Juvenilia

I first met him in Chinchpokli.

What kind of love story begins in Chinchpokli, you ask? Well, the kind in which two young men are trying to catch taxis on a Friday afternoon in July and it has rained all day, one of those Bombay monsoon stretches that leave you dazed, the earth overwhelmed by the stubborn potency of the clouds. Both young men are unknown to each other – at this point, they think they will take separate cabs. The one behind is upset that the one in front might get a taxi sooner, but it was he who came here earlier, so he’s entitled to the first cab, no? In any case, cabs are difficult to come by: they’re all occupied because of the rains, and the empty ones drive away with a curious nonchalance, giving the impression that the driver has taken the car out for a leisurely spin through the drenched streets.

By the time we were able to flag down a kaali-peeli, I was nauseous from the quintessential pungent stench of uncleared garbage decomposing in the post-shower humidity. The guy in front was speaking to the driver, his fingers around the door handle, ready to jump in. I walked over and tapped his shoulder, which startled him, because in Bombay, in spite of twenty-something million people packed into that slim peninsula, one doesn’t address another with a civil tap on the shoulder – you either go about your business as though unaware of the multitudes, or you purse your lips to emit a sound somewhere between a roguish wolf-whistle and a lascivious air- kiss.

I’ve been waiting here a long time, and I got here first, so I should get this cab. I said something like that to his surprised face. Now, I have to admit that I’m not an instinctually polite person; I’m not rude but I guess I’m transactional, and that afternoon had me really piqued. I was expecting him to bark back, chal phoot… rasta dekh… I have the taxi now, but his features readjusted themselves to this new information instantly, went from surprise to amusement,  as though he wouldn’t allow me to sully his bright mood, and instead invite me to ditch my long face and step into his airy frame of mind.

Well, he invited me to do more than that: he invited me to share the cab with him, deftly taking care of the negotiations with the exasperated cabbie – bhaiyya first we drop this bhaisaab at Phoenix Mills then we go to Bandra, sounding so certain that even the driver instantaneously agreed, a miracle in that city. He held the door open as I climbed in and slid down the cheap velvet seat in the cramped Fiat Padmini, and when he joined me, our knees briefly touched. I’d clocked him by then, his pleasant face, his slim body, his shapely arms, his full smile, the kind that makes the pink gums peek out just a little on the sides. In fact I’d clocked him when he’d stood in front of me, unaware that a future fellow passenger was checking him out, turning to show me his profile as his eyes fixated on the taxis racing by. There is something about being drawn to someone at first sight, the tussle between the possibility of a magical future and the longing to stay in the moment forever.

By the time I got off at Phoenix Mills, we’d talked our heads off. Jolting and pausing through the slow-moving traffic, which I was suddenly thankful for, I told him my name, where I’d grown up, what I did for work, that I was new to Bombay, that I had just moved there a month ago and was finding it bloody tough. He continued to find me amusing, laughing at nearly everything I said. He said he’d been in Bombay for a couple of years, had come here from another city where he was working, and it turned out we’d grown up in the same city, though that wasn’t his native place as it was mine and we didn’t have the same mother tongue, but it was something!

As the taxi took a final turn in Lower Parel, and the driver asked me whether he should drive into the mall or whether I was okay to jump off on the road, I did something that I hadn’t done before, or haven’t done since. I asked for his phone number. Big deal, you’re saying under your breath. But, mind you, we were two young men in the mid-2000s India; we’d owned mobile phones for only a few years by then; there were no apps around to date or hook up, no stalking and sliding into DMs; and of course Section 377 was in full force, you could slip up just a little and be outed on the internet or end up blowing a police officer in lieu of a bribe. But I’d come to Bombay to wipe my slate clean – I’d lived in a place I’d grown inexorably tired of, worked a job that had sapped me of all creativity, been in a complex relationship that could only be disentangled by physically moving out. This was my chance to do everything differently. And this was Bombay! This is where love happened in the movies. I’d watched Wake Up Sid a few weeks before I’d landed, so surely I couldn’t be blamed for feeling like a lovelorn romantic on a rainy day in the city of dreams, sharing a cab with a handsome stranger.

