Whistling In The Dark is a new book assembling a series of interviews with Indian gay people outside the big cities, whose lives are not just illegal (albeit with a law that’s almost never enforced) but almost entirely invisible.
At the launch at the Oxford bookstore, we meet a middle-aged, working-class man talking freely of his secret double-life, completely unknown to his wife and kids. Ok, so people still live like that in the UK too, forty years after legalisation.
But what doesn’t happen in the UK is those men appearing at Time Out-listed book events in the nearest big city to their home. It’s a sign of how massively stratified this society is: the chances of news of his appearance filtering back home are basically nil. The world of book launches and the world of ordinary life in small-town India are, well, worlds apart.
The gaping chasm between the lives of India’s classes is in most ways a vile phenomenon; but perhaps one of the benefits of gaping chasms is that you can shine a little light in.
No milk today
I pop into a big shop to buy a little milk. But they don't have the one that I know is ok. This is a tragedy worse than anything devised by Sophocles. So I spend ten minutes comparing the small print on eighteen different cartons of milk looking for the sacred text: "No Boiling Required".
Eventually, I track one down, to the sound of a choir of angels singing in my head. Joy unconfined. It's amazing that when you know next to sod all about how to live in a country, and you know full well that you know next to sod all, the shrapnels you do know take on an importance of epic proportions.
No comments:
Post a Comment