HOMELESS ON GOOGLE EARTH by MUKUL KESAVAN

Author:MUKUL KESAVAN [KESAVAN, MUKUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788178244310
Publisher: Permanent Black
Published: 2013-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

It seemed to me that poor non-"straight" men in Bangalore grew into a kothi identity because their material and social circumstances were so oppressive, and so intolerant of sexual difference, that "effeminacy" (which in a more hospitable environment might have grown into a spectrum of sexual behaviours) found itself channelled into the one pariah form that traditional society tolerated: the kothi/hijra. So instead of growing into a range of identities—transgender, transvestite, transsexual, some attracted to women and others to men, and gay—they all became kothis, absorbed into a kind of default identity that had traditionally received boys or young men who felt sexually out of step with their peers.

Like Sharada, every kothi I spoke to came to a sense of her sexual identity in two stages: first being drawn to girlish things like doing housework or wearing frocks, and then being seduced by an older man. Nuzhat and Najma, aka Aijaz and Aslam, 23 years old now, had identical sexual initiations. They were 11 when they were sodomized by a neighbour. This happened to both of them when they were sleeping out in the open on charpoys. It wasn't the same man but he could have been; as I spoke to the NGO's community of kothis, the predatory neighbour appeared so often that he came to seem like a stock character in a play.

Aftab was 10 when he was first sexually exploited. His mother was friends with a woman in the neighbourhood and Aftab sometimes had lunch in this friend's house. One afternoon, as he was napping after lunch, the neighbour's 20-year-old son slipped into bed with him. The way Aftab tells it, he woke up screaming.

In many of these cases the seduction was rape: the boys were too young to consent to sex in any meaningful way. Aftab was repeatedly sodomized by his seducer's friends. When he was 15, his father discovered him with five men queued up to have sex with him. I asked him how he remembered that early experience of sex. Did he recollect it as abuse or was it a good memory? Aftab was ambivalent; he had been taken against his will but there was pleasure and relief in being wanted. After years of being teased and harassed and despised, to be sexually desired, to be taken by a man, was confirmation of his childhood experience of feeling feminine.

In one conversation I had, a large man with long black hair and a moustache, who didn't look like a kothi but was one, summed it up: "When I was 7, people wanted sex with me. I was puzzled … then I realized later that they knew I was a kothi." It wasn't the actual sex (which was often uncaring and brutal): it was the relief of being recognized.

One of the challenges that NGOs face in preaching the message and methods of safe sex is the commonness of sex between men and adolescent boys; predatory sex marked by furtiveness, ambivalence, and, sometimes, violence.

The need to have her femininity confirmed was the anxiety around which the life of the kothi seemed to turn.

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