So there I was, asking for his number, I don’t remember the words I used, but whatever I’d said worked, because he punched his number into my phone while the cabbie honked loudly for me to get off.

#

Qawwali by Wadali brothers on Saturday?

The text was not so much a move as it was a call for help. I’d seen the event listing on the NCPA website but didn’t know whom to go with. The friends I’d made in those early days were nice and fun, but they were too cool for qawwali; they were excited about a rock concert in Goa at the end of the year, something I had to feign knowledge of because I knew nothing about rock. Back in those days, long before the liberated Gen-Zs showed us that cooking eggs and wiping surfaces on Instagram could be cool too, being into anything traditional was weird, it was stuff our parents did; Western culture was the North Star of the youth, and I feared that even the mention of qawwali could be a social death sentence.

Sure thing!

The reply came right away, and suddenly it was the weekend and we were on Marine Drive. The wind sent our hair into a tizzy, our shirts billowed out then stuck against our frames, our arms went up to cover our eyes from the spray of salty water in the high tide. Families picnicked, bubbles were blown and balloons flown, golas dribbled down chins, the stately buildings bore witness to this communal bonhomie. If this were a movie, I’d know which song to play as background score – well, since you ask, it would be Mukesh’s “Kaeen baar yoon hi dekha hai”, its tender lyrics talking about stepping across invisible boundaries of the mind.

There was something heady about those first few months in Bombay, as is the case when you’ve moved to a city that has lived in your consciousness since childhood, all those

Bollywood movies I’d inhaled, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, made me feel as though I’d inhabited parts of it without even setting foot in it. And despite the housing catastrophe, astronomical rents, swelling crowds, stifling heat, and the invasion of flies every monsoon, there always seemed to be a story unfolding, a plot twist right round the corner, a never-ending stream of Hindi songs for background music, the possibility of the ephemeral and ethereal.

I don’t remember what we spoke about, but I’m sure there were no silences. He was even more handsome than I’d thought, but also had this unassuming boy-next-door quality that put me at ease. If anything, I was aware of coming off as the more confident of us two, while he kept underplaying himself, his job, his talents, his humour. He told me about his long relationship with a girl that had broken up before he’d moved to Bombay, and perhaps, like me, he’d moved here to start afresh too?

After the performance, as we walked up to Churchgate station among the dissipating throngs, he confessed that he’d never watched a qawwali before, he wasn’t even particularly interested in this kind of music. Why did you say yes then? He shrugged, and I chose to compliment myself, maybe he’d been thinking of me too all this time; as a gay man, compliments were so hard to come by that I’d got into the habit of giving myself little pep talks. He said he’d been impressed by the qawwali, he couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. Actually that is not what he said, this part I remember. It was so… chaotic but harmonious, those were his words. And it has stuck with me even a decade and half later. Chaotic but harmonious – the perfect way to describe the qawwali, but also our lives in Bombay; that somehow, cutting through all the noise, the bustle, the jostles and jangles, there was this interior quietude that held fort and wrapped its protective arms around our bruised bodies. Chaotic but harmonious – the perfect way to describe what he and I had.

#

Five years I lived in Bombay, and five years we were together. Strictly within the confines of straight male friendship though. But labels are fabrications of our modern world. The human heart was never built for them, and history is littered with stories of people who connected in different ways, of love that manifested through letters, music, companionship, of passion expressed without touch, of lifetimes lived together sans vows solemnised with god as witness or saat pheras around the holy fire.

He took it upon himself to show me around: the Mahim creek, the flamingos of Sewri, the murals in Bandra, jhinga kolhapuri at Trishna, berry biriyani at Britannia Café, Irani chai in the nondescript coffee shops of Bombay Central, curio outlets in Kala Ghoda… I did my part by finding us cultural things to do; I’d lived in a city that didn’t have a lot by way of art or culture, and so in Bombay I dived into the scene, booking my weekends up with plays, movies, film festivals, talks and readings. He came along to a lot of them, still unquestioning, keeping an open mind always.

