Top Quotes: “11 Ways to Love: Essays”
Essay 1
“Before you, there was the Internet. It taught me love. It told me that it was easy to shed this body, this history, this shame. So I chose for myself a new body and a new name with an upper-caste surname. Hiding was my first lesson in queerness because caste wouldn’t let me be queer.
A friend had described queerness as something you couldn’t put a lid on; it would leak through the crevices of your Orkut testimonials or Facebook pokes.
My fake profile was my best shield. I talked to and met many men who were convinced they were meeting someone of their own caste; my language and spellings setting me apart from my friends and brethren who would often be made into caricatures because they wanted to ‘make frnship.’ I would sometimes join these jokes in college, if only for fear of being found out.
That fear, I didn’t tell you, never leaves the body. You can have the poshest profile with the right markers, the correct surname and the proper amount of signalling but it’s like a cult: you do one thing wrong and you’re found out. Your punishment: public interrogation.
Practising queerness needed you to have an unblemished body and a blot-free history. I lacked both, so I made up stories about my mother and my family. I invented a family Durga Puja and important-sounding engagements that kept my parents away from me — not the visceral ugliness of abuse and divorce.”
“I had forgotten you were a man, that you were used to setting the terms of the relationship.
My second mistake was assuming that we could be equals. I could clasp your hands and make rings around the ridiculous pillars that help up Connaught Place, our webbed fingers weaving romance in my heart, but I was never confident that I could let your hand go.
The effort to fit you into my dream of a boyfriend ruined me. It drained me of dignity, turned me into this jealous creature who grudged you your relationships with other people. I grudged your relationship with her. I hated that you would travel to drop her home every day and then come to me. I hated that you would lie to me about her. I grudged it so much that even Maa knew something was up.
I am sorry. I was a scared little boy who wasn’t used to being loved.
I waited for you every day when we went out for dinner, and you’d disappear for hours because she called, because she was unhappy or feeling off. You’d come back and tell me how you had to take the call. I couldn’t be happy at how happy you were at having her happy. Our food, our romance, was cold.
I waited for you every night when you left my side to take her calls, to put her to sleep, to read to her, to lie to her that you weren’t at mine, and then tell me in the morning that yours was an innocent relationship.
I am sorry I didn’t believe you.
When you told me that windswept evening that you were seeing her, I tried very hard not to compete. I walked with you and watched you smile and tried to pretend that nothing had changed. I dropped you home, promised to see you soon, asked about her, and left.
I’m sorry I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry that you saw me at my ugliest, clawing to retain what I thought was love, but what was in reality only a shell, something that resembled a relationship.
I am not blaming you. It was my fault. I was trying to impose some imaginary template on our relationship where claim and assurance were cornerstones. Here I was, a fat pussy who couldn’t even claim his own gender, trying to claim you.
You know, I think it was the skirts that set me free. I had picked up the first one on the sly, at a flea market when neither you nor your friends were looking and stuffed it in the darkest corner of my almirah. Every morning, I’d dream of wearing it somewhere but always backed down — I didn’t have enough fight. How long can you bear being singled out?
The first day I wore that red flower-patterned wrap-around to a film festival, I remember you didn’t approve. You didn’t say anything, but you didn’t show up. I stood in the middle of the foyer, an increasingly desolate showpiece, as people milled by with excited whispers. I heard a couple of ‘oh so courageous’ but the panic of having to return home by myself was mounting; in the auto, in the dark alleys that lined my home, fabulous wouldn’t save me. Queerness wasn’t enough for survival.
The night you left, I retrieved my dignity. I decided not to live on scraps and feel happy that I too had a slice of your life. Your smile needed to be enough for me; if not, the memory would have to be enough. Unlike the perennially dying city that brought us together, our relationship needed to die.
When you called me a few weeks later, I was on my way to the airport. I remember you were surprised when I picked up and spoke normally; you asked me if I didn’t love you anymore. I laughed. I did still, I think, but I didn’t care about you.
You taught me that queerness was about far more than love. That my best friend who went berserk trying to stop me from self-destructing deserved far more love than you ever did. That circles upon circles of people who’d closed ranks around me and saved me from you had earned that love.
You came back but by then I’d been saved. Queerness had rescued me. I had friends, I had my chosen family.
