a lesbian?" she finally asked me. "Many lesbians look and act like men, so you'll be as happy with them as you’ll be with a man!"

I told my mother lesbians were still women, no matter how masculine some of them may be. Besides, I had no desire to enter a marriage of convenience, and I was sure no lesbian would want to marry me either.

What I didn't tell my mother was that looks and physical bearing apart, I barely got along with the few lesbians whom I knew, for reasons that were hard to fathom. Most of my friends were men, evenly split between gay and straight.

In fact, there were times when I wondered long and hard if I was a misogynist. For not only had I not succeeded at striking anything beyond a nodding acquaintance with lesbians, but the few straight women whom I was friends with were co-workers or family or my male friends' wives or sisters.

I didn’t have a female friend whom I could point to and proclaim in all honesty, "There's a woman who I became friends with on my own, without any middleman's help."

***

But circumstances can change, and so can people. With enough will-power and effort, something that lies hopelessly in the realm of the insurmountable can slither silently into the reign of the possible.

Earlier this year, I was goofing off at Washington D.C.' annual Gay Pride Parade Festival, pretending to man one of the booths of the Asian and South Asian gay and lesbian groups when a woman approached me. Fair-skinned and flat-chested, she was a couple of inches shorter than me. Her hazel eyes twinkled as she smiled at me and tilted her neck to throw back her long black hair.

I recognized her instantly, although I didn't remember her name. We had met at the Heritage gay and lesbian event a couple of months earlier, where I had seen her sitting by herself on the staircase by the bar, lost in thought.

She reminded me her name was Pat, and I reminded her of mine. We started chatting, and she told me she had grown up in Cambodia, and had come to the U.S. as a refugee after living for weeks or months in other Southeast Asian countries along the way. We swapped stories of childhoods spent in India and Cambodia, talked about what we did for a living and asked each other where we lived. I learned that Pat too lived in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. In fact she had also parked her car at Falls Church metro station, so we decided we would leave together.

I noticed that Pat was quite content in chatting with me. She wasn't mingling with the Asian lesbian's group, whose booth was adjacent to the one we were standing in. "Aren't you a member of AQW?" I asked her, using the group’s acronym, Asian Queer Women.

Pat shot me a quizzical look. "It's only my second time at a gay and lesbian event," she said. "The Heritage event was the first."

That made perfect sense. I flushed with pride that she had preferred to chat with a known gay devil than with the unknown lesbian angels sitting at the neighboring booth.

Just then there was a sudden cloudburst. Pat and I huddled together as people rushed to take shelter in the booths. We watched a few hardy souls strip to their shorts and dance in the rain.

The cloudburst ended just as suddenly as it had started, and my friend Vuong joined us. I was aware that Vuong and Pat knew each other, for I had seen them chat at the Heritage event.

About thirty minutes later, Pat and I decided to leave the festival. I offered to drop Vuong home, since he lived close to me. As the three of us left the booth and headed home, we ran into Kevin, an old acquaintance of mine who was taking pictures of people for Metro Weekly, Washington D.C.'s gay magazine. Vuong and I posed for a couple of pictures, but Pat preferred to stay out of the limelight.

***

As we walked towards the Metro station, I patted myself on the back for breaking a big barrier. Here was the dawn of a new friendship, a relationship that had sprouted without the need for a middleman to sow the seeds. I hadn't sought out Pat; she had approached me. But it was a promising start nonetheless.

The Metro train was crowded, and the three of us sat on separate seats as and when they became free. We got off at the Falls Church station after thirty minutes. While Vuong and I had to make our way to my car, Pat had to head to hers. I gave her a tight hug and kissed her on both cheeks, as is quite common in the gay and lesbian world. "See you next time!" I said.

"See you!" she said. I looked at her as she sauntered towards her car, her long black hair swaying ever so gently in the light afternoon breeze.

"Pat is so sweet!" I told Vuong as we walked towards my car. "I was surprised that she hadn't heard of the Asian Queer Women's group."

Vuong gave me a blank look. "Pat's not a woman," he deadpanned. "He's a guy."

I could have fainted right then and there. I would have, had I been a Victorian-era society lady.

"Really?", "Really?" I asked a couple of times just to make sure. “Yes, really,” said Vuong.

I was largely silent during the ten-minute drive to Vuong's. My ego was punctured and the wind had been knocked out of my sails. At least I didn’t have a flat tire.

Having chatted at length with Pat at the gay Pride event, only to learn that she was a he, Pride had truly come before the fall.

***

I've exchanged a few emails with Pat since that day, but I haven't seen him. He has told me he would like to get together at some point, but he has said he has been too busy.

I’m not sure if Pat knows that I mistook him for a woman when I cozied up to him on that dog-day afternoon. He probably does, although I like to think he doesn't. Whether he does or not, I plan to bring it up and say sorry to him the next time we see each other.

For few pleasures are more supreme than asking someone if they had noticed the swift kick I had given them during our previous meeting, and having the gall to apologize profusely months after doing it. Justice delayed may be justice denied, but an apology delayed can cause malice to fester.

When all is said and done, boys will always be boys.