He wasn’t the most articulate, I was always the more verbose, the more opinionated, picking the right words from the lexicon at the right times, all of which he lapped up with that same touch of amusement that I’d glimpsed on that first afternoon in Chinchpokli.

But in his own way, in his own time, he told me about his life, the early death of his father, the close relationship he had with his mother and sister, the birth of his nephew, the frequent trips he made back to his home city, our home city, though none of us thought of it as home anymore. With every such revelation, I felt the glow of intimacy, like I was being invited into his world step by step. I wasn’t ever worried about letting my guard down, about showing how charmed I was by him, or how the attraction I’d felt at the start hadn’t waned; I had a lifetime of experience in dealing with male friends I’d had crushes on, was adept at functioning under the cover of jolly camaraderie.

In those five years, I made a lot of friends – I found my kindred spirits in Bombay, people who had had lives so different to mine and yet were driven by the same kind of unhinged energy, full of the need to expand and expose and express themselves. For the first time in my life, I felt like I might have stumbled upon somewhere I could call home, and even if I’d have to leave the city, which I eventually did, this was the place that had laid the foundations on which a new me had been built, one who wasn’t cowered, squirming in the embarrassment of being a misfit, or looking over my shoulder for bullies.

He didn’t have many friends, though he lived with one of his closest pals and they played squash every weekend. In those first few months, he took me along to a friend’s surprise birthday party, and when I jumped out from behind a pillar with the others shouting “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!”, I could tell the girl’s eyes stopped on me for a second, wondering Who TF is this one? She told me as much later, when we became a tight group of four, two girls and two guys who hung out so spontaneously that looking back now, from this present time of calendarised dinner dates booked weeks and months in advance, it seems as though we were always together. Memory has an uncanny way of collapsing time, like in a movie screenplay that goes from one relevant scene to another.

I’d like to believe that I had, in modern lingo, friend-zoned him by then, not seeing any romantic potential – surely something would have happened, surely he’d have given some kind of  hint. Even then, when I began going out with the guy who would later become my long-term partner, I didn’t tell him about that right away, perhaps trying to draw out the possibility of something blossoming between us still, or perhaps just holding on to the alchemy of that first encounter, the charged ions in the taxi as we’d sat in proximity.

In those five years, we didn’t take many pictures. Phone cameras weren’t as advanced, and none of us was into documenting our days anyway. But there is this one photo of the two of us – I can look for it in my iCloud now, but I don’t need to because I remember it so well. We’re at a restaurant in Andheri, not a posh one, in fact it’s a kind of glorified stall. We might be eating vada pau or garlic prawns. I’m wearing a striped short-kurta that I bought in Haridwar. He’s wearing a T-shirt in the same sea-green colour but without the stripes. The waiter taking the photo is in front of me, I’m smiling straight into the camera while he has had to turn around, his sinewy right arm around the backrest of the bench. I’m barely able to hold my face together, nearly crumbling in laughter, because he must’ve said something funny. He did this thing of slipping into my mother tongue when he had to make a joke, he somewhat knew the language because he’d grown up in the city, learnt it from the streets and the playground, giving it a gangster lilt, which was in stark contrast to how I spoke it at home. Even something as mundane as Arre dada ki hochhe ta ki would have me in splits.

The thing about the photo that strikes me the most is our smiles, radiant and unfiltered, travelling all the way up to our blazing eyes. Life wasn’t easy even back then – there were tough jobs and family issues and work drama and zero savings; but it was difficult without being bleak, if you know what I mean. There was something so bullishly optimistic about those years, the belief that we could make it through unscathed no matter what. And, dare I say, a feeling that we could journey through it together. Before we became parents, carers of ageing parents, homeowners strapped with mortgages, senior executives responsible for company bottomlines, taxpayers writing cheques for slimy politicians, online activists tasked with solving the world’s problems, piecemeal images refracted through the prism of worldly duty and material need, we were simply and wholly us, him and me and all our friends, and the pulsating, throbbing city, and that was enough to ignite in us the determination to collectively win at the game of life.

#

I eventually told him about my boyfriend after he and I had spent the night together.

