A Curable Affliction

“Now that you’re visiting India, we should start looking for girls for your marriage.”

Vinod was visibly shaken by his mother’s suggestion. “Aai, I told you I’m not interested in marrying,” he reminded her, straining to make himself heard over the incessant din of hawkers’ cries, blaring street music and the incessant cawing of crows—sounds that didn’t think twice before penetrating the Saneys’ living room.

“You don’t have to marry right away,” Smita assured him. “You can do it on your next visit to India. But you should meet a few girls this time, choose a suitable one and get engaged. Don’t you know girls are willing to go to any lengths to marry software engineers living in America? People like you are in high demand; you’ll surely be able to snag the best of the pick!”

“I don’t want to meet any girls. I’m simply not attracted to them.”

Smita shrugged. “It’s but natural that you aren’t attracted,” she said, wrapping the long end of her sari across her shoulders.

Vinod was pleasantly surprised by his mother’s reaction. How on earth had she figured him out so quickly? If only all mothers were so wise, so astute!

“You always attended boys-only schools,” his mother continued. “Even in college, there were just three or four girls in your class. And now that you’re in America, your roommates are all men. How can you be attracted to women if you’ve never had any female friends?”

The smile all but vanished from Vinod’s face. He reiterated that he wasn’t attracted to women.

But there was no stopping his mother. “The women you interacted with the most were I and your sister,” she added with a dismissive wave of her arm. “As a result, you treat all women as if they were your mother or sister!”

Vinod was aghast. His mother’s remark could’ve come straight out of a Bollywood movie. He looked around the room, half-expecting to see the cameras rolling. But the only things moving were the window curtains swishing gently in the light afternoon breeze.

There was no mistaking it: the time had come to bite the bullet.

“Aai, I’m not physically attracted towards women,” Vinod clarified, fidgeting nervously in his chair while gulping a big sip of coffee, wondering how she would react. Would she glare menacingly at him? Would she stare him down? Would she burst into tears? Or would her eyes pop out with disbelief?

But Smita didn’t bat an eyelid. “Don’t worry,” she assured him nonchalantly, smiling the faintest of a faint smile. “Once you marry a girl, both of you will become intimate with each other. Intimacy leads to sexual attraction; followed on its heels by passion. That’s how arranged marriages work.”

Vinod’s jaw dropped. “I’m sure I won’t develop any such attraction,” he shot back, unsettled by his mother’s equanimity.

“How can you be so sure? Are you speaking from experience? If you remain stubborn like this, the attraction will never get a chance to develop, and you’ll remain single all your life.”

Vinod didn’t say anything. Smita was pleased, for her son’s reticence was proof positive that he was having second thoughts. But it was best to rule out all possibilities.

“Do you mean to say you don’t have any sexual desire at all?” she asked, her tone betraying a hint of worry.

“I do have desire,” said Vinod, his voice trembling. “It’s just not towards women.”

Smita pondered the remark for a few moments. “Are you attracted towards men?” she enquired tentatively.

“Yes, I am,” said Vinod, avoiding his mother’s gaze, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead in Mumbai’s muggy midsummer air. “In fact, I’m sexually – not just physically – attracted towards them.”

There! At long last, he had done it. The cat was out of the bag. Vinod was engulfed by a tsunami of relief. He felt that a great burden had been lifted off his shoulders; an elephant had stepped off his chest. Long had they been his loyal companions—the burden and the elephant—trodding him mercilessly underfoot, holding him unflinchingly in their vice-like grip, unceremoniously casting aspersions on his sanity. Difficult though his coming out was, never had he imagined it would be so easy.

Smita’s face was a picture. “Vinnie, you should stay in an apartment by yourself, instead of with roommates!” she thundered, shaking her head, her hands on her hips. “It’s time to live alone, now that you can afford it.”

“What does living by myself have anything to do with it?” Vinod asked, mystified.

His mother waved her arm dismissively. “I’ll make some pakoras,” she announced, making her way to the kitchen. “It’s time for an evening snack. Your Baba will be home soon.”

***

“We were happy when Vinnie didn’t get admitted into any of the IIT’s for his undergraduate studies,” Smita mentioned to her husband that night in an agitated voice, long after Vinod had gone to bed early from jet lag. “We were afraid he’d get ragged, hazed—even sexually abused—by other students at the hostel. We were pleased that he attended Bombay University instead and stayed with us. But how wrong were we! Destiny has betrayed us,” she bemoaned.

            “What are you driving at?” Hemant asked, scratching his chin as he slumped in the armchair next to the writing table in the living room. “We weren’t wrong; he didn’t get hazed.”

            Smita threw her arms out in indignation. “The assaults just got postponed by four years,” she alleged. “It may not have happened here, but it happened in America.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Isn’t it obvious? Someone in America has assaulted him, brainwashed him into thinking he’s a homo. It must be a fellow-student; it could even be one of his roommates.”

            “Did you ask him if he was assaulted?” Hemant wondered aloud. “Or are you jumping to conclusions, as you often do at the drop of a hat?”

            “I didn’t ask him,” Smita admitted sheepishly. “I was sure he would deny it, as he may well have started enjoying the encounters by now. I’ll leave it to you to have a man-to-man talk with him.”

            Hemant shook his head, the sad look on his face looking sadder in the dim yellow glow of the night lamp. He looked as if he would burst into tears at any moment.

            “I don’t think this is permanent,” his wife continued. “I can’t imagine why you’re so upset. It’s just a passing phase. I’m sure Vinnie will become straight as an arrow the moment he moves away from his tormenters. After all, homosexuality is a Western perversion. A few months of solitude followed by marriage to the right girl, and the hanky panky will make way for the hunky dory. Thank God, afflictions such as these are eminently curable!”

