No one shade of love

No one shade of love

The jacket of So Now you Know is nostalgia-inducing. There are images of decked up Sridevi la Chandni, an unspooled audio cassette, caps of soft drink bottles, video cassette, canvas shoes, CD, a pair of specs and a stack of books. One of the books is J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. 

Only our idea of nostalgia doesn’t really match with Vivek Tejuja’s. On the surface level, that is. He talks about being bullied in school, finding company in books, he flowers a bit in college and then....it’s the struggle between love or lust. Only his love is for men.

There are many references to heteronormative love, but as we read page after page of this slim memoir, we realise that this chase, quest — call what you will — for love is universal. There is hesitancy, rejection, moments of piquancy, moments of hostility, moments of numbness, longing, breakdown.

Tejuja goes through all this from the age of eight, when he realises that he is not like others. But who is he? The kids in school, especially Deepak, whom Tejuja likes a lot, taunt him as ‘faggot’ and fling comments like ‘You are gay, na?’ 

It was a trying time because Tejuja admits that since childhood he wanted to be someone else, not himself. He had feelings for boys and hence refused to play the ‘sankali’ game that was so popular amongst kids living and playing together in a building or housing society in the ’90s Bombay. “I was scared that if I played this game and held the hand of someone I liked, I would be done for...”, he writes. And, so he withdraws into a shell with books and the sea for company.

Living in the ’90s, Tejuja’s process of discovering himself is through pop-culture. He writes in detail about films like Sadak and the character of Maharani, his dancing with a veil to a song of Razia Sultana that acts as an eye-opener about his orientation, TV series like Tara which had an gay character called Petha, Kareema in Dekh Bhai Dekh and Pinku in Mast Kalandar. 

Tejuja wonders about the portrayal of gay on screen, who wore floral shirts or were too affected in their mannerism and speech. He didn’t want to be a Pinku. Tejuja is guided into becoming himself with friends like Zubin in college with whom he hangs out at Voodoo, a bar-disco, which was considered to be a safe-haven for gay crowd. He writes about coming out to family and being taken to a psychiatrist to be “cured of homosexuality”. The author wishes that he was instead taken to an LGBT counsellor. 

Despite all the undercurrents of pathos, So Now you Know, signs off with hope. Tejuja hopes of finding true love on chat rooms; he goes about leap frogging all those men who didn’t transform into a Charming Prince after that kiss in the car, in the bar, on overnight trips and secret getaways. 

So Now you Know... offers an insight into the gay world which is no less judgemental than the heteronormative world. It also pokes holes into your theory of ‘being liberal’. For starters, introduce your gay friend as simply friend. And, open up yourself to the idea of romance between man and man, woman and woman and man and woman. There is no one shade of love or lust. That’s what we need to comprehend one year after Section 377 was scrapped.

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