We hadn’t met in a while, he’d gone to see his family, and that evening, we caught up on the past weeks, hurriedly telling each other the things we’d been waiting to share. I don’t remember where we ate or what we did, but I remember walking the streets of Versova aimlessly, him talking about the time with his nephew and how much he valued being an uncle. It was very late in the night by the time we stopped, a drowsy calm had engulfed the city, dimming even the eternal hullabaloo of Bombay. And maybe because it was late, or I couldn’t find an auto- rickshaw to take me home, or a sudden downpour had started, or some other excuse, he suggested I stay at his. He even offhandedly mentioned that his flatmate wasn’t around. I remember walking coyly behind him into the lobby of his building, then going up in the rickety lift, then through the door of his flat, my ears burning with anticipation. Was tonight going to be the night?

He gave me a T-shirt and shorts to change into, and came out of the toilet in a vest and shorts himself. He had muscular legs, the calves and glutes strong and rounded in the right places, and for once I didn’t stop myself from openly admiring them. I was already seeing my boyfriend by then, we were in a stable relationship, but now I switched off that side of me.

He had a double bed and there’d been no question of me sleeping on the couch. For a while, he played me music on his phone that he really liked, his favourite tracks from Coke Studio, a fusion of desi folk and indie rock. I can still see him head-bobbing to ‘Madari’. We spoke some more in hushed tones in the darkness, lying next to each other, dozing off but resisting sleep in case the night wasn’t done yet, there was more to come. From under the covers, I could feel the warmth of his body, the strength of his breathing, and when we finally fell silent, it was our breaths that syncopated in a choreographed dance, doing what our bodies weren’t, betraying the turmoil yet managing to stay serene, chaotic but harmonious.

We slept very little that night, woke up in the early hours of dawn. I expertly hid my dejection by amping up the practised faux macho cheer, spouted platitudes like It was a fun sleepover, should do it again, yeah! He said he knew just the place for breakfast, a South-Indian eatery close by, open at that hour, the fragrance of ground coffee beans flooding the street as we navigated the puddles from last night’s rain.

It was at breakfast that I told him about my boyfriend, and that I had decided to follow the guy to a different country. I had applied for a Master’s course and gotten in with a scholarship, so it was now more or less confirmed. It was time he knew that last night had been our final chance to play our cards, show our hands, but now, under the clear rays of the rising sun, I could see what he was, had always been: a good and close friend. And he deserved to know about me and my life. My boyfriend and I were illegals here, I said, there was no legal cover or respect or social acceptance for our kind, I had been dating this guy for two years and it was time I gave it a fair shot, I’d never know if I didn’t try. I didn’t label my sexuality, didn’t give him any background on whether and how I’d always felt about men, didn’t even say much about the boyfriend. Stripped of all context, this was me telling him my deepest secret, risking him being disgusted that we’d just spent the night in the same bed.

He became quite stoic, blowing over the frothy surface of the filter coffee in the steel tumbler. You’re doing the right thing, he finally said, no one deserves to live their life like a dirty secret. He’d never been this articulate and succinct before, he had a way of meandering and deflecting before he came to his main point and I’d always thought it was because he struggled to express himself verbally. But here he was, saying my biggest truth back to me in only a few select words. Indeed, no one deserves to live their life like a dirty secret.

Of course I didn’t say out loud what was at the tip of my tongue, something I didn’t say to any of my friends as I did the rounds announcing my impending departure: that I was betraying them, our friendship, our city. That unspoken and unsigned pact of ours, to stick together and see it through no matter what, was now breached, and I was guilty. Instead we quickly perked ourselves up, made plans to visit each other, go on vacations to third countries, promised to video call at least once a month. Nowadays when friends leave, I don’t even try, I’m a weathered soldier who knows only too well the fallout of these separations, but back then, I really did believe that I’d be able to keep up, and that they too would remain exactly how and where I was leaving them.

A few months later, I left Bombay. Our last meeting, the farewell as it were, wasn’t just me and him; the girls were there too. The four of us drank ourselves silly, cracked up at jokes, recounted old stories, and hobbled back to our respective homes at an ungodly hour.

