Below is an excerpt from the new book Manboobs: Memories of musicals, visas, hope and cake by Komail Aijazuddin, now available from Abram Press.
By senior year, I was as alone at home as I was at school. My two sisters were now living abroad, so it was just me and my parents in the house. I locked myself in my bedroom, the better to focus in solitude on the raging anxiety of SAT prep and U.S. college applications. It helped that my oldest sister was getting married in the spring and my parents were busy planning the event. I worked as best I could on my applications and sent them off with hopeful excitement. On the windy spring night of the actual wedding several months later, I fell horribly ill with a stomach flu. South Asian stomach infections are not easy ailments, not harmless diseases that allow you to lie gracefully on a Victorian fainting couch while kindly matrons hold a bottle of smelling salts under your nose. No, these are intestinal demons that turn your toilet into a Chernobyl.
I got back from the hospital just an hour before the evening. mehndi was about to set off, still choking but somewhat rested after a tonic infusion. My father was outside arguing with the florists while my mother sat on the living room sofa singing into a pile of dough and reciting a spell her grandmother had given her to keep the rain away on important occasions, which, judging by the dark clouds swirling outside, wasn’t working particularly well. The house was tense, as it usually was on special occasions. This was the first wedding in our immediate family. Everyone was nervous.
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By 2002, Pakistan had left the Pulse Global tapes behind. Three years earlier, another obese military dictator named Musharraf had fought his way to the crown in a coup (a chronic illness) and then made endless televised speeches convincing the nation that he hadn’t done anything stupid. With huge reserves of money and the temporary prominence that Bush’s war on terror would soon give Pakistan and its power-hungry army, the country largely agreed.
Many changes followed quickly: the only state-run broadcaster, Pakistan TV, was joined by hundreds of new channels that flourished under more lenient media laws. Newspapers flourished, television series took off, and flamboyant fashion designers sent thin models down crooked catwalks in the baseless belief that every stiletto appearance was a blow against the rising tide of extremism pouring in from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Back home, a gold-decorated wedding tent was erected on the empty lot next to our house, and after throwing up a few times in the flowerbeds, I joined my family in the receiving line to greet the hundreds of guests who streamed in wearing their finest diamonds and most dazzling silk gowns.
I cannot stress enough how central weddings are to Pakistani culture. They are the Diana to our Supremes, the Dorothy to our Golden Girlsthey make fun of fundamentalism. Since Pakistan banned alcohol in the 1970s as a short-sighted concession to the religious right (that you’d have to deal with them afterwards, sober, apparently never occurred to anyone), weddings are basically all we do. Given that non-Muslims are technically allowed to buy alcohol in the country, Pakistan actually has some good distilleries. My favorite local liquor is called Murree’s Sapphire Gin. From a distance it looks like a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, but a closer look confirms that this Ms. Sapphire fell into need, pawned her larger jewels to rent them out, and now works in a plastic recycling plant, sorting discarded takeout containers. I like it though, because with Murree Gin, it’s not the glass bottle but the alcohol itself that’s colored a bright, glowing blue.
If you drink enough, your urine will be turquoise the next day. When people learn that alcohol is not served in Pakistan, they imagine either a romanticized Prohibition-era cocktail orgy or an arid tundra full of prejudiced teetotalers. The truth is less romantic than either. The generation that grew up before Prohibition speaks nostalgically of glittering masked balls in private clubs and champagne dinners in hotel bars, almost always glossing over their generation’s active role in the loss of all these things. The rest of us, in the prohibitive present, are forced to rely on nervous, overpriced bootleggers. Most of them come with their own transport, nondescript vehicles cleverly retrofitted with smuggler holes so police checkpoints won’t spot the bottle of whiskey in the rearview mirror. Others are more inventive, like the elderly man who could produce bottles of chilled Grey Goose from his wooden leg. At such moments, when you pay exorbitant prices for a bottle of vodka delivered to your home in a trailer, you may feel like you are the only terminally ill patient in the Betty Ford Clinic in the Islamic Republic.
There is hardly a public event in Pakistan where people do not clap for the military or God. A well-planned wedding therefore serves simultaneously as a matchmaker, discotheque, restaurant opening, company party, nightclub, school prom, dance performance, fashion show, charity event and – at the better weddings – an open bar.
Unlike some marriages, desi weddings are not short affairs. It’s quite normal for a single couple to invite you to as many as eight ceremonies—more if you’ve actually met either of them—and the numbers add up quickly. Let’s say you’re in your mid-twenties (#itgetsbetter) and know six couples getting married in a year. That’s already 48 individual events, all overlapping over the course of four crazy, over-the-top December weekends (only the very rich or the very crazy get married in the summer heat, often to each other). By the end of wedding season, you’ll feel like you’ve been gangbanged by sequins.
Given the centrality of marriage, it’s not too surprising that the first film to portray an upper-middle-class South Asian family on screen with any degree of realism also had a – you guessed it – wedding as its subject. Most Bollywood films, of course, sink into the nauseating depths of weddings, but something about sari-clad brides being forced to backing-sing on Swiss glaciers raises doubts about whether realism is a guiding principle. Monsoon Wedding was different – a realistic, thrilling, joyful explosion of a film set in a world so familiar to me that watching it made me feel less seen than caught. The bride’s younger brother in the film, who plucks a trigger petal from the marigolds, was also a chubby, effeminate, English-speaking brown boy whose love of dancing and cooking led his doting parents to question his sexuality.
“He’s just like you,” mothers across South Asia have said to their closeted sons.
“Mmmm,” we all murmured back. No one ever said that this character was gay per se. In fact, no one ever talked about being gay at all, although I saw more homosexual desire around me than not. It was perfectly normal, for example, to see two boys at school or two men on the street in Lahore walking together, their hands clasped together like lovers. That an unmarried heterosexual couple would do the same was almost unthinkable by comparison. College professors later referred to places like Morocco, Pakistan, and India as “homosocial environments,” societies where cultural segregation of the sexes meant that public affection between men was an act of social conformity to segregation rather than a conscious declaration of individual sexual identity. In places like these, segregation lends homosexual relationships a sense of plausible deniability. After all, hiding in plain sight is one of the ways queer people can live with some degree of agency in repressive states around the world (how else would we have survived the Middle Ages?). How can you be gay where there is no gayness?
This lazy conceit works until the boys are expected to marry, and then things usually fall apart spectacularly. Most gay men I know in Pakistan, even Western-educated, quasi-liberal men living in the 21st century—relax, I’m not outing you—are desperate to marry women. These men rarely identify as gay (though many of their ex-wives do) because that would require acknowledging a reality they try with all their might to deny. It is sad but not incomprehensible that in a feudal country where most people grow up in clan family systems (a euphemism for when interdependence becomes a parenting strategy), a gay man would rather submit to the social contract than face it and risk expulsion. Some do it to retain their family ownership, others do it out of deep self-loathing, but most do it because they cannot live any other way. There are some exceptions, mostly upper-class gay men who cloak themselves in the embellished privilege of their position to live their lives with a certain degree of authenticity. They are tolerated because in this cruel kingdom they are seen not so much as threats but as castrated courtiers. I used to think that men in South Asia who do not come out are like the White Witch of Narnia: angry, frigid queens trapped in vast chambers where it is always winter but never Christmas. We have never gotten along. They think I am dangerous and naive, I think they are cowards and hypocrites who are only upset that they cannot take on a more powerful role in the patriarchal system that oppresses us both. Homophobia, I assure you, is not reserved only for heterosexuals.
Excerpt from the new book Manboobs: Memories of musicals, visas, hope and cake by Komail Aijazuddin, published by Abram Press ©2024.
