Category: I Am

Home Away From Home

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

When my buas were alive, I had homes outside of my own to go to. My bedroom just got painted over and the last time that happened, I had stayed in Munni Pua’s (my elder bua) house for a fortnight. She took care of me like the parent she was to everyone she knew – I shall admit that I was beloved by both my aunts. They replaced the need of a father figure, which I never had.

I would just have to tell them I need a place to stay and they would open up the doors to their homes and let me stay for however long I wanted to. If I needed a piece of furniture stored temporarily, Goodie Pua (my younger bua, who was really the man of the family as I grew up) would tell me, “send it over to mine, I have ample place to keep it.” And when I would visit her home, the same piece of furniture would be placed in her home as if it belonged there beautifully.

I miss them. Not only because I feel like a great part of my life was shaped by their presence, but because I miss their love and affection. I could joke with them, be chastised by them, love them and be loved by them. I had family! I had someone, in my extended family, I could count upon to help me at any given time. Right about now, I feel quite alone and secluded. That is the price of age and death, I suppose.

All mentors and guides have to fall away sometime, in order for one to find strength and solutions from one’s own self. But I am human, after all, and when I see my best friend having two homes, my lovers having two homes, it sometimes hits me that I now just have one, and my whole world resides in it. It is not a very great comfort and at times, of late, I miss having a larger family.

My greatest fear, let me tell you, is dying alone. With no familial support or person who cares sitting by my bed as I breathe my last. It’s not death that scares me then, it is just the thought of having no one saying they love me in my last moments. I was there as the older generation grew older and needed help in their final moments. I wonder who will be around when it is time for me to get help.

I have seen my family contract – with people falling away to death or distance. The people I loved the most have passed on and now I am left with a handful of people that I can truly count upon.

Life has shown me that I need to be aware of mortality and it is the greatest leveller in this world. I do not regret anything – I am merely sitting here, thinking, of the losses that I have garnered since the age of 19 and wondering upon the pros and cons of having a large extended family. Perhaps this is why the human race wants to procreate and see their offspring procreate some more. But that would seem to be a selfish reason to have children.

Of course, I am also a believer of bonds that are not linked by blood. It is not necessary that I have to be born into a family to call it mine. I can create my own family… and over the years, I tried to assimilate a tribe of my own. Mostly through the route of friendship, I have developed a kinship with many – but as I look back on the most recent experience of mine, no one really called me to their home and said, “stay here until your house gets painted.” That makes me think more and miss my aunts most.

I am not a believer in an after life, but I shall safely say, they have left an indelible impact on my life on this earth, and they are terribly missed, and remembered every day through the calls of my heart.

Intimacy

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Growing up, I received a lot of physical affection from my grandmother and one of my aunts, on a daily basis. My father was an alcoholic and from the age of 13-18, I lived in absolute terror of his presence. Long story short, he was abusive. My mom was a single parent for all aims and purposes and she was too independent and driven to pay much attention to physical intimacy. She herself came from a home where her childhood was not a very affectionate one.

I realised I was homosexual at the age of 12. I craved for affection from another man. It wasn’t the fact that I lacked love. The complexity of emotion was far deep-seated and interwoven with pathology. I wanted the care and affection of another man – especially since I was gay. It was something as slight as putting his arm around my shoulders or holding my hand as a sign of bestowing importance and love.

It is somewhat tragic that I belong to a generation where I didn’t grow up too fast but learnt faster. Through my formative years, technology’s advancement was progressive and not radical, so I always felt out of place and alienated. I fought for my place in the world, and it feels like I am still fighting a losing battle against a backward mindset. I fell in love with men whose languages of love were no where close to intimate gestures – and the ones who were intimate ended up breaking my heart abruptly in a matter of years. The devastation that the latter inflicted left even deeper scars than those left by my father.

Relationships can be exacting, because they evolve, too. The tragic part is this: during the romantic phase where the other is trying to impress and gain my love, the affection and the intimacy pours out in a flood. It is my foolhardiness encased in romanticism that make me believe that this is not a phase. That this will not change in time. There are moments that bring in undiluted bliss and security. That is how I get pulled into the world that I wanted, because that is all I can see at that given moment in time.

