Scar tissue

If I learn to ride a bicycle, I will turn from gay to straight. When this thought flashed across twenty-one-year old Mohanaswamy’s mind, dark night had descended on the coastal state of Goa. Huge waves were crashing down on the seashore. As Mohanaswamy tossed and turned on the bed in a hotel room in that unfamiliar city, his friends, tired of cycling and braving the hot sun the whole day, were slipping into deep sleep one by one.

Elsewhere in the city, owners of wine and mutton shops were downing their shutters. It was just about two years ago that Mohanaswamy had come across the word ‘gay’. He now identified himself with that word, though he wasn’t sure whether it really described him. For him, ‘straight’ meant every other creature on earth except him and the people of his ilk. English dailies and magazines like Debonair often used the word ‘gay’. But he didn’t know what gays were called in the vernacular. So far he had earned several monikers in the local slang — each one filling him with pain, disgust, humiliation and incredulity. But there was no equivalent word for ‘gay’ in Kannada. You wouldn’t even find it in dictionaries and newspapers.

The first moniker Mohanaswamy got was ‘GanSu’, a short form for ‘Gandu Sule’, which, in Kannada, referred to a male prostitute. Shockingly, it was his sister, Janaki, who gave him the horrendous nickname. He was a schoolboy then, studying in the seventh standard. Even now, Mohanaswamy wondered whether his sister really knew the meaning of the word or she uttered it inadvertently. It was a hot summer day. A lunch had been organized for the Brahmin families of his village at the Raghavendraswamy temple. Mohanaswamy’s parents had left for the temple at ten in the morning, asking the children to join them at lunchtime. Janaki’s friends had come home to play. Mohanaswamy loved to play house with those girls. He found it more interesting than playing gilli-danda, top and marbles with boys.

Though the girls forced him to go and play with boys, he wouldn’t listen. The boys always bullied him. That day too, he hung around with the girls at their doll’s wedding. They drew rangoli designs on the floor, wrapped towels around their waists as saris and tapped their feet as they sang songs. They did not notice how much time had gone by in fun and frolic until Mohanaswamy alerted that it was past twelve o’clock and time to leave for the temple.

If you walk barefoot on a hot summer day on the streets in Ballari district, your soles will develop boils by the time you take ten steps. The children had no other option but to walk barefoot as their lower middle class parents never bought them slippers, fearing that they might lose them while playing outdoors. So Mohanaswamy and the girls started walking barefoot.

They chatted along the way, ran when they couldn’t bear the heat and stopped by under the shade of tamarind trees intermittently. As they walked, they came across a small canal, which had to be crossed to reach the temple located on the other side. A little further, a stone slab was put across the drain to facilitate the crossing of it.

But to reach the slab, people had to walk a couple of yards ahead. Already exhausted, the children were in no mood to walk any further. They stopped by the canal and some of the girls hesitated to step on the slab in case they spoilt their ghagra-cholis. The canal carried human excreta and filth of the entire town.

Leaving his sister and her friends behind, Mohanaswamy, bubbling with enthusiasm, ran towards the canal in great speed and jumped over it successfully, like Hanuman vaulting the ocean. The girls watched him aghast. ‘Come on! Jump over, just like me. Can you do it?’ Mohanaswamy screamed, standing at the other end of the drain. A couple of girls in the group tried to imitate him in vain. Others hesitated even to try.

‘Losers! Losers!’ Mohanaswamy screamed, giving them the thumbs down. ‘I am the winner, I am the winner,’ he yelped in joy. The girls were off ended. Seeing him jumping around in joy, and in a bid to defend her team, Janaki yelled at him, ‘Stop it! Why are you dancing like this? Are you a prostitute? Yes, you are Gandu Sule, a male prostitute!’

MohanaswamyVasudhendra and Rashmi TerdalHarper PerennialFiction₹399

Shocked, Mohanaswamy held his breath and steadied himself. His sister’s harsh words, followed by the laughter of the girls, pierced his ears. Encouraged further by her friends’ response, Janaki repeated the word even louder. ‘Gandu Sule!’

The incident left an indelible mark on Mohanaswamy’s psyche. But his new moniker intrigued elders as well as youngsters in the town. They shortened it to ‘GanSu’.

From guilt and shame, Mohanaswamy lost confidence in whatever he did. He wondered whether he would ever be able to vault over the canal again. One day, just to reassure himself, he walked alone towards the canal and attempted to jump over it. But he fell into the filthy water. He went home and scrubbed his body with soap over and over again and poured buckets of water over himself. But the stench lingered on for over a week.

Vasudhendhra is the author of 13 Kannada novels

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