Close Too Close (25 page)

Will you stay?

He snuffles into a wet tissue.

Rules of engagement: I am not allowed to open his shirt or take his pants down. Yes, I can kiss him. On his face but not his lips. Between desire and the risk to his self, we agree that I can rub him on his packer without touching him directly. The rest can flow. And we can call stop when we want to.

Spooning is a good place to start. He presses his ass onto my crotch and the movement rises through my spine and lands my lips on the back of his neck. The wetness turns him around and he breathes into my chest. Where should I hold him? I remember what it was for me. When you are not your nude body. When your nude body is not your desire. And when the impossibility of this desire, to inhabit and act through this body, can lead you to a bottle of sleeping pills.

Who is more qualified to protect him than I? Against my own desire to suckle his breasts, as breasts . . . enter his vagina, as vagina . . . to tear open his shirt and the layers of clothing under . . . to turn him around and onto his knees . . . to enter his mouth against the thrusts of my own grasp of his face . . . to pin him, take him and go, go, go . . .

If the shame of these thoughts was not visible to him, it was only because I lay naked, exhausted, nestled near the bound chest of a fully-clothed man. He made a very satisfying lover and it’s true that the hold of large hands can be very substantial. Was that a look of love? The look of being somewhere else . . . was he seeing with his naked eyes the possibility of becoming a man . . . could there have been a more honest way to tell him how
this
man had become a man . . .

He dresses my feet with his boots and comes up my naked body in swirling strokes of his tongue . . . how strange; these boots make me stand on my legs again, and fill me with a desire that I have never known in Bata chappals . . . but the turn to ride is his now and he wants to show me something new. It happens again and again, rhythms multiply, play begins and ends and brotherhood deepens.

He says he can’t take my sweat anymore.

Cold water on all this love is not our idea of an ending.

I ask him to wipe me with his pack of wet tissues.

He says this is impossible to do in Lahore what you have

done in Delhi.

How did you?

How did I?

Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

Government Teaching Hospital

Delhi; sorry, New Delhi.

The trolley bed is wheeled through the corridors. My body is naked under a long single garment touching my ankles, with buttons in the centre and running through the length of it. I have been on T for over two years now and am taken for a man. Even when lying on this trolley bed. Even with this single thin green garment, worn by hundreds before me, lying crumpled over my body, communicating against my deepest discomfort its contours to the attendant pushing the trolley and nearest to me.

‘Kya hua tha?’

‘Matlab?’

‘Matlab, bachpan mein kissine . . .?’

‘. . . kheench diye the?’

‘Hain . . .’

‘Par aadmi ke mamme itne bade kabhi dekhe nahi.’
*

His crotch brushes against the trolley frame, pushing it further towards the OT. As the largeness between his legs comes near my face, recedes and moves closer again, I meet his gaze; we know we are family and I am not alone anymore. The dread of what they call Sex Reassignment Surgery lessens in the assurance of his presence. His hand comes closer to my head as he wheels the bed and I turn my cheek to rest it on his thin hairy fingers.

As he leaves me in the pre-op room, I ask,
‘Kahan karte ho?’

‘Pehle yeh karvalo, phir tumhe wahan le jaaunga.’
*

Under the diagnosis section of my papers, it reads: ‘Gynecomastia’ – a condition defined by medicine as, ‘The abnormal development of large mammary glands in males, resulting in breast enlargement’. The diagnosis gives Dr K a place to hide, and without his knowing, it communicates my truth: indeed, I am a man with large breasts. Dr K has done some rather fine line drawings around them, to mark out the sites of incision. When the knife will touch skin along these black markings and remove the subcutaneous fat under it, I will be turned into a man some more. With the black marker in one hand, and a wet tissue in the other, Dr K draws and erases, and redraws and erases repeatedly around my breasts, till he has the lines he wants. The friction of the erasure and the rough wetness of the wet tissue makes my nipples erect. Not all erections are desired. And some, like these, even detested. Especially by the one to whom the breasts belong. To whom the nipples belong. To whom this body belongs. But Dr K is as stoic as ever. Not a twitch, nor a freezing of his drawing movement, nor a blink of an eye. His crotch remains as flat and unremarkable as it was when he entered.

The blackened wet tissue is thrown on the floor and my eyes are blindfolded. I am made to stand against a blank wall. Of my naked, sagging, large breasts, with lines imprinted on the skin from the self-fabricated elastic binder I have worn for years, a photograph is clicked. Without a flash. And then some others.

How is it that doctors can do this? Is it because they touch so many breasts, finger so many cunts and lift so many dicks everyday? Didn’t my breasts get in the way of his mathematical calculations about how much tissue would be removed from where? When they touch their lover’s lips and cup their genitals, do they see the bodies they have handled all day long? Other breasts, other cunts, other dicks? How does so much body every day, and sex, mix? But this seemed like fun. I could make a game of it and draw red lines around my lover’s breasts one day. And when my career as an artist begins to dry up, I could make some performance art out of it: get on stage; have my lover draw thick purple lines around my big, drooping, imprinted upon, prosthetic breasts, with their erect nipples in the middle of large dark areolas; and then ask her to photograph me.

With a flash. For performance.

The morgue isn’t anything I know of from Hindi films. Or even Hollywood.

But sex in the morgue of a Delhi Government Teaching Hospital can compete with European Art House porn.

Rules of engagement: He is not allowed to open my shirt or take my pants down. Yes. He can kiss me. On my face but not my lips. Between desire and the risk to my self, we agree that I will suck him. The rest can flow. And we can call stop when we want to. And one more thing: he wants to face the bodies in the morgue as I blow him.

I don’t believe this already; He takes my hand and guides it through the open zip of his attendant’s shorts. He is 5 feet 9 inches and for my 5 feet 3, I have to go down on him. Extracting a semi-erect dick lying on one side is a special pleasure; far better than lifting a flaccid one that lies in the centre or is rested upward and below the navel. I am extracting his, from within very tight underwear, under a very tight pair of shorts, through a very short length of zip. It’s circumcised. And thick. And long enough for quick, short strokes. He aims it against the inside of my right cheek and the saliva drips as he emerges and goes in again. His arms are lifted and held together behind his neck. He is a man with that self-assuredness that his organ needs no support. And that it can have a life of its own. And so the strength of his thrusts is very particular, very pointed, very powerful. His dirty white shirt is open to the last button and his dirty white shorts are just below his crotch, half-covering his very tight buttocks. And the dirty whiteness has a strange glow about it. Suddenly the smell of dead embalmed bodies hits me, over and above the smell of my saliva on his organ, and over and above the smell of his piss in his underwear. The movement in my stomach begins to rise and I can taste the dal and palak paneer and my night medicines in my mouth. Vomit from fellatio in a morgue, vomit dripping from the phallus, vomit held in the bottom of the very tight underwear of an almost naked, standing man.