Yesterday, conversing with my lover, I mentioned to him how he appeared to me in chats during the initial phases of our relationship. I said jokingly, this is how you sucked me in. He retorted, you should then have had sense to see how any relationship would start. You should not have allowed yourself to get sucked in. That struck home. There are glimpses of people we see, that they do not realise they are showing. Again, the romantic in me looks at the larger picture. There is of course the fear of abandonment and separation anxiety, because I love forever. It gets hard to be exacting.

So I step back and I sacrifice. I am the first to make my fear and desire known. However, I also realise that the cycle of any relationship is thus… Or are there truly relationships which remain steeped in the romance that they were born into? It is a complicated question. A woke Gen-z would state that I need to put my own needs first. But I also realise that any relationship is made up of at least two people. I have learnt through learning, understanding and observing that relationships should last even through things when they aren’t fun or easy.

Being an out gay man since the age of 16, I must also point out one thing that happens particularly with homosexual men. Since my family knows about me and has come to accept me completely over the years (I wouldn’t have it any other way, much to the chagrin of my sister), the men I fall in love with see me in my home. They see all my moods, my highs, my lows and my outbursts. And with me being me, quintessentially, I make no compunctions to hide who I am right from the start. So all my lovers see what they will get.

I, on the other hand, only see the best of them for the initial months. They enter my personal spaces. I never enter into theirs. So I never get the chance to see them lose their cool with their family members. I never see the way they interact with the people they profess to love and who are linked to them by blood. This happens very gradually for me. All I get to see is the excess of their love. When that thaws, I have already been drawn in, hook, line and sinker. So when they actually start treating me as family, I realise how they actually interact when the romance dies down.

My lover said one thing to me some time back. “I am not afraid of you anymore.” He comes from a patriarchal mind-set and his earlier partners have all been authority figures, who placed him in the back seat. So, when I love him wholly and completely, he sees me as an equal. It is ironic, yes. I would like all the woke people out there to read ‘afraid’ as ‘in awe’. All our illusions dwindle away, in the second year of the relationship.

How many of us make it through the third, without recrimination and with the realisation that the person we are in love with is human, and not Eros, we all set out to be initially?

Mirror

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I can never be assured of my worth. In the scheme of things, I can never understand just how much I mean to someone I love. I know what they mean to me and just how much it would devastate me, if I lost them. But I can never realise what it would mean for them to lose me.

I’ve known men to love me and then give me up. It doesn’t take them much to discard me like used toilet paper. I’ve seen the ones who love me lose interest in me sexually. It happens over years and sometimes over months. I guess that is true of most relationships. But it’s always sad to be the one who gets faded out first.

I wonder what it would take for someone to be completely compatible in at least one aspect of the relationship. I’ve been hearing quips about age. Then there are comparisons to my way of cooking in which I fall short. There are incompatibilities in bed. I am left to wonder who doesn’t like kissing? I mean anal sex is preferable to being French kissed and that sets my alarm bells ringing.

But through it all I doubt myself. It’s never the other. I find myself lacking. That’s what happens with love. We revert the accusations. This self hate pierces directly in my heart and character. Has the abuse from my father and the lack of a male figure in my life made me incapable of seeing myself worthy in the eyes of any man? That’s a very scary thought.

I look at myself in the mirror and I see someone who has a bad body and a lopsided face. People on social media say I look magnificent. There are men I have met who want to wed me, bed me, the entire fucking deal. But then I know how that works. It all is roses and attention in the beginning. But eventually the roses die and the attention diminishes. So I am back to the mirror.

But is my self worth really in their hands? How they see me? Is my identity linked to whether I am fuckable? Or if I want the question to seem worthier, lovable? What is with me that I cannot see myself as a survivor?

I lived through abuse. Determined my sexuality with no help but my own research and knowledge. I faced bullies. I made my own way. I took care of my needs. I raised my fur kids. I braved heart break. I faced depression and anxiety for decades. I met death head on and battled the overwhelming sense of losing the loves of my life. I dealt with diseases I feared and I helped others through them. I shunned discrimination. I loved those who loved me and then some. I provided a safe haven in my own home and with my family for the men I love. I helped them to understand what it meant to be gay and accepted and loved. In the process, I understood love, loss and lust. I became who I wanted to be. I remained true to myself and showed that truth to the ones I loved.

So why the fuck do I give my power to the men I fall in love with? If it’s because of some thing my dad and I have to resolve then well, he’s dead. I probably need therapy to deal with that. So then, so be it.