The Queer Take: Embracing the hidden parts of your life by casting aside deeply ingrained lessons

The Queer Take is a fortnightly column by poet-writer Joshua Muyiwa. Read more from the series  here .

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Ever since I moved out of my family home, I’ve been terrible at making the time to visit them regularly. While I’ve been able to use the handy excuses that are available to all of us, I’ll go ahead and admit that those aren’t always the reasons behind my absences. If I was going to be completely honest, I’d have to admit that this distancing from them began from the second that I knew I wasn’t like the other boys (or girls). I can’t place my finger on the precise point of this parting but I can still touch the scar.

In A Revathi’s book, The Truth About Me , she writes about taking a gamchha, throwing it over her head, twisting the ends together into a thick braid and dancing around her bathroom with it — cotton conjured coiffure. In Living Smile Vidya’s autobiography, I Am Vidya , she writes about waiting for her family to go out, locking the windows and doors, turning on the radio and dancing to the film hits like her favourite starlets. She’d also spend hours by the rivulet that ran near her house play-acting scenes of being rescued by her hero. On reading and hearing such similar stories from other queer friends, I see that everyone in my community always knew to hide in the beginning — just like I did.

In childhood, I quite quickly learned everyone’s routine in my house and whenever any room of the house was free of watchful eyes, it would be transformed into the fantastic. Rooms, corridors and gardens have been turned into a Paris runaway with me doing the Naomi Campbell walk to Snow’s “Informer”, to glittering with the gaudy glamour of a kotha and I was the one — the tawaif — seducing the gathered men, to running around on my tippy-toes in imaginary stilettos like Mariah Carey in her video for “Honey”.

At first, when I was younger, if someone did happen upon me, it wasn’t so shocking — they’d chalk it down to childlike exuberance and enthusiasm, they’d compliment me, they’d even crow my praises to the other members of the family. But as I grew older, my Urmila Matondkar moves didn’t find approval anymore. It wasn’t considered cute. “Why can’t you just walk properly?” “Why do you always have to act like a girl?” “Are you a pansy?” “Don’t do that!” “Don’t be a sissy!” “Stop making those girly gestures!”

Everything I did, it seemed to me, was entirely wrong. I’m not going to drag my entire family without telling you that some of them were amazing in so many other ways. My grandparents, who brought me up, were the most attentive and kindest people in the world, they would show up for everything that I ever did — they were in the audience at the school auditorium even when I was getting a certificate for a hundred percent attendance. In fact, one might argue that all of my grandparents’ attempts at sandpapering away my excesses, edges and eccentricities were for my own good. It was meant to make me fit better into the world.

In a manner of speaking, my Malayali grandfather and my Nepali grandmother were teaching me the lessons that they’d been taught as outsiders in a new city as well: keep your head down, don’t draw attention to yourself, things will be okay. They both knew intimately the feeling of being stared at, of being watched. I’m only able to have this clarity in hindsight. Though it hasn’t meant that I’ve been able to forgive or forget immediately — and I’m still working on undoing their strict standards and instructions for occupying the world.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux might have first written it but Madonna first sang it: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m a child of second-class citizens, of minorities, of outsiders. I have been trained to learn quickly the ways of the insiders, imitate them but always know that I will never be part of that group. I have been trained to secret away the things that truly gave me pleasures. In the light of day, we ate our masala dosas with fork-and-knife and late at night, we savoured the ‘spare parts’ curry. Imagine this added layer to already being queer?

Places like childhood, family and home have really come to mean different things from this distance. I’ve always been able to pick out the fun stories to tell about my journey through these places, and I’m even willing to acknowledge that I was happy then. But, in my early thirties, I want to reclaim the times that weren’t so happy, dust them off and look at them for the things that they’ve taught me too.

Today in the darkest of my times, I’m still able to escape into other worlds. Meena Kumari and I still dance together in mirrored halls, sometimes I transform into Rekha making eyes at Farooq Sheikh, I still go from one side of the room to the other doing dhak-dhak like Madhuri Dixit in “Choli Ke Peeche” and now, I’ve even added Aretha and Nina to Beyonce and Rihanna in my routines.

I’ve come to see that these secreted away moments from these places in the past aren’t things to be ashamed of any longer. It has been a slow, steady and surprising process finding this out. And I’m still unwrapping these gifts and it is no big thanks to the world.

Joshua Muyiwa is a Bengaluru-based poet and writer