Kolkata: Brewing a potent queer identity

“On our third date, we knew we wanted to be together,” says Upasana Agarwal.

“We spent seven to eight hours together, walking around the city. Nandini was late — made me wait for 45 minutes at New Alipore petrol pump!”

The woman in question laughs. “Upasana was so abrupt, she wouldn’t look at me when we met... whatever I said, she’d reply with a shrug — ‘theek achhe (okay, sure)’.”

Nandini Moitra and Agarwal are in a relationship after they met on the online dating site OK Cupid in May 2014. Both women are in their early 20s and they have co-founded Amra Odhbhut (we are strange/queer), a pop-up café that doubles as a space for Kolkata’s queer community.

They live in Agarwal’s house with her parents. Their room in the south Kolkata house has been painted black. One wall is covered with posters and images. “I print out stuff I find interesting,” says Agarwal. Fairy lights illuminate one corner of the room, and rows of books are stacked against another wall. A bookshelf displays exquisite embroidery art that Moitra has been working on. Cats wander in and out.

“We had a nice day — free-flowing conversation, and wandering around the city. We thought we’d go to Experimenter (art gallery) but it was shut, so we went to Olypub instead. We walked down to Maidan, she bought some black cigarettes,” Agarwal says, laughing at the memory. “Then we went to Earthcare bookstore on Middleton Street. And to Sushie Okie, where Nandini took sushis from my plate — ‘Can I have your sushi,’ she said and, without waiting for a reply, besh tuk-tak korey kheye nilo (she finished it nicely).”

“I saw her clothes and knew she had a lot of cats,” Moitra says, laughing in her turn.

She was 21 then and the manager at a city gallery. She was simultaneously studying art. Agarwal was 18 and had just joined Jadavpur University for a degree in English literature. She was learning graphic design and coordinating the Kolkata chapter of Take Back The Night, the global non-profit against sexual, relationship, and domestic violence.

They began hanging out together after Moitra’s workday ended. “We’d head to Park Street and have a plate of pan-fried noodles at Bar-B-Q.”

They believe that compared to the hostility attracted by men in same-sex relationships, they had an easier time as two women spending time in each other’s company. “Girls tend to be invisible, I feel. At the same time, yes, there is a sense of hesitation. I have been bullied as a kid, and I am wary,” says Agarwal.

They even censor themselves in some situations. “Like when we went to Ahmedabad recently to meet the Queerabad people. And we stayed at this Airbnb (homestay) owned by a family. But when we travel alone we don’t feel unsafe as queer people, we feel unsafe as women,” she adds.

And sometimes, when people stare, they simply ignore it.

“The living together happened very organically; we had been seeing each other for a year and were spending a lot of time together, often staying at each other’s homes. Eventually, circumstances made it difficult for Nandini to continue living with her mother, so, though we had wanted to wait until we were making enough to live independently, we both started living with my parents,” says Agarwal.

“We both earn, but being artists we don’t have a stable income.”

Acceptance from the family has been a mixed bag. There is tacit acceptance and a lot of silence as well, but of the comfortable kind. It is more often outside the family that they draw their greatest strength, but again, not without the pitfalls. “We have lots of (queer) community members and friends who feel like family; and that, too, brings another set of problems — of love, friendships, conditions and so on,” says Moitra.

Agarwal came out at 15, and Moitra at 19. But then, the ‘coming out’ experience is an ongoing one, they say. “We ‘come out’ every day to new people, to strangers. And coming out is also a very Western concept, I think. We really stress that LGBTQ people do not need to come out of the closet if they don’t feel comfortable because it makes them susceptible to violence and threats. So, we definitely feel that it’s no cause for celebration. Because even while visibility is giving LGBTQ people all over the world some hope, we feel people shouldn’t feel compelled to do so,” says Agarwal.

Moitra hails from a conservative town in Gujarat and had studied in Bengaluru’s Christ College before moving to Kolkata. Agarwal is a Kolkata resident — her mother is Bengali and father Marwari. Moitra gets along well with them. “I give her mother make-up tips. She likes to have a younger person around to share these things with,” she says. She also helps them with everyday things like using a taxi booking app. Agarwal helps her partner’s family likewise, and even accompanied them when they shifted Moitra’s unwell father back home to Gujarat.

Marriage is not on their minds right now. “A standard family set-up/ unit with the patriarch as the head, women reproducing and looking after house and food and so on, grandparents in place — all that makes us uncomfortable. It’s a mutual sense of discomfort,” says Moitra.

While they see marriage as inherently unfair and out-of-date, they feel many queer couples are redefining rules and the concept of marriage and the symbols associated with it. For instance, many straight women have discarded the sindoor (mark of a married woman) as a symbol of oppression. “I know of a transwoman who wears sindoor for her husband — for her it is a symbol of rebellion,” says Agarwal.

For the future they’d like to keep working with art and activism, grow their café into a space for literature, art and poetry. “We’d like to bring together queers from everywhere and discuss our experience and come up with ways to help the community have a sustainable income flow,” says Agarwal.

