Tags:
Gay,
África,
Literary Fiction,
Lesbian,
Lgbt,
India,
Los Angeles,
Bollywood,
Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla,
Kenya,
South Asia,
Lata Mangeshkar,
American Book Awards,
The Two Krishnas,
Desi,
diaspora,
West Hollywood
this pain was so familiar. It would not disappoint. It was the only constant, in bed with him and once he was gone. I knew that when this was all over, it would be waiting for me like an unshakable friend, grimacing at my futile attempts to momentarily alienate it. But for a few moments, I had decided to embrace the pain because of its perseverance in tracking me down.
No man had tried that hard to find me. And I wondered if any man ever would.
I lay on my stomach, entwined in the soiled and crumpled sheets as he walked back into the room after taking a shower. He hovered awkwardly around my bed – just a mattress thrown over a box spring. I could sense that he was nervous and didn’t quite know what to do or say because I was making no effort to turn around. I just lay there. Not looking at him. And more importantly, not letting him see me.
He mumbled something about having to drive back to Anaheim and thanked me for everything. I was curt to the point of being cruel. Adrian said something about it being a long drive. He offered his number.
“Adrian, can you just take care of it?” I slurred.
They left the room and I started to feel relieved. I knew that I had been insensitive and had probably made him feel like trash. But what was I supposed to have done? We had met in some dark corner at a sex club where he could barely have made out
what
I was. I might have even seemed Latino to him at some point. But now, with daylight intruding through the blinds, and him showered and satiated, he might have seen me for the South Asian I was. And that would have been embarrassing, wouldn’t it?
All those images of 7-Eleven salesmen and heavily accented, singsong dialects would have come flooding into his mind and maybe he would have cringed. He’d realize his exotic passion flower was just the basis for a
Simpsons
character. Seen my typical South Asian features and realize that I looked nothing like him. Large, dark eyes. That long bumpy nose, thanks to a deviated septum. Skin, dark not from tanning on the beach, but from birth. And then what if he had felt cheated? Defiled?
And what about my body? How, in this culture of gym-bodies would he have felt about having had sex with someone whose body didn’t look like he spent at least two hours daily in a gym. The thought that he probably didn’t care about all this or that he already had a pretty good idea about it after fucking me all night hadn’t even entered my mind. It was the visual that worried me.
Swathed in my sheets, now that neither the night nor his lust could have obscured me, I found solace in being ironically passionless and cold to him. Turning into a typical, cold queen just to keep him – after all this – from rejecting me first.
Was this not the curse of every South Asian whose standards of beauty were in conflict with his own appearance?
No, no, he couldn’t see all this. I couldn’t have let him see that I was Indian.
CHAPTER 4
THE LADDER
I can’t seem to remember exactly when it all started. This shame. All I know is that it must have happened a long time ago. Long before I knew what was happening or had any control over it. Perhaps it’s the result of being born in the shadows of colonialism.
Imagine growing up in a country where being white automatically meant that you were entitled to the privileges that everyone else had to struggle for.
Even the South Asians and the Africans who warred against each other with class and economic prejudices cast everything aside to act as subservient as they could when the
goras
or
dhorias
came into view. There were many of them, the white people, some of them expatriates who had had to unwillingly relinquish the luxuries of colonial, pre-independence Kenya, but had decided to stay on, others who had come back with the hope of educing anything reminiscent of their golden era.
I remember how excited my mother was at the