Issue #9
We’re baaaack!
Back with a cute new look for a new year. There was a lot more disappointment than I had initially anticipated when I announced that there wouldn’t be a new issue in January. I’d like to thank every person reading this for sticking around and still being a part of this weird brainwave I had at 5 in the morning, last June. I hope the new look reflects that for you, that there’s an us in mush.
Every new year comes with a certain amount of promise and optimism which begins to fade away come February. However, one month into 2021, I find that my optimism about this year being better than its precursor is still standing strong. COVID-19 figures are still terrifying, and the pandemic is nowhere near over, but I think we’re finding ways to adjust and move forward while still maintaining physical distance and emotional closeness. It’s this optimism that set the tone and unexpected theme for this issue.
Issue 9 looks at the future by diving into the past. Three retrospective essays that explore how people, moments and events, whether they’re enormous, seemingly irrelevant or anything in between, work toward nurturing how we express our queer identities in the years that follow. I hope you enjoy them.
One last thing, mush strives to publish narratives that are meant to be sat with and absorbed over time. So slow down and take as much time as you need, we’re not going anywhere, we promise.
x
Veer Misra (@v.eird)
A Fairy Tale in New York by Faraz Arif Ansari
This is the story of the first proposal of my life. It happened in the most romantic way ever — straight out of a fairytale, like it happens in the movies --- well written, choreographed perfectly, like it was meant to be. I was 18, he was 21.
He was my senior at university and the baseball captain of the university team. Tall (6'4"), his eyes were the colour of the summer sky --- blue like I have never seen before, his voice always made my heart skip a beat, his hands could've won the award for 'Best Looking Hands', if there was ever an award for it, his smile could light up the darkest night --- truly, he was straight out of a glorious dream... one that you never really recover from. Almost like how I imagined my man to be --- Mr. Darcy meets Mr. Rochester but truly a Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables, in every sense.
He also happened to be my roommate and that's how we met. It was fated. There are no coincidences in life.
I met him when I was 16 and he was 19. It wasn't love at first sight. We couldn't stand each-other initially. I always thought he was too good looking, too much of a jock, and perhaps way out of my league --- even as a friend. Sigh. He thought of me as extremely nerdy, snooty, "arty-farty" (that is literally what he told me!) and always, always, always way too lost in books.
“Look up and see the stars too, eh?” — he always said that to me, every time he passed me by. He stirred many invisible storms inside me, every time, as he did that. All I wanted to do was hug him and perhaps let him know what he does to me. Oh, but I didn't. I couldn't. Never.
Love, as it happens, always finds a way. Always. After the first six months of staying together, between midnight assignments, 4am grilled cheese, cheering for him as he played his matches, and reading out Jane Austen to him before bedtime, the ice started to melt away. Because he wasn't out to anyone then, it was very unspoken, when it started to grow. But if you were in the same room with us, you could see it, you could feel it --- it was real.
My closest friends noticed it first. I shrugged it off, of course. I could see it, I could feel it too but I thought I was imagining it all.
How could he be into me?
“This isn’t love”, I always said.
“You are a fool, Faraz”, my friends always said.
And then, it happened — our first trip together to New York for New Year's Eve, 2005. Around 10 of my friends and I were planning this trip together for the last one year. He had been overhearing things, listening to me whine and sing, whimper and complain about how I wanted everything to be perfectly organised. A few days before the trip, while I made hot cocoa for us as we stayed up finishing our term projects, he asked me if he could come along with us --- I was pleasantly surprised.
My friends, of course, agreed in a jiffy.
“WE KNEW IT! WE KNEW IT! WE KNEW IT!”
They were all too excited. There was a lot of "OMG, we told you!" too.
Little did I know then, that this trip would end up becoming one of the fondest memories of my life.
Our plan for New Years Eve was to watch the ball drop in Times Square, go to a few clubs and then head to a friend's sister's party in Williamsburg.
Of course, nothing was to go as planned. The universe had bigger plans for us.
We were sharing the same hotel room. As I saw him put on his dinner jacket for the evening, I wished for a Christmas miracle.
"God... Universe... Please find a way to make us hug. I want to know how it feels when he holds me. Please..."
On our way to Times Square, he asked me if we, just me and him, could go for a little walk and then return before midnight to watch the ball drop. My friends promised to save us two seats from the terrace of a five star hotel that we had somehow managed for ourselves.
