A Treatise to the Indian Male

Dear friend,

I know that I am disturbing your difficult life by writing to you, but please, lend me your ears. I know how hard it is for you, a successful man, somewhere in your mid 30s, to run a household, a family, and file complex tax returns, but I promise to only take 10 minutes of your time. It will be well worth your attention.

I wanted to congratulate you. You, yes you, have carried on in ways that have long been steeped in tradition, growing values that benefited your forefathers before you and yourself for centuries. You have successfully mastered mastery over your little fiefdom of life, and for this, you have my critical appreciation. World over, people marvel at your abilities of domination and subjugation, and they sing your name across borders for what you have done, are doing, and intend to keep doing. By writing to you, I give your leave to laud your accomplishments formally. What is this, you say, that I wax eloquently about without speaking of directly thus far? Why, of course, your complete subjugation of the fairer sex.

For, they must be fairer, must they not? Or what worth have they in the field that is most akin to the flesh trade these days: the marriage market? Though no one has formally expostulated upon all the ways with which you have bent womankind to your control, I take great joy in doing so now. Let us start from the beginning.

It began with your sister. You remember her, the beautiful thing who had your smile, your hunger for fresh fields of knowledge, your delight in the same pleasures of the sun and soil as you did? Yet see how, from infancy, you hid her away, tucking her into a corner of existence while you rolled around in life’s backyard, without a thought for that closeted other? When she, like you, split her legs and laughed at the aunt who tickled her tummy just the way she did with you, you, like the elders around (and before) you, shut her legs like the death trap, because her chaddi was seen. Do you recall how you were allowed to frolic around the garden, practically naked, proud of your already heavily invested manhood, without a care in the world, while she was made, from the outset, to feel guilty about what lay between her legs?

Ah, realization dawns on you. I see you smiling, and I smile with you. You know that that was how it began. Later on, when your parents insisted that she (legs always, closed or near-closed by this point for modesty’s sake,) learn how to cook dal chawal and a variety of biryanis so that prospective husbands would value her more than those who did not, you did not see any reason to complain. Though no one impressed upon you the importance of cooking to fill your own stomach, you never saw reason to worry. Because there were countless women across the country, just like your sister, being taught that it was their job to nourish men like you.

Do you remember when she was petted after scraping her knee on the rough parapet near Daddy’s Buick? Do you recall the stabs of jealousy you felt when she was fawned over for her little bruise, the way you never were? Do you remember feeling the beginnings of the first sense of something so alien to human nature, the idea that another could feel pain, feel emotion, and sob with the overwhelming anguish, while you could not?

Well, you shouldn’t feel bad about THAT. Even now, you know that you needn’t, shouldn’t, can’t express emotion, my friend. It is unseemly in a man. After all, ladke nahin rote hain. You don’t need an emotional support system, like a weak willed woman would. You have not been denied anything. You are a strong, independent man, and when, later on, your turbulent feelings become too much for you, you can lash out at anything in your immediate vicinity. After all, anger is masculine, though emotion can never can be.

Your sister was handed an education. After all, which bride in the making isn’t taught to do her household accounts? By this time, ideas such as gender equality start to float around. So she can pursue a Master’s degree. In fact, she should. That way, she can help her husband earn, in addition to managing the household, the children, their education, and his sex drive- but more on that later on.

She studies. She does well, surprisingly so. They find her a match. He is kind, quiet, even-tempered, and patient. He wants a child. In fact, he wants more than a child; a whole quiver of them, to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. She obliges, because what is love, but tending to your husband and family’s every need and desire? By this point, she does believe that her success will always lie in the fact that she is a beautiful housewife, managing her husband’s social circle, her children, and the household in addition to a successful career. And she does so everyday, regardless of fatigue, hunger, sleep deprivation, and lack of time for herself. She lives happily ever after. Exit sister for now.

Let’s focus on you. You study, and you start working. The ‘rents start looking for a girl. They find one. They marry you to her, and her parents tell her that she is now entering her husband’s household, enforcing the idea that she, as a woman, must moves from one family’s custody to another, like a beautiful gold bangle that is passed around and treasured. Gold bangles chime; they reflect greater light. They never move, act, or think. They are acted upon, as all commodities parceled off from one place to the other are. Her parents ask you to take care of her, and you happily accept. She cannot, after all, manage her own life. She does need you, and cannot exist independently, autonomously. After all, what woman is complete without a man in her life?

