Chapter 1

Go where you breathe free. Go far away if you have to.

Fear was a seed nurtured every day in the place I come from.
So regularly, that the seed branched out as a tree, bearing rotten fruits of pseudo-lives.

Pseudo-lives, everywhere. Pretense after pretense, day after day. Men like me woke up and indulged in role-play. It would have been an interesting turn of events if it was with each other, if it was what you’re thinking, but we were just puppets with strings controlled by public facades.

Why am I telling you this? Because bodies have come and gone, I’m restless, and this mortuary makes me want to reflect the watershed moments of my life. So allow me to vent, I’m dead. Have some respect.
 
My life was ordinary.
The writer in me wants to weave together a dramatic narrative that I will delusionally think was unique to display the life I’ve lived as a stand-alone event.

1. The boy had a gay awakening.
2. The boy lived in denial
3. The boy was thrown out.
4. The boy then rose to break shackles.
5. The boy had a taste of liberation.

Classic storyline.
But sadly, the only truly remarkable story from where I come from would have been about families who embraced their children’s sexuality and loved them unconditionally.

Rest of us, po-tay-to po-tah-to.
The same story repeats itself like a broken tape recorder – “We can cure you”, “Don’t utter a word about this to anyone, get married it’ll all fall in place”, “It’s just a phase”, “Just get out of my house”. Then, the trump card – “We brought you into this world, we’ve done everything for you, why can’t you just do one thing for your family? For us?”

Maybe, I should tell you about my gay awakening. His name was Prithviraj. Watching him shirtless, shaking his hip, could be intense enough to make even a straight man question his sexuality – it was torture; he should be punished for making my body feel things. Watch him here.

If you did go watch him, can we both now agree that he is irresistible?
A man who makes you want to stop and look again is trouble.
His madness hid behind this irresistible quality, and only a sane mind could see through the deceptive appearance.

It was Rukhsa who first introduced me to this song. Rukhsa is my best friend from school. She had the maturity of a 25 year old when she was just 10. Weird. The first day I walked in and sat on the bench right behind her, she offered to help.
No 10 year old ever does that.

Rukhsa was a person who makes you feel like you are wanted.
A beautiful misfit that sheltered other misfits.

When we first kissed in our school corridor, I told her I liked men. She patted my head as though I was a golden retriever, smiled, and walked away.

Years later, in testing times, when my father slapped me and said, “History has never been appreciative of your existence”, she casually came home and gave me a book.

An empty book to pen thoughts that could not be contained within me. The cover had an illustration of a young man wearing a green shirt, free-spirited, almost camouflaged in the backdrop of a garden and below it the lines – “Go where you breathe free. Go far away if you have to.”That night I opened the first page, and wrote my first words as a gay man who was out.

I am going nowhere.
History should be rewritten.
Why should our desires be just dreams?

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