And so, we stepped out in the cold, exploring this winter wonderland that New York turns into every Christmas, on foot. We had hot cocoa in Washington Square Park and went carol singing in Gramercy Park. It was like I was in a Christmas movie and I never wanted it to end! When we started to make our way back to Times Square, we realised that there was no way we could make it to Times Square. The roads were choker-blocked, the pavements were overflowing with people. And so, we decided to head to Williamsburg early and wait for my friends to show up. He suggested that we walk by the East River in the torrid winter --- a terrible plan that would turn out to be absolutely romantic because of great company. We got a few drinks on our way, we sang Christmas carols and danced in the middle of the streets.
About 30 minutes to midnight, he suggested we go to the Brooklyn Bridge to see the fireworks. It was my first time in New York. I had only seen the Brooklyn Bridge in the movies. I was tipsy with excitement. I started to sing cheesy Bollywood songs that he couldn't understand but he started to hum them along with me --- Be still my heart, I kept whispering to myself.
As we started to walk towards the Brooklyn Bridge, it began to snow. Snowfalls always brought a strange sense of ease, comfort and magic --- just like candlelight does. We went silent, as we saw New York transform slowly. It was magical. And then, suddenly, he held my hand. It was the first time that he had held my hand. My heart froze.
"I hope it is okay...", he said.
I gulped and nodded.
We both went silent, as we walked through the snowfall. I could hear my heart beat through my eardrums. I am certain he must've heard it too.
He took me to his favourite spot on the Brooklyn Bridge, right before the clock struck twelve. We stood there together, hand in hand, our cold bodies warmed by our closeness, looking at the East River as the fireworks began to light up the night-sky.
2006 was here. As we turned to wish each-other, he smiled at me --- a smile that I had always longed to see, a smile that I knew was only for me, a smile that will stay with me until my last breath ---
"Happy New Year...", he whispered to me. I wished him back.
"May I kiss you?", he asked ever so gently, ever so sincerely.
I answered him by kissing him.
We could hear the fireworks with our closed eyes, our faces were being illuminated with the bright lights in the sky, as we lost ourselves in our first kiss.
I don't know how long we kissed for --- time didn't exist then. When we looked at each-other again, he asked me, "So you and me, yeah?"
I nodded, as I blushed, "You and me...", I said.
He had gifted me a bookmark --- Venus from The Birth of Venus, bought from the Winter Market in Union Square. I still have it with me.
I lost him in an accident in 2009.
Enigma of the Strange Instagram Crush by Harsh Aditya
2020 was the year that went shit for all of us. For most of you, it probably started in March with the lockdown but for me, January hit like a bus. It wasn’t a great start to the new year. I remember sitting in my bathroom crying my eyes out like a five year old infant who had lost his favourite toy. With a half-lit cigarette in one hand and my phone with 8% battery in the other, I tried to put together fallen pieces of myself. I tried, but I couldn’t. I was crushed, heartbroken and all over the place for someone who did not even know that I existed. Anyway, I decided to walk out. It felt strange – the feeling of leaving the bathroom after a good cry made me feel different– as if I was a different person altogether. Scattered yet composed. I acted as if I was holding myself together but the reality was far from different.
On one December morning, I was in the metro, scrolling through Instagram. Like any normal day, the vicious cycle of procrastination and guilt continued parallel to the ‘just five more minutes’ cycle of thought. I decided that I’d get back reading Amitav Ghosh in five minutes. Five minutes. Those five minutes were beautiful. My heart raced, eyes shone, and fingers stopped at this one picture on the explore page– a man in a black medical residency uniform with a stethoscope around his neck posing with a wide grin at Times Square, New York. The caption read ‘only positive self affirmations’. I was torn between clicking on the profile and exiting the app.
My mind had already started playing games with me. On one hand, I didn’t want to take another step further, on the other his username screamed ‘click me! If not now, you will lose me in the sea of one billion other people’
Don’t. Don’t do it. He is probably straight.
No, go ahead. You know he is out of your league. Don’t have any hopes though. There’s nothing wrong with checking him out.
I made a decision. It felt like jumping from an airplane without a parachute.
The man belonged to Pakistan and was a medical professional. A football enthusiast, ice cream lover, wrote poetry and had impeccable style. He was interested in history, arts and culture.
My fingers kept moving vertically as the light of my mobile screen flashed across my face. I caught myself in a weird expression—half grinning and half pretending that I don’t care—in the mobile screen and tried to make a normal face. I looked left, then right. Did anyone see me smiling stupidly? Luckily, no one was sitting beside me. Half of the metro was empty so I kept my half-baked judgements about myself aside and gave my attention to what needed it.