You consummate the marriage. The sex is easy; contingent on what you’d like, when you like it, and how you like it. She is, after all, a woman. She cannot have needs of her own, surely? There are those rare flashes of drive she shows, however, and you adore it. It’s exactly like the porn you’ve always lustily consumed; every man’s deepest desire. But should she try such boldness outside of your marital bed…

You have a son, my dear friend. You have a boy, the spitting image of his father, and you revel in the fact that his looks are not that of your wife’s. You are proud of him, always looking for your side of the family in his little fists and frowns. That is, after all, what he is here for. He alone will carry forward your legacy, spreading your name across the globe. He grows and grows and grows. From childhood, you tease him about girls, and laugh when he teases them or has female friends; secretly pleased by his rigour, a reflection of your own. But then he turns into a pubescent.

Something about the growing facial hair and his stature displeases you. When one day you stumble upon him touching himself with a girly magazine in hand, you roar bloody murder. You burn the copy and yell at him for behaviour that is but natural to a 13 year old, unable to tolerate the virility that is steadily declining in yourself just blossoming in him. You cannot stomach a boy more than half your age, more capable of mustering a salute than you are. You shame him for it. And this will be the first time he is made to feel like sex is something ‘dirty.’

Years later, after many guilty stabs, he finally comes home, unable to hide the love bites on his neck, most common to teenagers in the first flush of sexual exploration. You take him aside that evening. He is taller than you now; a man in his own right, incomparable to the pot-bellied, balding, flabby skinned man you find in your own mirror. He is handsome, you notice gruffly, less like either of his parents than you first thought. You brush all of this aside, and talk to him.

You do not enquire about whether the person was someone he loves, or who loves him. You do not think it necessary to know whether your son has had safe sex, and whether he needs a word or two of advice. Instead, you lecture him vaguely on chastity and purity, on the respectability a girl needs and can lose if she is not pure for her husband. You make an idiot out of him, and you attempt to teach him that women should forever value their hymens over their own sexuality, their desires, and their love.

You have made a son who is exactly like you. In time, you let him out into the world, to do exactly as you and your fathers before you have done. Over time, various problems arise. Your parents die, and you and your sister fight over the property. In court, the judge, (also an Indian male,) sides with you in his heart of hearts: a son, bearing his parents’ name should, after all, inherit property in its entirety. The monetary compensation you offer your sister should be enough; never mind that for her, it has never been about property or land or wealth, merely living on the same land as her father and mother once trod on. She is forced to sell out. Your daughter appears bruised at your doorstep one day. Her drunken father in law lashed out at her. You and your wife soothe her, but raise your hands up in polite befuddlement: she is not yours now, and you cannot speak for her. She has a husband. Your aunt suffers depression; she is going through menopause. You do not want to understand a problem that is uniquely her own, one common to her sex. You hope that she will get over it.

All in all, you’ve been very successful at what you aimed to do, my most well beloved friend. You have, indirectly and directly, controlled the flow of power, clasped it tightly to yourself and your countless automaton siblings. You have crushed hopes, dreams, and desires of not one, not two, but many genders that existed within your purview. Through an age old system, you have othered your fellow human beings and yourself, alienated your own feeling from its mortal shackles, and transcended the starkly drawn realms of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to rebirth yourself as a being beyond touch, emotion, rational thought, or understanding. And in doing so, you have controlled the lives of thousands.

I congratulate you. I applaud all that you have done to yourself, me, and humankind at large. Placed in a country where the Woman, just like the Man, has been elevated with equal weight as part of the Divine, you kept the image intact, worshiping Lakshmi and praying to Mary while happily destroying all that they stood for, every single day. No other system could have worked so perfectly.

But more importantly, I thank you. For all the beliefs you have crushed, and all the hopes and dreams you have tarnished. Someday, my friend, they will rise again. And when they do, they will burn every single thing you have known, loved, and sought to protect.

And that day, I will congratulate you for being the fire to the world’s gold, and for helping it make itself anew.