A few hours after the Supreme Court of India said it was criminal for consenting gay adults to have sex, sometimes even for heterosexuals to indulge in certain, non-missionary kinds of bedroom activity, Avinash R sent me a text message that was two words-long but articulated all of his incredulity and exasperation. “True? Seriously!”

Avinash had left his Borivali East flat in Mumbai at 9 am that day, December 11, to reach Lower Parel for a meeting with a group of local businessmen who seemed interested in a project his NGO had in mind for homeless kids living along the Western Line railway tracks. The confabulations, with a break in between for lunch, had stretched till well past evening. So when the story on Article 377 broke, across TV channels, social media and news agencies, Avinash, his phone on silent mode, had been busy convincing the benefactors how their help would go a long way in providing food, basic education and shelter for the orphans, many of them already ravaged by drugs and venereal diseases.

Avinash, about 38 now, was nine when his father, who had taken voluntary retirement from the Army to teach in one of the many English schools in Darjeeling, saw him patiently helping his cousin Priscilla get ready for Sunday Mass. That night, as Avi’s father prepared to go to bed, he told his wife, “That boy of yours isn’t turning out right. I don’t think he’ll ever join the armed forces like I did. Or take inspiration from the bravery his uncles and grandfather showed in the battles their Gurkha regiments fought. He will see the end of that tradition.”

Avis’s mother had then mumbled feebly and said it was a little kid’s passing fancy. “He is not like the other boys, I know, but he will be fine. I will ask Priscilla’s brother to take him for the football games they play at the school ground.” The boys, forever on the lookout for new recruits, promptly allowed him into their club. At 4 pm, after Avi had been given the evening tea with four glucose biscuits, the other kids would holler, “Avi, aaija. Come quick.” He would pick up his canvas shoes and trudge along, always volunteering to be the goalkeeper. It allowed him to escape the rough tackles and spend time by himself beneath the goalpost.

That went on for a couple of years. In fact, Avi got so good at it that he became the team’s official goalkeeper. They would play football on weekends with boys from the other neighbourhoods, collecting Rs 2 from each player in the team for a bet of Rs 22. The winners took home Rs 44, splurging on dokaan ko chiya (special tea sold in sweetmeat shops), singara and piro aloo (spicy potatoes cooked with arbol chili powder).



The next few years passed by in a blur. His younger sister Shristi was born, studies at school turned hectic and it became non-negotiable for the boys to miss the football sessions. The bets were getting larger by the year and they had begun to play for Rs 110 per team. That meant the after-win parties were now a sumptuous affair, consisting of steaming plates of momo, thukpa, shyafale and fried meat. Some of the bigger kids in the team would slyly order tongba, the fermented millet-based alcoholic drink that comes in a bamboo container and has to be sipped hot or warm using a wooden straw. The headiness that followed would render them useless for the rest of the evening.



After classes finished in the afternoon, Avi would rush home and wait for his maths tutor at 3 pm for private lessons that would go on till 4. That one hour was the worst of the day. He hated Mr Pradhan, whose dirty-brown moustache dipped in the tea cup whenever he drank from it. Sometimes when Avi was unable to get to the root of a tricky equation, Mr Pradhan would place a pencil between Avi’s index and middle finger and press the two hard against each other, making him wince in pain.

The free time that he got, Avi spent with Shristi, watching her eat, burp, throw up, eat again. When she began to make sounds that resembled words, Avi thought the first name that she would call out would be his. But like everyone else, she said Ama.

Avinash doesn’t remember clearly now, but he thinks it was the day after their ICSE results came out that changed his life forever. He was 15, fair even by pahari standards, his straight black hair crowding his forehead in a messy fringe. No one who visited their house ever failed to compliment him on his delicate good looks, especially his complexion. Some of them would wink and tell his father, “Avi would have been such a pretty daughter, daju.” His father ignored these remarks, an unspoken fear growing in his heart.

That year, everyone barring Pasang in Avi’s group had passed the 10th boards. But because Pasang’s parents were away in Gangtok to attend a relative’s wedding, it was decided that the celebrations would be held at his place. Pasang didn’t mind much either. “Who cares about my results,” he said. Waving his right hand up and down in a quick chopping gesture, he exclaimed with dramatic flourish, “I’ll be a butcher like my father.”