Without wasting a second, my mind cast him as the lead actor in the imaginary movie of my daydreams. He was perfect. Or maybe, I made him perfect. I put him on a pedestal which elevated his status above everyone else around me. The man was flawless for me. He was handsome, no doubt, but his interests being so similar to mine added to his charm. His deep black eyes, wavy hair, heart-melting smile, nervy hands and his love for kurtas and books made me fall for him. He had me at the reading bit when I saw him reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in one of the pictures. His bookshelf was stacked full of books from across the canons of English and South Asian literature. My eyes saw Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Mirza Ghalib stacked along with Arundhati Roy, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Homer and Sylvia Plath amongst others.
That was enough for me to go head over heels.
Why did clicking the follow button feel like trading my soul to the devil? I kept contemplating—Should I? Should I not? It isn’t a huge thing if I follow him but I am afraid of my own overflowing emotions—what if I end up looking like a stalker? I know I’d visit his profile frequently even if I don’t follow him. Doesn’t make sense not to.
But some part of my brain refused to do it. Call it my sixth sense or instinct but I followed what it directed. I closed the app, put my phone on flight mode and picked up Shadow Lines again. By the time I could process what had happened, I had missed my station.
A few days passed in smiling, grinning, being lost in my own thoughts, daydreaming and spending a ridiculous amount of time on the app. The average time showed 4 hours and 6 minutes of activity, even though I was swamped with my university readings and assignments. My heart would flutter whenever I saw him posting. He was the top profile on my search history and I was the first person to like/view whatever he posted. I kept refreshing his profile from time to time in the hope of something new.
I was happy for no reason, listened to songs which I wouldn’t listen to otherwise and was losing my grip on. At that moment, things around me felt beautiful. I felt less heavy and it seemed as if I could fly. All of this was just for the first few days after coming to know of his existence.
The coming few weeks weren’t as I had expected. The thought of losing him started sinking in and therefore, the magic spell started fading away. I was bed ridden, started bunking university and the thought of how my fate is to just gaze at my crushes from afar. I started pitying myself and wasn’t hopeful or looking forward to the coming days anymore. It felt as if someone had stolen my jurisdiction of myself and made me vulnerable to this man who I kept going back to in the virtual world.
Time passed and I realised that I hadn’t written anything or read any books for weeks, how I was not being gentle to myself. I didn’t do the things I was passionate about. The realisation of getting over this hit me late but the moment it did, I realised how important it was for me to go through this experience of a short lived infatuation. Even though it made me feel weak, it also taught me how crucial it was for me to take time to self reflect and be non-judgemental to myself.
It took me four weeks, one solo trip to a literature festival, nearly twenty solo dates and a hell of a lot of university work to feel alive again. It felt great to be back. Though that man lived rent-free in my head for the next few months, there was a lot to catch up on. I started imagining futures which did not involve him and those were the days worth looking forward to – going on picnics, buying books, spending more time with myself, doing things that make me happy.
In conversation with a friend, Vanya, she brought up something that has stayed with me till today. We were talking about a guy on whom we both had tiny crushes. When I said “I am manifesting him for you,” she said:
“You know, Harsh, I hope we are not in some cis-hetero trope where it is easier to manifest him for me coz that would make a hetero match. If you have a crush on him, I would also manifest him for you! Why should romance be restricted to the heterosexual folks? Doesn’t matter his visible sexuality, you know. Don’t just give up your idea of romance for someone’s visible sexuality.”
Her text enlightened me. I realised how after coming out, I had kept the door closed on so many possibilities in my life. I lived in self denial for years which had scarred me. These short lived infatuations are living proof of it. Imagining a person as perfect is a strange reflection of my own insecurities which I believe can be balanced out by putting someone else on that pedestal of perfection and looking at them in awe. This ‘perfection’ of a stranger frustrated me but at the same time had me attracted to them. There are times when I try to be like them but thankfully, most of the time they are short lived obsessions.
Experiencing infatuation as a queer man feels like walking through the tenth circle of hell. There is this constant tug of war between heart and mind– one knows how exactly things will go and the other still wants to take that deadly step. For a moment, it feels like it is worth walking the lanes of burning hell.