I didn’t exile myself to chat rooms any more. I said yes to people who wanted to meet me and sleep with me. I met people in bathrooms, in buses, at home, at railway stations. I became friends with some of them. My life was not you any more, it was queerness. So I held hands in public and traveled to other cities and admitted publicly that I didn’t know this latest music piece or that latest book.
I threw on my best skirts sometimes when I thought I had enough fight in me. When I didn’t, I took a cab. My caste and gender had come together in this beautiful flux that denied supremacy to romance. The skirt-wearing non-boy was finally over. The misery of romance had been dispelled.
In relief and love,”
Essay 2
“We stuck to neighborhoods we knew, nightclubs and restaurants that welcomed a predominantly African clientele during the week, and Bryan’s friends’ homes. On the street with my new Kenyan and Nigerian friends, I watched other people watch them with uncertainty, and sometimes, unmasked disgust. As a student, I rarely took autos; I usually traveled by bus. But when I was with Bryan, taking the bus together didn’t seem like a feasible option — being boxed in with so many prying eyes was too much for the both of us. An auto afforded us some privacy, but only when we could get one. Drivers wouldn’t slow down for us and when they did, they’d refuse — they were never going in our direction. It would be a long wait till we found one and headed to Vasant Vihar in south Delhi, where Bryan and his friends stayed. It was far from DU’s south campus too, and they lived in dingy, poorly ventilated flats, where the entrance to the building was almost always at the back. We usually went to his friend’s house. I never once saw where Bryan lived — he told me he was sure to be evicted if we brought an Indian girl home.
Only two friends from college knew that I was dating him. The mutual friend who dropped us home was somebody we’d both recently met, and was the only other Indian in the group. I didn’t speak of Bryan to anybody else because I’d met him a day after I had ended a 3-year relationship. Bryan was my rebound, and he knew it. There’s nothing I can do about that. ‘I’ve been in India for 5 years, and I only just met you when I’m leaving. I’ll take what I can get,’ he’d said, a few days after we first met. I liked that about him — he was practical but not unfeeling, chilled out but would show concern when necessary, and funny without calling attention to himself.”
“As a fat girl, I’d been apologetic about my size when I was in bed with anyone, and would twist and contort my body so that nobody could ever really get to see all of me all at once. ‘We like your body,’ Bryan would say, as though he were speaking for all of Nairobi, Kenya, Africa. For the first time in my life, I felt weightless, confident, eager to seek pleasure for myself, and not be ashamed or embarrassed to ask for it. I’d do my best to represent India, and be flexible, sexy, and just all-out great — because Tracy had asked him how I was in my bed, and I felt like I must not let my country down.”
Essay 3
“Even though people, including those who love me sincerely, have made me feel left out because of my size, I have also been lucky to have friends who always had my back, sometimes literally. Once, in Class VIII, we were playing trust falls, and I was partnered with a friend, a girl about 2/3 my size. She fell on me and I caught her albeit with some effort. Then it was my turn. To anyone else, it would have been obvious that she’d never be able to catch me, but she insisted on trying. We both fell down, but I didn’t mind. I guess the purpose of the trust fall had been served. She had shown me that I could trust her to have my back. She still adamantly refuses to acknowledge that I’m fat. I know that a lot of writing about the body positivity movement these days is centered on the idea that there’s nothing wrong with being fat, and htat’s aboslutely true, there isn’t. But to the 13-year-old me, who always felt out of place and out of sync, just the fact that someone was willing to stand by me and proclaim loudly that I was not fat made me feel better. It is only in the last year two that I’ve become comfortable, so to say, with the idea of being fat.”
“Having been a bystander to relationships around me, I’d be lying if I pretended it did (and still does) not make me happy to have found love as a fat person. I would also be lying if I didn’t admit that there's a special pleasure in having found it when others who have every ‘advantage’ of beauty haven’t. I know that doesn’t paint me in the best light, but it would be false to say that I never resented my skinny friend when she talked about how ‘she needs to lose weight’ or when my beautiful friend cries when ‘she never looks good in photos.’ I know what you’re thinking: just because I think she’s beautiful or skinny doesn’t mean that she does not have her insecurities to deal with. And most of the time, I know that’s true.