The memory I have of that evening is of the four of us standing shoulder to shoulder on the terrace of Rangsharda, looking out at the sun setting over the Western Express Highway. I turned to look at him and he looked back, and I noticed for the first time how his eyes were glassy and brown in the congealed glare of twilight, swirls and strokes curling around the constricted pupils. We held our gaze for a while before he cut through the moment with something funny in my mother tongue.

#

In the next few years, I prioritised visiting family in my hometown on my trips to India. I visited Bombay only once and met him in the café of Prithvi Theatre for old time’s sake. He hadn’t changed at all, except maybe lost some hair. I knew I’d put on some weight, still getting used to life in a new country, new food and new weather, though he kept complimenting me. The old ways returned soon enough, setting the café trilling with our laughter as we made childish self-deprecating jokes, sang the Bhojpuri version of ‘Tum hi ho’… Kahe ki tum hi hau…

We spoke about work and life, this and that. There was a lot to catch up on for me, because while I’d taken to posting avidly on social media, his life continued to be out of reach. I asked him many questions, and he told me that he was still keeping up the squash, about the exciting projects he was embarking on. Wow! I kept saying, flush with genuine happiness for how he’d found a way to merge his career and passion. And for the first time, I spoke openly of my boyfriend, our life together, the joys and challenges of setting up a home and telling our families.

Years passed by after that meeting, as they do in stories, with a Like here on Instagram and a quick Hello there on WhatsApp. I always wished him on his birthday, and he always forgot mine until a few days later when he’d text to apologise. One time, he said he’d started dating a woman. During the pandemic, we exchanged notes – first it was horrific where I was, then it got bad where he was; life contracted to the here and now, leaving us bereft of breathing space to reminisce about the past or imagine a future. On occasion, I’d insist that he send me a recent photo, and with every new one, I noticed his growing beard, the soft bags of flesh under his eyes, the hint of a gut beneath his T-shirt, but he still had that smile that lightened up his face, the gums peeping out on the sides, the arm holding the phone in selfie mode still muscular.

#

I’ve had to look up the date to check when this happened. It was right after the pandemic began to abate. It was night time for me, so it must’ve been very late for him.

Hey, how are you doing?

He said he’d been thinking about me, he missed me a lot, and couldn’t stop obsessing over what we could’ve been if I hadn’t left, or if he’d come with me to this new country. He went quiet for a while, and when I hadn’t replied, not because I didn’t want to but because I was staring at the phone screen dumbfounded, he added, as though I’d be in any doubt:

As in… if we were in a relationship… I don’t know what it would be, but… together…

Those years were like a coming-out festival. Whether it was because Section 377 had finally been repealed and homosexuality was now legal in the country, or because we’d all been through the pandemic and had glimpsed the end of human connection, or were just buoyed by the freedom that comes with hitting our mid-thirties and knowing we’re now definitively in the second halves of our lives, never to be young again, a slew of men who’d sworn to be straight had now declared themselves gay or bisexual – some on the internet, some on personal text, some over phone calls.

But this wasn’t like that. What he was doing was what I’d done when I’d told him about myself: he was stripping himself of all context, no labels, no past, no apologies, he’d even obliterated my partner from his consciousness when he mentioned moving countries with me. He was homing in on just the two of us, the only people that mattered in this conversation.

When I finally typed my response out, it was neutral, sterile. Scrolling through the messages now, I sound like someone who is in no mood to reciprocate, trying to find the empathy to politely fend off a random fan. I’m trying to imagine how those messages must’ve read to him that night. But well, I’d turned my life around to be with the man I’d chosen and who’d chosen me. Sure it had taken its toll, but for once I wasn’t chasing after anything.

After sending him those insipid texts, there I was, not a wink of sleep in my eyes, my head a muddle of what could’ve been but now would never be, what would’ve been and now could never be. One gets to a certain age and looks back at all the winding paths one’s life could’ve gone down, and from this vantage point, there rises a yearning for all that has been foregone, but also a comfort with where one has landed.