            Hemant was at a loss for words. “Don’t treat your assumptions as facts,” he eventually advised her as he and Smita made their way to the bedroom. Hemant climbed into bed, overcome with weariness. “I’m not sure what the cause is, but it could well be different.”

            Smita fell fast asleep soon thereafter, but her husband kept tossing and turning for over an hour. The street music was no longer blaring; the hawkers’ cries had subsided. And even though Mumbai was a city that never slept, the crows too had called it a day.

When Smita woke up in the middle of the night, as she often did, she noticed that her husband was fast asleep. As she made her way to the bathroom, she had an epiphany. Sexual assault wasn’t the only cause of homosexuality. There was one other—no, wait—two other possible reasons. Her husband had been correct after all. Perhaps her son was indeed telling the truth. Perhaps he was genuinely attracted to men without having to be forcefully initiated into it. Smita made up her mind to ask him the very next day.

                       

***

“Aai, I’ll eat later,” Vinod told his mother the next morning as she was making breakfast. “I’ve fasted for twelve hours; I’m off to the lab for a blood test to check lipid levels.”

            Smita spun around. “Get your sperm count checked as well,” she blurted. “It’s a simple test.”

            Vinod blushed. Giggling like a teenage girl, he covered his mouth with his hand to hide his embarrassment. His mother hadn’t lost her knack for unleashing bolts from the blue. Indian mothers didn’t usually prod their sons to get their sperm counts checked, not even in Bollywood movies. His mother was truly special. Perhaps it was her Ph.D. that made her so, even though the doctorate was in engineering.

            “Lipid levels are more important for people in their forties and fifties, like me and Baba,” Smita hastened to explain. “The sperm count’s more important for young men.”

As Vinod stepped out into the bright sunshine for the fifteen-minute walk to the medical lab, Smita chided herself for assuming that he had been the victim of an assault. Victims of sexual abuse didn’t look happy, nor did they radiate joy and optimism. And they certainly didn’t giggle uncontrollably. Never had she seen her son as happy in a long time.

            And the thing about being homosexual? Vinod hadn’t mentioned it since the previous evening. Maybe he had forgotten all about it. Even if he hadn’t, there were two straightforward explanations, the ones that had occurred to her in the middle of the night.

Perhaps he had a low sperm count, making him impotent. Didn’t impotence translate into a lack of attraction towards women? Presto! And when an impotent man is a prisoner or a sailor, don’t other men force themselves on him? In fact, force isn’t always needed, for he will gladly surrender to their overtures. After all, isn’t an impotent man a man who is not a man?

Smita shuddered. Her son had always been a bit of a sissy since childhood. But what did effeminacy and impotence have to do with each other anyway? She hoped her son’s sperm count wouldn’t be abnormally low.

            The second possibility was far more tantalizing. What if Vinod’s count was abnormally high? What if he was oversexed? Maybe the women he slept with weren’t enough to satiate his appetite. Smita bit her lip. She was sure her son was a decent person, one who wouldn’t have pre-marital sex. In that case, whom could he possibly have sex with? Men. Lots of them. Friends. Roommates. Who knew who else? Maybe it wasn’t his roommates who assaulted him. Maybe Vinod was the one who forced himself upon them. But Smita dismissed the notion. “My son’s too weak to do that,” she told herself.

            In either case, her son’s problem would be a solvable one, something she didn’t need to worry about. She made a note to tell this to her husband that evening when he came home from work. She couldn’t for the life of her fathom why Hemant had lost his peace of mind over it.

***

Thanks to the efficiency of Mumbai’s medical labs, Vinod got his test results that very evening.

            “My bad cholesterol’s a hundred and twenty,” he told his mother as he started rattling off his blood test results.

            But Smita interrupted him. “Show me the other results,” she ordered. “Lipid levels don’t matter when you’re in your twenties.”

            Vinod handed her the report.

            Smita flipped impatiently through the pages. A big smile soon lit up her face. She could scarcely believe what she was seeing. “Your sperm count’s perfectly normal!” she cried, grinning from ear to ear. She gave Vinod a big hug. “I’ll tell Baba when he comes home. He’ll be delighted.”

            Vinod shrugged. “I didn’t expect it to be anything but normal,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

            “It is a big deal. You’re normal after all. There’s nothing wrong with you!”

            “Aai, I must beg to differ,” Vinod ventured with an impish smile. “There is something wrong with me: I’m still jet-lagged.”

            Mother and son laughed heartily. “The jet-lag’s just a passing phase,” Smita assured him, “as are many things in life which we fear are permanent.”

            Vinod couldn’t imagine what his mother was referring to, but he let it pass. “Aai, I’m off to bed,” he told her. “I can’t stay up a minute longer. Enjoy your evening.”

            “You can be sure I’ll enjoy my evening,” Smita mumbled, feeling palpably relieved. Her son’s homosexual desire was caused neither by impotence nor by excess libido. Her husband had been wrong after all: there was nothing permanent about it. It was merely a mental affliction, one that could be easily cured. The next steps were clear. She would convince her husband to prod their son to live by himself and ask him to consult a psychiatrist. The road ahead was by no means smooth, but what came in the way were molehills, not mountains.

It didn’t matter if her son’s homosexual desire didn’t disappear completely. All that was needed was a flowering of his heterosexual desire, so he could marry a woman, have kids and enter the familial stage of life that every Hindu man was duty-bound to enter. And who would care if he continued fooling around with men, as long as he had a wife and kids? Would it really matter? Not for nothing did north Indians think of homosexuality as the Hobby of the Kings. They were right: it wasn’t an American perversion after all. It was Indian to the bone.

           Vinod may not have been the manliest of men, but in his mother’s eyes, he was unquestionably a king. Now all he needed was a queen. The man-to-man talk with his father could wait for another day.