Discussing Sex in Comtemporary Indian Culture
Discussing Sex in Comtemporary Indian Culture
I've never had sex in India, the country where I was born and spent most of my first eighteen years. I've had impatient kisses in the shadows of whale-backed ambassador cars, and I've necked in the bucket seats of crowded movie theaters in Hyderabad, the city in southern India where I was born. But that was a long time ago, when I was young and naïve and India was a conservative, closed nation, where "love marriage" was a dirty term and riotous Valentine's Day celebrations were still a generation away.
My high school sweetheart and I were the only lovers in our high school of 2,000 students, save for one other couple: her best friend, a busty Telugu rebel named Nirupama, and Samer Khan, her handsome, brooding Muslim with green eyes, an Enfield motorcyle and a pocket knife. So scandalous was their affair in mid-80s Hyderabad, that Nirupama was banished to her grandparents' in neighboring Tamil Nadu so that she might come to her senses. For months her amore rode all night to rendezvous with her for a few hours. When those visits were curtailed, I heard she tried to commit suicide.
My girlfriend's family was less traditional: they had lived in Papua New Guinea, where she kissed boys under the mistletoe at "X-mas" time. I, too, was more progressive, born of a mixed marriage, my mother a relatively liberal Syrian American. We would steal quick embraces in her tiny, doorless bedroom, her grandparents constantly peeking in on us. Once we were caught fondling each other on the roof of her apartment complex by a neighbor. He hauled us into his living room, threatening exposure and subsequent censure unless we listened quietly to his diatribe on morals and bowed our heads in shame for the sins we had just committed.
When I left India at eighteen to study at Caltech in Pasadena, California, I imagined I had lifted the prudish veil of my native land and could now indulge in guilt-free, sensuous sex with gorgeous blondes on the hot and sinful shores of the West. I was still a naïve virgin after all, and teen pop culture had led me, like all the rest of my classmates, to believe that America was a land of vice and...