It is the perfect vortex, and the perfect void. He texted again, now nearly dawn for him:

I can’t sleep at all. Thinking of you, of us.

Same. But I have a smile on my face.

His final text for the night:

Same ☺

#

I’m in Bombay for two nights. This time round, I’m in the country for a considerable length of time, planning to go from city to city. Nearly a decade after I upped and left abruptly, I’m here to make amends. The moment I bought the tickets, I texted all my friends to let them know my travel dates, scheduling meet-ups and short trips and stays, promising to spend time with them and the husbands and wives and children I hadn’t yet met. I want to take the fiery subcontinental sun in my palms and gobble it up whole so it can keep me nourished for the next few years.

Bombay is not what it was when I’d lived here, or rather, it is a city with which you have to reinvent your relationship every time you arrive; it is moody, tough, guileless. You can’t just land and find it waiting for you, bejewelled and bedecked. Most of my friends here have also breached our pact; they left one by one, to Goa, Pune, Delhi, Bangalore, some even farther away, to San Diego, Melbourne, Amsterdam.

He’s one of the handful who stayed. When I messaged, he sounded noncommittal, said he was swamped with a project and had an early flight to catch so he’d have to see about meeting up. I told him I was going to stay with a friend in Powai, that I was quite flexible so he could let me know. No further replies, so I assumed he’d moved on, or didn’t want to pick up where we’d left off. We hadn’t really texted after that night. I let things be.

Last night, he messaged out of the blue:

Maybe we could get dinner tomorrow?

I didn’t think he’d made a note of my itinerary. My pores emitted that gooey feeling I used to get every time he’d message the moment he landed in Bombay after his travels, a pressing urgency in his tone… Let’s meet? Now I didn’t care to check what I had planned for the following night. I was playing with my friend’s toddler; I put the baby down on my lap and typed with shaky fingers:

Some wine would be nice too ☺

I was thinking of staying in a hotel near the airport. Maybe it’ll get late and I have an early flight

My heart missed a beat, I knew what he was trying to say. I texted:

I was thinking the same.

We’re still in sync…

Always were ☺

Also in case you can’t tell, I’m flirting. Because I know I’ll be too shy in person

It was the most forward he’d ever been. I looked down at the baby giving me her gap-toothed grin. The next time I see this child, she’ll be big enough to speak, run around. The next time I come here, none of us will be what we are in this moment, except mute spectators to the incorrigible tunneling of life through relentless time. So I wrote:

About time! You were too shy for five years while I was throwing myself at you

He sent a GIF of two hands popping out of two screens and joining for a shake. Gosh, such a nerd! I replied with a GIF of two hearts bumping into each other and bursting into confetti.

#

And so here I am, in this hotel room in Saki Naka. I made something up to tell my friend why I wasn’t staying at hers tonight. I’d eventually told my partner about those late-night messages two years ago, but I haven’t said anything about tonight, about this hotel. I will someday, but now is not the time. Tonight belongs to just me and him, grabbing our golden tickets to the time capsule, lest we miss our one last chance to glimpse the selves we had and hadn’t been.

I’ve been here for the last three hours, tracing my finger on the window along the blinking lights of planes taking off the runway. Our reservation at the restaurant downstairs expired, and I’ve had to order room service. I’ve messaged him but it only shows a single tick; his phone is unreachable when I call. I run to the door every time there’s a ding of the lift outside, the sound of footsteps, but they walk past, or don’t come this way. The receptionist confirmed at check-in that he’s paid for this room in full, but that means nothing.

Maybe he got cold feet, maybe something’s come up, or maybe he’s sensed the deluge that might drown us at the other end of this time travel, or he just needs a little more time… But I can’t leave, I know I’ll stay the night, until it’s time to check out, and then some more. I’m inside the capsule all strapped into my seat.

Some stories are ready for the telling only when they find their ending. But some need to be told so we can catch them in the folds of our fingers, hold them close to our beating hearts, calm them down, stop them from manically circling over us like trapped djinns.

And that is why, sat in this hotel room, I tell this story even as I await its denouement. I tell our little story lest you discard it as juvenilia.