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What happens when we make peace with ourselves, our present and our past

When we see our shared humanity as a link that unites us despite our individual variations, it is then that we see the world in its real splendour

In the stars’ individual brilliance, I saw a safe future for myself. (Credit: Suvir Saran)

When I was five years old, we left home in Delhi to move to Nagpur where Papa would work at the National Academy of Direct Taxes. The world I had gotten accustomed to was changing and taking turns least expected by my juvenile brain. I wondered how Mom would function in a new place, with new challenges to tackle, and still have us three kids and my father to puppeteer through our challenges in life.

The rituals of the household run by Dadi, my paternal grandmom, were going to be lost and replaced by unfamiliar ones. The early morning feeding of the birds with prasad prepared with love by Panditji and offered to the household deities by Dadi was my favourite morning ablution. It held the same importance to me as my shower and other bodily functions during those hours. Then there was the parakeet who ate out of my mother’s hands. Who would feed it, and how would it make its peace with Mom now away from Delhi?

The journey to Nagpur by train, with all the small towns it stopped in, the stench of the toilets, and the body odour of my fellow passengers seemed like a peregrination, covering transitions of my own life and weaving them into the passage of my parents’, seeming arduous and tedious because it came with thoughts too lofty for me to fathom at that tender age.

Once settled in Nagpur, I cried myself to sleep almost nightly. A crying that was silent, that was deliberately and carefully kept unnoticeable. I was mourning the move from our ancestral home but, more importantly, I was frightened of the feelings that were developing in me.

The youngest of three siblings, I was assigned insignificant chores that would keep me out of harm’s way. This made me a shadow to my mom, and I often quite literally wrapped myself into the neat pleats of her saris, hiding from my worst nightmares and dreams. In doing so, I also hid myself from others. I was young enough to think that what I couldn’t see would not see me, and so if there was no sari to hide inside, I would sit in rooms full of people with my eyes shut. Afraid that I was judged for being different, for loving those of my own gender, for wanting to use my hands and learn stitching, embroidery, dressmaking, cooking, and ironing, I felt I was considered a deviant male who wasn’t fitting comfortably into the boxes prescribed for me by society.

In this home in Nagpur I was introduced to the funeral processions for deceased Muslims. The artist inside me was captivated by the visual streetside elegance of the piety shown in the last rites and the men in the procession, many bearded, some with dramatic ones painted orange. The hats, tunics and pyjamas they wore added more drama to their form, and that excited me further still. It was only when I learned about the “thing” they carried on a stretcher of sorts that I realised my mind was fascinated and excited by something mournful and sad.

Something, somewhere, in my soul, in my thinking, in my being, was rattled by the revelation, and it made me cry incessantly. I was crying even when not bawling visibly. In the loss of humans to death, I found a connection to the death of my freedom to dream, to be myself, to love as I wished, and to build my own fantasies and work hard to realise them for my pleasure. Verbiage for what I felt wasn’t coming to me, yet I knew that to be understood by the world I was born into, I would need to see parts of me that I cherished die unnecessary deaths.

It was this constant self-doubt and self-hate that had me wanting to be nothing more than a shadow of my mom, a woman who herself was a minority, but who was my champion, understood many of my unspoken cues about life and fears, who comforted me deeply with every touch and conversation, and who, every night, put me to sleep with hauntingly beautiful lullabies, even if it was a fake sleep, one which would throw me back into a dark and dreary cesspool of fear and questions, that wouldn’t leave me until the sun came out.

Three years and three homes later, we moved back to Delhi, into the same home my grandmother ran with a generosity of self. The rituals I had fears of seeing vanish were again part of my life. The nightmares about my future, my place in this world, my being different – these didn’t vanish, but they melded into disquieting realities. I was learning to make peace with myself. Anxiety and disquietude were channeled into talent that my teachers and mother were appreciative of at school and at home.

It took a good two years for me to fully accept the hand dealt to me by God and the planets and stars. My parents and siblings showered me with an abundance of trust and love. I was never left wanting for anything. It seemed like they did with less so I could have more. Perhaps my plaintive eyes made people forgive my less than perfect scores at school. I failed grade VI and had to repeat it, and my father, who was strict, was nothing but loving and caring. Of course, my mother conditioned him and schooled him to be that way, of that I have no doubt. My new classmates opened their heart and soul to me, and my teachers were only more generous and caring still.

The night sky of Delhi was a constant in my life. In the stars’ individual brilliance and heightened beauty, I saw a safe future for myself and a place on this planet for little me, a man who was gay, who enjoyed artistic things, and who had a desire to do many of those things often considered not manly enough.