One thing which I have noticed is that I come closer to myself every time I go through any infatuation phase. I grow with similar experiences and learn something about myself which I never knew earlier. Surprisingly, I thank these men who I have fallen for all this time. Unknowingly, they piece me together bit by bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Well, what else is queer life, if not an unsolved, messed up jigsaw puzzle?
Wisdom Teeth by Aditya Sinha
At a time when survival and risk are both measured in the people last touched, loneliness hangs heavy in the air between us. It descends onto our tongues with the weight of silence. At a time like this, the mind misses no opportunity to offer an escape, a ‘better time,’ from our limited roster of experiences. No wonder, the aftertaste of loneliness is memory. But I have learnt that the futility of the present cannot be mended by the resilience of the past.
It is said that the farthest one can trace their memories back is to the age of three or four and if we remember anything from before that, it is most likely fabricated - a patch job the brain did on itself to make up for its inadequacy.
One of my oldest memories is of a morning so early, it is still night for some. The world, asleep, except for the streetlight that is still on; working overtime, its constant hum only occasionally disturbed by the triumphant chirp of an early bird. The sun has not announced itself yet, but even in the darkest corners of the house, silhouettes take form under the light of whatever little has broken of the dawn. I remember the wetness of my hair, the smell of soap that followed me like a shadow. I remember the yellow porch-light bouncing off of the button on my favourite shorts — denim, very distinctly violet in colour, and ones that I would, later in life, refuse to take off until I could no longer deny that I had outgrown them — creating an illusion of a little, flickering metallic sun where my navel used to be. Everything that is outside of this little island of warm light, still submerged in the blue of slumber, is slowly stirred awake. As all life around me stepped out of bed, I remember standing at the cusp of a day (for all intents and purposes, my very first) and I remember nothing but feeling alive.
Around the same time as the birth of my first memory, I lost my first milk tooth. After days of prodding the gum tissue to give in, I climbed onto the cool marble counter of my grandmother’s bathroom and under the stark lighting, went so close to my reflection that my open mouth stared back into my eyes. There it was — limp and pitted with red, dangling loosely from the roof of my mouth - a tooth, a cliffhanger. With my tongue full of conviction, I flicked it and then ran to my mother with the pain and a hole in my grin. Between my blood speckled fingers, the first lost piece of the jigsaw. I feel a familiar pain at the far end of my mouth again, but this time it does not come with the enlightenment of living, but the nagging poke of maturity: Wisdom teeth.
When it comes to human evolution, to outgrow a need is to progress. As we rubbed two stones and created both life and death, our minds learnt to do more than what our mouths could. Our diet evolved from raw meat and coarse leaves to an appetite for thought and language. To outgrow a need is to progress. As for wisdom teeth, there is a belief amongst some anthropologists that with time, as the human brain grew bigger, the jaw got smaller to accommodate for space — outgrown, it yielded in its defeat against evolution. On days that are particularly heavy with silence, I find my tongue recoiling into my mouth; receding with every quiet hour until its presence inside my jaw is as good as gone.
In my family, when a milk tooth falls, we plant it deep in the soil with the hope that in some cosmic form of regeneration, what we give back to the earth, comes around to us when we are worthy — similar to magic beans, but with delayed gratification. Every fallen tooth that found itself lodged in the soft ground with the nimbu tree, marked the development of my consciousness, and with it, the development of my queer identity. Growing up, I do not remember knowing how, or feeling the need, to separate the two. My persistence and my disregard for gender norms, both offshoots of childly wonder, earned me a few Barbies of my own. Every morning, I would comb and braid their hair in my room as all the other boys in my house gathered in the garden for sports. If I was lucky enough for my absence on the playing field to go unnoticed, I would spin elaborate and imaginative lives for each of the dolls that would ultimately end in love. I do not know if it was their effortless smiles or their unwavering dimples, or perhaps the fact that the little lives of my polymer princesses and their princes were limited to a shelf together — except for the hour that we would breathe life into each other — that made living with love look so easy. In their company, love could only be as far away as a story well told.
I learnt the markings to the steel cupboard that housed my grandmother’s sarees after watching her pleat yards of rani-pink and gold zari with the same virtuosity as the moon reining in the tide. When alone, I would try in vain to replicate it from memory with just about anything long enough to wrap my tiny frame. But in a humble effort to never forget, I scrawled the last three digits of the key on the metal wardrobe with a sketch pen. The blue ‘051’ scraped off within the month but not before the fluidity of the silks against my naive skin reassured me, at a time when I did not know what I was seeking assurance for.