Most of the time, I can look my friend in the eye and tell her that I think she’s perfect. But I do add that if she wants to lose some weight it would be a good idea to take up some form of exercise. Most of the time, my friend’s complaints about not looking good in photos only motivate me to take better pictures of her. But not always. Sometimes when I have just come back from 5 hours of shopping where I found perhaps 2 things that fit me and none that look good, when I have just endured another talk about my ‘health’ with a concerned relative, I want to look at that beautiful friend or that skinny friend and scream. It’s in those moments of weakness, in those moments of self-hate, that I find myself relishing what I have and what they don’t. I have the love of someone who sees me for exactly who I am and loves me for all of me, flaws, flab, and all. I have someone who never puts conditions on his love for me, never expects me to be different, better than who I am, but still manages to inspire and encourage me to be better.”
“Early in my college life, I had a friend who only got naked under dim lights or in the dark and would put on clothes almost immediately after sex. This anecdote has always stayed with me, especially once I started dating, probably for the reason that despite having an objectively (so to speak) less attractive body, I’ve never tried to dim the lights. Mostly due to the convenience of having an empty house during the day, my partner and I had sex almost exclusively in the daylight. I felt quite proud of myself. Despite having struggled with my body for pretty much my entire life (I believe I was skinny till about the age of 4), I never tried to hide myself from my partner. It was especially complicated because I always found him perfectly attractive, and I was fairly vocal about it. He would always ask me: if he was expected to believe me when I told him he was sexy, why would I consistently refuse to believe him?
The reason was simple, one that was drilled into me a long time ago: boys did not like girls like me. Unlearning that idea is what took so much time, and I still can’t say with certainty that it’s vanished from my mind. This is why the credit for me coming to terms with my body mostly goes to him — he was always vocal about his desire and insisted that I be vocal about mine. It took me a long time to get there, but I did. In the early months of our relationship, I would always be on the defensive, looking for hitches, waiting for that dreaded comment about my weight or how it would be good for me to lose some weight. Many time we’ve fought over the issue, and most of the times the fight has not been because he denigrated me for my weight, but rather because I was expecting him to. He once asked me how I could trust him so little that I assumed the worst of him, but looking back we both know that trust is not an easy commodity for me when I’ve always felt like I had to defend myself against slights and comments against my body.”
“It’s taken me a long time come to terms with the fact that if I’d been thin, I would be a different person altogether. I genuinely believe that my personality has been shaped by my fatness. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been mocked about my weight and that has allowed me to see how mean people can be. But, at the same time, it’s made me even more aware and more conscious of the power of hurtful words. If I’d sailed through life as a thin person, I would never have known how much words can hurt; how much power I have to make someone feel good or terrible about themselves with a casual remark. I would never have wanted to stand up for those people who are mocked and belittled; I would never have realized that there’s so much more to a person than their appearance. I’m exaggerating to some extent, my point is not in the least that all thin people are shallow or superficial, but I believe that the way we look shapes our interactions with society, and the way we interact with the external world shapes our internal self.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t expect that anyone would fall in love with me. Everything is not perfect all of a sudden; being in love has not miraculously resolved my self-esteem issues or rid me of my body fat. I still infuriate my partner and myself by sometimes stubbornly refusing to believe that he could want this body — this body that has only been the target of shame. But being in love has made me free to be imperfect, if anything. My partner knows that sometimes I’ll be stubborn and irrational because of years of hating my body. I told him how much I weigh a long time after we started dating.”
“I asked if he loves me only because I’m trying to lose weight. Though it may seem shocking, the simple fact is: he loves me and supports me no matter what I look like or what I’m doing. I’m about 5 feet tall and he’s practically 6 feet tall, and we weigh about the same. I look like a human version of Sadness from Inside Out (no exaggeration), and he looks like a human. My point is: we look different. At times, I’m asked if only fat people can date fat people, or whether skinny people can date fat people without fetishizing them. My answer to these questions is: how the fuck should I know? All I know is that there’s this lovely human being, who is (to my biased eyes) the best-looking person to have ever existed, who fits into several of those ‘my perfect man’ criteria that I had formulated at age 13 (tall, broad-shouldered, with dimple); who has the ability to turn my weight, something I have not told another living soul in the last 12 years, into just one single aspect of my person, among many others. I’m lucky that he loves me and I love him.”
“Falling in love with someone hastens the process of falling in love with yourself. You look at the person you love and it hurts you to think that they think those awful things about themselves that you think about yourself. That is when you realize that it would probably hurt them to know what awful things you think about yourself. The tricky step is the next step — the step where you perhaps realize that you’re worth loving because someone else loves you.