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Lucknow: Ignorance is bliss

Apoorva and Chikirsha first met in 2012 and have been together for three years. They live in Lucknow, but separately — Apoorva at her parents’ house and Chikirsha in a rented place close by. After meeting Apoorva, a law student, the Pune-born Chikirsha moved out of home and lived in Delhi for a year, telling her parents she wanted to study for UPSC exams. She travelled to Lucknow four to five times that year, to meet Apoorva. A dwindling bank balance later, she decided to move to Lucknow. Her parents still think she is in Delhi. That involves a bit of hide-and-seek. She zips over to Delhi whenever her parents come over for a short visit. “At other times I waylay their plans and say, ‘Hang on, I have a holiday coming up and will head over to Pune instead.”

Apoorva’s parents, too, think the two women are friends. “We have talked about my sexuality but they’ve not acknowledged it. I had posted my relationship status on my Facebook page and my parents saw that. They were upset and asked why I needed to do that publicly.”

For now, the young couple are making the best of their time together in Lucknow. “We hang out anywhere we want to. For people, we are just two girls,” says Apoorva.

In an ironic twist, no hotel would ever deny them a room. “When they say ‘no’ to unmarried couples, they mean heterosexual couples. They can never think two girls coming in can be a couple too. Chikirsha lives in a place where the landlord says guys are not allowed, which suits us just fine!” she says chuckling.

In a country like India that frowns on public displays of affection, the brunt is mostly borne by heterosexual couples, they point out. Girls being affectionate with each other or guys holding hands rarely raises eyebrows here. “A friend from New York who was visiting for a project on the queer community, was rather taken aback at the public display of affection in the case of men with men, women with women. It was a culture shock for him,” says Chikirsha. “So if you are from the LGBTQ community, it’s easier to blend in here.”

But it’s not all that simple either. “Sometimes people stare,” says Apoorva. “Chikirsha has short hair and maybe that’s a stereotype — women with short hair as lesbian.”

On the whole, however, they feel they have it easier than the men, especially when it comes to gender norms. “I have short hair and wear men’s clothes but I have not been bullied or catcalled the way a man would be if he wore a sari or skirt or cosmetics,” Chikirsha reasons. They also feel that gay men tend to be caught in the patriarchy trap, and can be as misogynistic as the straight men.

Life in Lucknow has been fine so far, both women agree. The people are “very nice” in general and it helps to have a decent LGBTQ network and support group. Contrasting their small-town experience with that of the queer community in the metros, Chikirsha says the anonymity offered by the big cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata is a big draw. “I would feel freer, I could be open about my sexuality,” she says. “In a place like Lucknow you can exploit the whole conservative thing, but in a metro you have a good support system — NGOs, queer clubs, and so on.”

The fact that the LGBTQ community is close-knit, one where everybody knows everybody else, can throw up its own set of problems. “People like to gossip. So when a relationship goes through a rough phase, everything becomes more magnified in the community. And if you break up with someone and date another, that person would know your ex and your friends would know her already. You end up recycling people in your life,” says Chikirsha.

Nevertheless, despite the internal travails, it angers them when the community is foisted with unfair labels. For instance, they say, most of the talk around heterosexual relationships is about love, commitment, building relationships and so on, but when it comes to queer love, it’s seen as all about sex and lust alone.

“We too form relationships, we commit,” says Chikirsha. “I think queer couples go through a lot more, because the relationship is secret, and we end up sharing so much stuff only with our partners. So when you find something, you hold on to it. The negative side of that is there can be a lot of mental abuse in queer relationships. The fear of being outed by an ex or of ending up living alone... You start compromising on your boundaries.”

As for marriage, they hope to tie the knot in the future, but certainly not now in a country that criminalises their love. They often talk of moving abroad to work and live.

In a country like the US, there’s a whole flourishing market around pink money — as the gay economy is called — and corporates woo them actively. “It works both ways — all the TV shows, films make money on it and the queer community gets representation,” says Chikirsha.

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Chennai: My queer family and other animals

Suchandra Das is a lifestyle photographer, cinematographer, independent filmmaker and director of two international film festivals. Her partner, Sree, is a real estate sales and marketing professional, who is currently working on her first novel.

As a lesbian couple in India, they have faced many issues. “Like when you rent a house, you are treated as two different individuals and not a family. That increases your rent, but when you submit rent receipt for tax benefits, you can only claim half of it. Also, you cannot include your partner’s name as a nominee in your insurance and other investments.”

Das came out before she moved in with Sree. “I didn’t want to hide such an important decision from my parents.” It took some time for Das’s parents to understand and accept that she was truly in love with Sree and saw her future with her. Sree, on the other hand, came out at the age of 10. “I had a tremendous crush on one of my classmates and, when I couldn’t contain the curiosity, I told my parents about it.” Her father had advised her to concentrate on studies and games. “He said it was too early to decide and assured me that if I felt the same way about women even after 10 years, he would understand that.”

Originally from Kolkata, the lovers first met each other through Facebook and decided to move in together within a month. That was six years ago. “We both knew this is it. Life was, and still is more interesting when we have each other around,” says Das. They say they have evolved as individuals, and fall a little more in love every day. “We have disagreements but those are issue-specific and we have learnt to get over them very fast.” They are full of plans for their life ahead — animal lovers both, they hope to start something for their welfare.

People sometimes tend to react strangely when they say they are a couple. Among their pet peeves are questions on these lines: “If you haven’t been with a man ever, how do you know you like women.” “How do you guys have sex”! (This is the ugliest). “Will you always remain gay?” “How will you have babies then?” And the most painful: “Which one of you is the ‘man’?”

Anuradha Sengupta is a Kolkata-based freelance journalist