There were 14 of them that night and they had pooled in money to buy wafers, two small cakes, packets of bhuja and a few bars of Dairy Milk. They had also packed enough plates of chowmein for dinner. Talking about that incident, Avinash would later tell me, “No one knows who, but somebody had sneaked in two bottles of Sikkim XXX rum. I think that did it.”

As the rest of the raucous band went off to bed, tired from all that head-banging and air-guitaring to Thin Lizzy and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the alcohol acting as a catalyst, Avi caught himself looking more than once at Dinesh, the captain of the school football team. Avi had known Dinesh for a while now. Many years ago when Avi had gone with Priscilla’s brother Norbert for the first ever football game of his life at the small ground next to the gumba, Dinesh was there trying to bounce the ball off the goal post’s side bar. He had soon noticed how all the kids went to Dinesh with their problems, with their squabbles, asking him to solve, mediate, intervene, lead. Avi had liked Dinesh instantly. Years later, when they were 13 and had gone to Mirik for an excursion from school, Dinesh had held Avi’s hand as they trekked up from the Samendu lake to eat at Tshering Bhutia’s restaurant.



The memories had come crashing back into Avi’s head. Overwhelmed, he emptied the remaining bit of his share of Sikkim XXX into Paljor’s glass and slid into Dinesh’s sleeping bag.



About a week after that ICSE party, four boys from the neighbourhood, all senior by a few years to Avi, invited him for a get-together at Lhendup’s bungalow. Avi had never interacted much with Lhendup, who had dropped out of school in his 9th and instead helped his father in their flourishing auto repair business. But he knew Lhendup to be Dinesh’s friend. He agreed when one of the four boys smiled and said, “Dinesh has said he will come too.”



When Avi reached Lhendup’s house at about 7 pm, there were six boys there. But there was no trace of Dinesh even at 9. By this time the group had finished the first bottle of Honey Bee brandy and polished off nearly half of the second. Binay, who Avi had been introduced to that evening, was rolling a joint of hash. “So, is Dinesh coming?” Avi asked Lhendup, getting a little impatient. “If he’s not, I think I will leave.”



Avi still remembers Binay’s voice as he poked his head from an inside room and said, “No, you won’t. We called you here for a reason.” It was as if everyone was waiting for the cue. Suddenly someone ran to the main door and latched it shut. The next thing Avi remembers is two of the boys pinning him to the ground and Binay slowly staggering towards him. “You sissy,” Binay spat. “Dinesh told us everything.”



For a month after that incident, Avi didn’t step out of his house, often barely leaving his room. Every night he would wait for Shristi, his father and mother to go off to bed. After he was sure they were asleep, he would switch off the lights in his room and quietly cry for hours.



That didn’t stop the boys, some of them total strangers, from coming right up to his house and asking his mother, “Aunty, where is Avi these days? We thought maybe he could come for a picnic with us?” Some would say it was a birthday or a cousin’s wedding. She wondered why he didn’t go for the football anymore, why he refused to meet even Norbert and Pasang, his best friends, and why he simply stopped talking about Dinesh, his favourite person in the world.

One day at breakfast, Avi announced to his parents that he had decided to go to Kolkata for his senior secondary, and that he would stay with uncle Kisan and his wife Ketaki at their New Alipore house. Avi hadn’t done too badly in his ICSE, managing a decent 82%. It was possible to get a seat in a good school in Kolkata. Moreover, Kisan uncle, who was in the police, could use some departmental influence to help him out.

Avinash didn’t like Kolkata very much and soon moved to Delhi for his BA, graduating from one of the best colleges in the city with honours in English. Unwilling to study any further, Avi first tried his hand at PR, hated it, and quickly shifted to the publishing industry. A year into that, he changed course to work with an NGO in the field of animal rights. He got so fanatical about it that for a year in 2001, he lived with four dogs and an equal number of cats in his Patparganj flat. It went on until his landlord threw out both Avi and the strays.

It was the next year, October of 2002, when stopping by JNU to meet a friend of mine who was doing his Ph.D in Social Medicine that I had my first meeting with Avi. They were nursing their third large peg of Old Monk when I landed at my friend’s room in Jhelum hostel with another bottle of rum. After the introductions were made and we settled down to talk about the Gujarat riots, Avi turned to me and asked, “But you guys never write about the persecution of gays in this country. About their tragedy. We are a minority, too. I guess it is convenient for the media not to talk about us.”