This is the intellectually uncomfortable step. No one should ever have to rely on anyone else for a sense of completeness, for a sense of comfort in their body. Is it un-feminist of me, I ask myself, that I love myself better now that someone else loves me as well? I don’t think it is un-feminist, but I don’t think it is ideal. It would be ideal to never doubt my worth or my loveableness because of my body. It would be ideal if society hadn’t convinced me for as long as I can remember that I’m a lesser person than anyone else, that I am unworthy. It would be ideal if we were taught to love ourselves unconditionally by our parents, teachers, siblings, and friends.
I didn’t have that ideal situation: I fell in love with him, and in the process I learnt how to love myself. Loving him doesn’t mean I’m blind to his faults or I never get angry with him; loving myself is a similar experience. I still have bad days, when I feel like all the terrible things I feel about myself are real, but I also have wonderful days when I feel loved and lovely, neither despite nor because of my fatness.
Falling in love as a fat girl has given me what was promised through diet and exercise: the ability to be more than just a fat girl.”
Essay 4
“The richest 1% of India owned 53% of its wealth, up from 36% in 2000.”
“The waiter, who knew me from my previous visits, decided to speak on my behalf: ‘Sir, madam really likes Mexican.’ Perplexed, I tried to protest. The waiter continued, ‘Sir, I’m confident of this because the day before yesterday madam came here with another sir and ordered everything Mexican.’ My face turned red and Rahul sat there, puzzled. In a small voice of indignation, I told Rahul that I’d come to the restaurant with my cousin, and we both began to laugh. It was then that I learnt how much of my privacy is infringed upon because of my disability, with apparently good intentions.”
“Yes, I was incredible; yes, I was inspirational; but — and it was a big but — I was disabled, and for him, like for many others, the truth began and ended there. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t love me. It was that my disability meant that I wasn’t even on his radar as a single woman. I wasn’t even considered before I was rejected.
One day he told me over text that he was marrying someone else. He explicitly repeated that he didn’t like me that way.”
“People with disabilities are all too often thought about as asexual beings, who have no need for love, sex, or romantic relationships. As I grew into my 20s, the absurd anecdotes of me trying to bump into my crushes in college hallways developed into a more serious recognition that because I was blind I was very rarely seen as a sexual being. I remember a male friend from a very conservative, traditional family who was forbidden to invite any of his women friends home. One day he told me on the phone that his mother had cooked a delicious vegetarian fish, and in response, I joked that I would love to come over and try it. He replied, ‘Yes, sure. You are always welcome.’ I was shocked. Then I realized what had happened. I, a woman with a disability, would never been seen as a prospect by his family, so I didn’t, in his family’s mind (or in his, for that matter), count as a ‘woman.’”
“I set up a profile on Shaddi.com. A non-disabled friend and I would often browse through the site together, looking for prospective grooms. But I quickly learnt that if I — a woman with a disability — expressed interest in a non-disabled man, it was not received well, and was sometimes even seen as offensive. However, in the 6 months that I had my profile up, I received about a dozen calls expressing interest in me. Now on the surface, this shouldn’t be surprising. I had a smacking profile: I have 3 degrees, a ‘good’ family background, and a ton of interesting hobbies and talents. But what all the interested callers had failed to notice was my disability. Oh, and in case you were wondering, there was a paragraph dedicated to my impairment on my profile.”
“When it comes to disabled people getting into relationships, the argument that ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ is often used. In a country like India, where all women are devalued in comparison to their male counterparts, women with disabilities are on the lowest rung of the marriage market. While it’s not uncommon for disabled men to find non-disabled wives, disabled women are told that they should feel lucky if they get anyone at all, to say nothing of the fact that they also have to find ways, monetary or otherwise, to compensate for their impairments. Through my various exploits on Shaadi.com, one thought was always crystal clear to me: I’m no beggar, and even though I’m disabled, I’m not going to marry just anyone.
Armed with a postgrad degree in mass media, moving from journalism to activism, I started working on the sexual rights of girls and women with disabilities.”
“On campus, I didn’t have the option of casually bumping into acquaintances and striking up conversations. It was hard to remember and place so many voices in the initial days. So, I would often exchange numbers with people the first time I met them.
Once, I was at a campus networking event and I met a man at the end of the evening in a cloakroom. He helped me get my coat. We chatted for a bit, and as we were getting ready to leave, he said, ‘See you around.’ And the question in my mind was: How would I see him again? Without thinking it through, I asked, ‘But how will I see you?’ After a little laughter on both sides, we exchanged numbers.