If you are familiar with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, you know that the greatest catalyst for any decision is the menacing optimism of ‘possibility’. A dejected Jack found possibility in a beanstalk that defied gravity and bloomed through the clouds. Once inside the giant’s castle, he was amidst riches so obscene that his curiosity was surpassed by his capacity for desire. In the version of the story I read, the book says, “If Jack was pleased at the sight of silver, how much more delighted he felt when he saw such a heap of gold: he had the boldness to even think of gaining it.” The dolls and sarees laid down the path for my sense of self and my identity, but in a race towards acceptance, they felt like the second prize. The real win — the gold, was only to be found in the fulfilment of love and someone to share it with.
Not unlike Jack, I had the boldness to believe that all the little pieces put in the ground would come back to me as something - or someone - when I will be worthy. But acceptance and actualisation are two sides of the same coin, which is to say, that when you fall flat on reality, only one of them makes it to the surface. Soon my attendance in the garden became mandatory rather than recreational, and I was sent out in the sun to join other boys, who were to become men one day, in deciding which way they wanted to chase a ball that morning. In their defence, they had me do the easy albeit the grunt work out of what, I assume, could only be insignificance. But I had no complaints, or excuses for that matter — the dolls I would have otherwise spent these afternoons with were taken off their shelf, never to be seen or discussed. In the face of being perceived as an indiscretion, my identity receded within me for safekeeping. And I built a shield around it, not realising when it turned into a fortress armed so heavily with self-acceptance that it became impenetrable by desire. On nights that are particularly stifled with yearning, I carry the emptiness of the shared shelf with the lost dolls to my bed, only to lay awake with a discomfort that can be best described as loneliness.
As a late-blooming queer individual, it has been tough to make room for the realisation that the worthiness of love is harder to find as a queer body. When our expectations of love are dictated to be tame, and our expressions, timid, then love feels like a permanent state of hesitation. You learn to categorise it as ‘impossible,’ ‘uncertain,’ and ‘achievable’ to eliminate further chances of disappointment. With just achievability as its benchmark, the gratification of any new experience feels ephemeral on the best days and unfulfilling on the worst. Truth be told, I am still navigating the space of queer relationships, and no matter where I go in my search, there seems to be no promised land. This inability to tick enough boxes in an already meagre checklist of life experiences has often made me feel not enough; an insufficiency only deepened with the reminder of age that is sprouting at the end of my mouth. With its every pinch in my sore gums, the growing-pains of identity resurface.
Wisdom teeth are named such because, besides emerging at adulthood, they come with a definitive expectation of lived experiences, and naturally with the anxiety of not having lived them all, I am forced to go over every moment where I have stretched myself to make room for two. Analysing them, rating them on a scale of one to ‘achievable,’ hoping that through some permutation and combination, I would feel greater — more enough — than the sum of my parts.
I think of all the pearly white pieces of me that dissolved into the soil like magic beans, blissfully unaware of all the hope I planted in each of them. They have returned to greet my gums with a familiarity that is so ancestral, it is still breaking out from under the strain of history. But by erupting both inside and in spite of the mouth, the wisdom tooth’s defiance serves as a reminder that the act of growing is perennial and so are the pains that come with it. Every night as I tend to the discomfort it stirs, I think of how the wisdom tooth — a faulty discharge of evolution — bursting through the ground of a full jaw is an act of resilience in itself. The wisdom tooth, confident in its identity, charges at the mouth from the ground-up never seeking to be completed by it. The question was never of the worthiness of love, but of its dissent and its acceptance. I am learning that as a queer body, the only difference between not feeling enough and having room to grow, is perspective.
The wisdom teeth, like the Beanstalk, erupted from the tiniest grains of promise. And I know what you’re thinking — correlation hardly ever leads to causation, but to defy evolution is not far from magic. Yet unlike Jack, I feel prepared to part with my enamel-coated shoot of possibilities, which is to say, I have since taken an appointment for a tooth extraction. Not because the pain in my gums outweighs the persistence of the tooth, or because the memory of it will persevere in the form of a sunken shrine at the healing site - but simply because it is time I make room for resilience to sprout from somewhere much, much deeper within me.
Before you leave, we just wanted to mention that a platform like mush thrives simply on more and more people reading queer stories. If you like what you just read, it would be wonderful if you could share this newsletter with your friends, families, lovers, pets as well as any sociable gremlins that you might come across.
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