He continued to speak in a voice that was soft but seemed to come from somewhere deep in his gut. “Will you write if I tell you that just last week when a bunch of men from the apartment I live in threatened to beat me up for being a homosexual, the officer in the thana instead of noting my complaint demanded oral sex from me? Blackmail is routine. It is rampant. Like the sword over the king’s head, it never goes away. We have to pay, one way or the other, to hide from the world our truth. From our colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, parents, landlords, policemen, teachers, courts and everyone else the fact that we are gay. It comes with a cost.”

With my friend peering into his glass as if to find something sensible to say, and me, a guilt-wracked representative of the bullying half, shielding myself with silence, the only weapon at my disposal, Avi went on, “Do you know, it’s a myth that straight men have sex only with women? They rape gays all the time. And for some reason that doesn’t make them homosexuals. It merely makes them macho. They take advantage of the fact that our sexual orientation immediately makes us vulnerable. We must be the only minority that feels safe absolutely nowhere in this country, unlike some who can still take refuge in their ghettos.”

Avi was leaving for Mumbai the next day. There was an interview with an NGO lined up and he was sure he would crack it. His monologue finally wore him out and at about 1 am, much to the relief of the two of us, he suddenly changed the subject and said, “It’s a group that works with children. I love kids. I think they will see that. If I get the job and I like the city, I will pack up from here for good.”

He has been in Mumbai ever since and we have remained in touch, mostly through texts and emails.

Three years after he shifted to Mumbai, taking up a two-bedroom flat in Borivali, he texted me one Sunday of September 2005. “Dude? Free? Can I call?” I was in Kolkata and had just got my parents to join me for a month at my rented Jodhpur Park house. Remembering his verbal assault in that fungal JNU room, made worse by the smell of stale mess food, I dithered for a moment. Then, thinking Avi might have something important to tell, I acquiesced.

The weekend before that, as Avi and Mithilesh, the guy he had started sharing the apartment with, were watching a video at home and wondering whether to call for beer or whisky, there was a knock on the door. Two men, both in their mid-20s, were standing outside. They had come to collect the Rs 250 that the local cable company charged from its customers. Mithilesh went to them with the money and to make polite conversation said casually that he hadn’t seen them before. “Where is Arvind bhai?” he asked. “You guys new here?” The one who took the money and jotted down something in a fraying notebook said this was their first month and that they had taken up Arvind’s job.

The other chap, quiet till now, began to smile. It was obvious he wanted to talk. Thinking it would be rude to ignore him, Mithilesh extended his hand and said hello. Introducing himself as Chandan, the man began without any preamble, “We’ve heard storied about you two. Some day we’ll have a few drinks and chat. I will get some of those videos and we can have fun.” Mithilesh pretended he didn’t understand anything of what Chandan was saying and turned around to shut the door. He was shivering with rage and humiliation.

“We moved out of that apartment after a couple of weeks,” Avi said on the phone. “Puritan Mumbai is as bad as the rest of Puritan India. And everywhere we are the outcastes. Treated like whores and freaks. Or both. You asked me if I will ever come out. I will, perhaps. I can. I am ready for it. For the risks that will accompany the decision. But is our society ready for me? Will I get a flat if I tell them I don’t have a wife because I am gay? Will I be able to say Mithilesh is not really a cousin? Can I ask Shristi to stop lying about me to her boyfriend? What will Baba and Ama say when I tell them that they should stop expecting me to be ‘cured’ and that no magic potion, whichever dhami and jhaankri they go to, will make me have kids of my own? That this is how I am and it doesn’t make me a lesser son or a brother?”

Avi was silent for a while. “That night in JNU, you must have thought I was ranting, and must have wished you hadn’t met me in your friend’s room. But I wanted to convince you about my story. About what we go through. Just in case you decide to put together some of the things I have told you and keep telling you.”A day after the Supreme Court held that Section 377 of the IPC does not suffer from the vice of unconstitutionality, unwittingly exposing homosexuals to blackmail or the risk of spending a lifetime in jail for the offence – the verdict also confused and terrorized them as some had actually begun to live together after the Delhi high court decriminalized same-sex relationships four years ago – Avi sent me another short text. “Will you write my story now?”

(Some names have been changed for this article to protect their identity. And despite Avinash’s insistence, I have decided not to use his last name.)