All the while, a friend of mine had been observing us from the sidelines, and as I went back to her, she gave me a knowing laugh. I said, ‘What? I was just networking.’
She replied, ‘Hey Hidhi, that’s not called networking. That’s called flirting!’
That was when I realized that my simple method of keeping in touch could, in the non-disabled world, be a way of hitting on someone.”
Essay 5
“I was trying, and miserably failing, to sound like a woman. My voice, which at some point in my past I had intentionally broken to make myself sound bass and deep, was now unmistakably masculine. In college, the other boys in my class had already begun sporting a deep voice, and there I was, still with a smooth chin and a smoother, higher-pitched little voice. For young boys trying to be men, this was easy game, and I got a fair bit of grief from my classmates. I wanted to fit in, to be one of the gang. And so I determined to break my voice. I stressed it out, screaming and shouting every day, constantly straining my vocal cords. It took about 4 weeks for the first cracks to appear, and a few more months before my voice settled down into what it is now — a deep bass, baritone. The kind of voice that could, and did, do radio voiceovers. So why was I trying to sound like a woman?
Because I am one.
And because I’m attracted to women and wanted to get on to LesPark, a lesbian dating app that not only demands that you look feminine, but that you sound feminine too — in sum, that you prove you are indeed all estrogen and no testosterone.
Which meant that I, a trans woman, was an inferior second-class woman in the world of LesPark.”
“Growing up with a distorted understanding of my own identity, I felt a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of shame about my own body. This, together with a conditioning that prevented me from being either a complete rebel or a total conformist, meant that all I could do was experience the life of a teen from a distance. Experience it vicariously, falsely.
I never had anyone coming home to ask me out. I didn’t have girlfriends giggling and whispering in my room, discussing potential dates. I haven’t had, and will never have, a girl trying to sneak a kiss while my parents are downstairs. I grew up with people for whom all these things happened. I have friends from later in life whose future loves and lives are companions to their teen loves and lives.
Not for me.
Whatever a person’s teen experiences of love or sexual awakening was, good or bad, it paved a path for their adult pursuits. All I had were fictions and inefficent facts culled from hastily put-together books.
And so it was that as an adult I didn’t feel capable of acting on my debilitating, deeply felt, crushes.”
“I first heard about Second Life through an archaeology project. UC Berkeley was recreating an ancient site — Catalhoyuk in what’s now Turkey — online. Catalhoyuk was first excavated in 1958. Archaeologists estimated that the city was settled originally about 10k years before the present, and that it must have had a continuous culture and life that lasted for about 2000 years. It was a society with no hierarchies, no differences. Archaeologists don’t know why exactly Catalhoyuk citizens decided to organize society without much difference between gender and class. But what remains, and can be seen in the archaeology, is that men and women, rich and poor, old and young, all lived in the same village, and carried on doing so for 2000 years, in a society that was as close to being truly egalitarian as human beings could ever get.
The Berkeley archaeologists decided to rebuild and recreate the site on Second Life, as a way of allowing more people to see and learn archaeology virtually.”
“LesPark insists that only genuine, ISI-tested, Agmark-branded, made of 100% pure ghee lesbians (and bi women) can use the app. To this end, they came up with gender verification.
It works in 3 stages. First is voice verification. You read out a sequence of numbers from within the app, which is recorded and sent to the moderators for review. If your voice sounds feminine enough, you go to the next stage. Video verification. You shoot and submit a video of yourself. If they’re satisfied, you move to the 3rd and final stage. ID verification. You upload a video of yourself holding an ID card. The name, picture, and gender marker on the ID card should match those on your profile.
No amount of twisting, contorting, forcing pitches and breathing could alter my deep bass voice. Stage 1 fail. Which meant, simply, that LesPark was a fail as far as I was concerned. Anger and resentment bubbled in me. Trans women with deep voices are women too. Trans women can be lesbians too. This was transphobic. This was anti-feminist.
LesPark had to go.
The moment marked a growing up. While I might have hankered after a romance or relationship, I was not going to stand for trans-exclusionary, discriminatory behavior — be it by an app or a person. And so, that Saturday afternoon, I emerged from my room a lot surer about who I was, what I wanted, and what I was not willing to do to get it.”
