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Gay and loving it

Goa is a narrow-minded Catholic place and Charao’s villagers are gossipy and mean-minded. I cannot risk a scandal here, nor can my hosts. Ah! Hyderabad.

And it has been twenty years since the bawdy bard Hoshang Dinshaw Merchant has been calling the city home to which he came as a teacher of English and has stayed on. If at an earlier time he wrote a poem about writing poems by candle-light with an aw areness about the underbelly, now his poems talk about the many loves he discovers and the changing people and the city. A few years back, one waiter at a local hotel ran away from the place after Hoshang dedicated one poem to him. His latest collection of poems Goa! is dedicated to Jayram Pandit of Bihar (The Mason).

“I have many lives. I have contact with all kinds of people but the intensity varies. In the University I am an insider, if I make friends with autowallahs I am leading an outsider’s life. The city is its people, not the buildings. If I want to be a poet of the city, I have to know its people. Students take me home. I go to homes of my colleagues. I go to Hindu pujas, Muslim dargahs...,” says Hoshang Merchant inside his cubicle in the University of Hyderabad campus.

As he talks a bumble bee bumbles into the room. Shhh he says swinging his hand as if it were peacock’s downy tail. “There he has found his mate. Now they will become harmless and go away,” he says. Take him for a walk, make him pose under a gnarled tamarind tree, buy him a cup of Irani chai but you cannot make his mind wander away from the word love. It is only love, love, love, its many moods, metaphors and manifestations that populate his conversation.

Love and heartbreak are not new to Hoshang who discovered his different calling when he was 12 and couldn’t hide it from the world when he was 16 and let the world know about it when he was 20 escaping from his palatial home (in Pali Hill beside Dilip Kumar’s house) and tonnes of money that was his for the asking. If writer Bachi Karkaria is his cousin (she wrote about him in The Untold Charminar), Shobha De is his classmate as are Vinod Mehra, Ravi Chopra and Chitra (Murdeshwar) Palekar.

“I am a pioneer, one way of changing things is to keep a low profile in the job. If you are in a system you have to play by the rules of the system. The system can make allowances. If I am classified as a writer I have to sit in the minimum number of committees. And I have been able to write twenty books in twenty years,” he says. Penguin is bringing out a series of his books including an anthology of gay literature from South East Asia.

Hoshang also happens to be one professor at whose home students drop by. Once when his student Usha Mudiganti visited along with her parents, Hoshang insisted that he make chai for them, just as he does for legions of his other students, “She might have been a student but when she comes home with her parents she is my guest,” he says. One of his students has even made a documentary on him: Mother Hoshang, a day in the life of the professor. He remembers all of them — the students — Mukti from Pune or Mini from Bangalore, Anand in Chennai, Deepa in Mumbai, Shanti in Hyderabad or Usha in Mumbai and insists on calling each of them a child. The students don’t forget him either. “He is the only person who taught me poetry. I mean he showed us (by us I mean my M.A. class) how to read a poem. He feels a poem before he attempts to teach it in a class. And his reading of a poem changes with his day-to-day experience,” says Usha who now teaches English in Mumbai.

The entrancing experience has got to do with his eyes that remind one of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:

He holds him with his glittering eye--

The Wedding-Guest stood still,

And listens like a three years’ child:

Or perhaps it is the passion he brings into the classroom where Keats, Shelley and other Romantic poets come alive.

“I know English teacher is the best loved creature. English teachers work with feeling, emotions. Literature is life material; those who teach without an emotional involvement are doing a very criminal thing. It is wrong to give notes like a mechanical thing. Some of our professors and teachers (not in this university) are doing this. When I walk into a class I know I am being scanned by 30 X-Ray machines. They know whether I am prepared or no,” he says about the passion he brings to his classrooms.

“Teaching is like a cultivation of a child. Though post-graduate student are not very young, their minds are eager to be formed. I don’t harm the kids. I know they are coming from their behaviour, their change, their attitude,” he says. Unfortunately, all the students and their parents don’t see him that way.

The soft-spokenness morphs into a combativeness only when it comes to ideas: “I wash my own clothes, do my own jhadoo in a lungi without a shirt in my house. I believe people should not make servants of others. When some women talk about feminism, I ask them don’t you have an ayah?”

In Yaarana – Gay writing in India, he describes himself as a: “I, a male homosexual Parsi, Hindu by culture, Christian by education and Sufi by persuasion.” He ridicules the gays who have outed themselves on the Internet and says one should lead life on his/her own terms. “Modern life is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is hell. I don’t live my life in blocks. When I am writing I write, I shut off my critical faculties. I try to avoid schizophrenia. I want people to address me holistically,” he says musing over his cutting Irani chai.

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