Go ahead. Repress human sexuality. You see what happens.

One of the things Westerners notice first upon arriving in India is that there seems to be a whole lot of gay men walking around. Eventually, usually pretty quickly, someone tells them that actually affection between males (in the form of hand holding and lounging over one another like puppy dogs) is a common sign of nonsexual friendship.

I have to admit that I figured this out on my own pretty fast. I saw men being physically affectionate, and thought, "Are those guys gay?" But that thought was quickly followed by, "I'm pretty sure India is a conservative country when it comes to sexuality; that's probably platonic behavior." Other Westerners have a harder time with it. Even white people who are accepting of homosexuality just can't believe that such touching isn't really an expression of repressed sexual desire.

"Some of them have to be gay," my friend Eliza said in Mcleod Gunj. Statistically, she's right; but they're certainly no more gay than a bunch of guys in a football team locker room (and probably way less so.) It's really just the way it is.

This isn't to say that there aren't sexually repressed or sexually deviant people in India. But from what I've seen, people find ways to excercise their identities in completely different ways than in the West.

A prime example is the Hijra, or transgendered, community. Hijras have a recorded history of 4,000 years, and in some parts of India were valued for their 'third-gender" status. Today, though, Hijras are among the worst-off in India, in part because so many come from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Hijras suffer violence in public and private spaces, are commonly completely rejected by their families, and experience police brutality. Often, the only form of employment open to Hijras is as sex workers, and even there they are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy, stripped of the ability to negotiate with their employers for higher wages, or with clients for the use of contraceptives. Human rights groups have started taking notice of the problems facing Hijras, but they seriously need to get on the ball.

I actually don't know too much about transgender issues in India, in terms of the role of Hijras in Indian antiquity; but what I have encountered is the common response to Hijras. First of all; people don't talk about it. I didn't spend all that much time travelling in my first few months in India, and when I did, Vikramshila was paying for me to ride in the AC compartments. The whole time, these folks simply weren't mentioned, despite the fact that they form a immovable part of Indian society.

But having spent a fair amount of time in second class trains in the last couple of weeks (which is making me a little loopy, so be forewarned) I've run into a number of Hijras. A rumor I heard: one of the ways Hijras make money is by showing up at places (public transportation and weddings are favorites) and demanding money. People tend to pay up, since Hijras are considered bad luck. The first time I ran into one of these people, I was totally clueless. A woman in a saree comes walking up on the train and begins yelling and clapping at me. For a moment, I thought she was collecting tickets, but that seemed not to be the case. After she left in a huff, one of the over-friendly guys oogling over Catie said "She is a man." Catie and I were very surprised, and spent the next few minutes trying to figure out if our informant was truthful. It seems that he was.

It fascinates me that a group of people can be so public and yet be so invisible in the public eye.

A similar phenomenon involves homosexulaity. I asked Amrita, one of the friendly liberal Vikramshila ladies, about the status of homosexuality in India. She said that India is a fairly repressive society. Although male homosexual sex is illegal, while lesbian sex is not, a woman taking a woman as her lover is considered the more serious offence in mainstream society. Furthermore, men have a way around the societal restriction. It's fairly common, Amrita told me, for a man to ask his wife to sleep with the children so that he might share his bed with a visiting male friend. This is usually platonic; but, she believes (and I've heard this corroborated by other Indians) that this provides the occasion for guys to do it on the dl. Again: a common practice, hidden in plain sight.

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A couple of final anecdotes about sexuality in India (of which, really, I have no experience). As a Westerner, people assume that I am a person with extremely liberal notions about sex and what have you. In my case this is completely correct, although not in the ways they might think.

Example number 1; sitting on the train today, just after a Hijra walked by demanding money, I had the following conversation with the guy next to me:

Him: Your country?
Me: America.
Him (longish pause): You have many gays in America, yes?
Me (amused, perplexed): Yeah. I mean, some. The correct amount, I'd say.
Him: And you are gay?
Me (abandoning any hope of a rational conversation): No.
Him: But you approve of gay activity?
Me (wonderng if 'gay activity' means what I think it means, but deciding to play stupid): I have gay friends, and they are great, but mostly I don't care one way or another.

Something about me being a white guy made him think it was ok to strike up an extremely personal conversation about sexuality, which I'm fairly sure he wouldn't have done with a Indian person. The only reason I wasn't offended is because I decided not to take him seriously.

But being white is apparently more than an inducement to Indian men to talk about sex. Consider:

I was standing in the lobby of the Hotel Samarat in Mushirabad back in late June when a short, bald, well-groomed Indian man approached me to ask for my name and room number. The whole thing happened so fast that I didn't have the time nor energy to decide to lie.
Consequently, at around 10:30 PM, this man shows up at my door. I was wathcing a movie ("Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," if you must know) and swithced of the TV to invite him in. Upon sitting in the chair adjacent the door, he implored me to make my self comfortable, and forcably grabbed my wrist and pulled me over to sit across from him on the bed. This was awkward.

More awkward was the fact that he spoke very little English. He told me about his job (something involving exports and the Indian government) and that about exhausted his knowledge of English. He rattled off the names of half a dozen Indian languages, of which I have no knowledge, and regretfully informed him of such. I sat quietly, trying to figure out what was going on. He invited me down to the hotel bar for a drink; I said no thank you.

At this point, I imagine retrospectively, this fellow was struck with the fear that I didn't understand why he was there.

"Just 20, 30 minutes, talking, OK? No problem?" he asked. "Happy jolly?"
I said, "No problem," though I had no idea what he was talking about.
"20, 30 minutes happy jolly, OK?" he asked. I begin to feel distinctly weirded out.

It's one thing to talk for a while with a person who wants to know about America, or to tell you what he knows about America. It's altogether different to sit in a room with a man who only occasionally asks, with desperate seriousness, "No problem? Happy jolly? 20, 30 minutes?"

Eventually, I concluded that this interaction, if it could be called such, was benefiting neither party: and, after garnering sufficient confidence, I stood up, arms folded, and said, slowly, such that he might understand, "Well, I'm going to go to bed. I think you should leave. Thank you for coming."

I can only imagine his thought process, but this seems close: he thought, "crap, I think this American kid doesn't quite understand what I'm selling."

"No problem?" he aksed.
"No, no problem, but I'm going to bed."

He then took the back of his hand and casually ran it up my crotch. I stepped back a bit.

"I'm going to bed, I think you should leave." "Was that an accident?" I wondered. "Did he think that was an accident?" he wondered. Once again, he pressed the back of his hand against my penis. This time, however, sure that I understood his nonverbal proposal, and sure that I was rejecting it, he made a beeline for the door, claiming, "I come back tomorrow," a statement which proved untrue.

After a few confused seconds, I began laughing. The poor guy: to be so repressed that you pounce on the first white guy you see on the off chance that he's gay. What a small life!

When I told Shubhas, she apologized profusely for putting me in that situtation. I told her it wasn't her fault; she said that, had I told her while we were at the hotel, she could have sent Atanu to rough the fellow up a little. I said I wanted none of that, but she remained shocked.

Being a Westerner, I've been privy to some elements of hidden Indian sexuality that I might not have been had I been an Indian. I don't really know enough about how sex works here to offer any generalizations, no matter how tentative, but I have received confirmation of my mother's thesis that human sexuality is both completely unpredictable and totally unstoppale. Only the fiercest fascist can strip a person of his or her sex drive; and transgendered people, considered aberrations in every civilization, are actually fairly universal across cultures. I suppose it's fascinating to see how differently a culture can deal with and interpret the same, seemingly simple sexual side of humanity.