Hi, my name is Smita.
I want to tell you a little about why reading and books are important to me, and why they were particularly important to my adolescence. I’ve always had books around me while growing up. My dad loves reading and his books would be all over the house, and this was before I could even read.
When I started learning to read in LKG, I would pick up the books and riffle through them. My parents didn’t believe in saying things like certain books weren’t meant for kids. They believed that if you could read it and understand, it was well and good and you could go ahead.
Books are expensive in UAE, though, because they are all imported. When I was a little kid, we had a neighbour who was a teacher so she had a lot of kids’ books and she gave them away to us so we could read. My brother and I, when he started growing up a little, picked up reading very quickly. Every time we came down to India, we’d be able to buy books. Between all the books my dad, brother, and I picked up, our baggage was almost always over limit, but we worked around that.
THE STORY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
I identify as queer and a non-binary person, if one must go with labels and terms. When I was in school, around the age of 13-14, I would have crushes on my female friends but I always attributed it to wanting to be best friends with them, because I didn’t know that anything else was possible. Two girls must be friends, right? I didn’t know there were other things that existed, other options. The year after that, when I was about 15 or so, I’d come down to India for vacation. This is when I was going through my Chicken Soup for the Soul phase. So we picked up a Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul here, one of the four or five versions that were available then. I still remember very vividly that we were on a train, going down to Tamil Nadu from Gujarat and there was this one story, about a page and a half long, about two friends – a boy and a girl – who were 15-16, like me. I remember that the story described them as chilling together in the girl’s room and the boy seems very restless. When the girl asks what’s going on with him, he basically comes out to her saying, “I am gay”. The girl’s response to the boy was something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t think I know quite what it means but you are my friend and this doesn’t change anything.” She asks him what he wants to do next. That story was revolutionary for me, then, because I might have read hundreds of books by then but this was the first story that connected with me at a very intimate level. Finally, the feelings I had towards some of my crushes made sense. It was equal parts relieving and scary because it made what I was feeling all the more real. I clung on to that story for a while.
VPN TO THE RESCUE
A few months later, after I went back to UAE, I came across this website called Goodreads. Goodreads is basically a social media site for book readers and authors. I don’t think I have come across a book which doesn’t have a page on Goodreads; English books, though, not ones in regional languages. I think they have a collection of Spanish books but I don’t know about Indian language ones. I love Goodreads because it helped me find books and make lists so I could hunt specific ones when I came to India or went to the book fair that happened once a year. A few weeks after I discovered Goodreads, I found the lists that were pre-made by other users and I came across one that was titled “Best Lesbian Fiction of All Time”. My mind was BLOWN. You must know that in UAE, the government strongly believe in web censorship so a lot of websites which even remotely mention LGBT issues or abortion or the like are blocked. Fortunately, I had access, very early on when I was 11-12, to something like a VPN which allows you to access forbidden content. You can’t use it all the time, though. Once I came across this list, I started looking for e-book versions of the books featured there because there was no way I’d be able to find actual physical copies in the UAE and even if I could, there was no way I’d be able to buy them with my parents around. As liberal as my parents were about books in general, this was still a no-go zone. Actually, I don’t really know, for certain that is, but I doubt it all the same.
ANNIE ON MY MIND
Back to my search for the e-books: it was very hard. Back then, downloading stuff wasn’t as easy as it is today but finally, after much searching and use of the VPN, I found one of the books on the list called Annie on My Mind. It was by this author called Nancy Garden and that book was glorious. It was about two girls, also 15-16, living in New York; it was written like an epistolary novel with a bunch of letters exchanged back and forth. It was a beautiful book. I found a PDF version and I hid it on the computer somewhere, under some other file name so I could read it late at night on the shared family computer when everyone was asleep.
THE PLOT THICKENS
Once I came down to India a few years later, books became much easier to find online. At one point I went a little crazy and downloaded and read everything on a similar Top 15 list. When you read a bunch of these, you realise that there is very little diversity in the world of queer women lit, particularly fiction. It was driven home even more forcefully when I came across another list called “Top LGBTQ Fiction of All Time” which featured books with protagonists who were transpersons, gay men, bisexual persons etc. All the queer women protagonists happened to be white women who lived in global north countries. There were very few Black or Latino women; Indian women were of course absolutely absent. I devoured the books all the same, at least in the beginning. The reason I started slowing down after a while is because I realised that the formula in all these books was the same; there was very little diversity of story or plot. In the case of books about queer women in particular, their sexuality always took centre stage every single time. Whereas if you read about gay men, the books were set in different contexts, showed other sides of their personalities, with sexuality only being one aspect of their life. That always annoyed me.
Now this is changing a little. So there are books that show diverse queer women characters and focus on their other interests, other aspects of their lives. I find it very enjoyable, I must say.
MEETING MYSELF
This is also the time around which I was coming to terms with my sexuality and I met someone who was possibly the first queer friend I had; kind of like a queer mentor. They introduced me to Indian LGBTQ books. I think the first recommendation of theirs I ever read was Because I Have a Voice which has both stories and non-fiction essays. It’s quite a lovely book; I would recommend that everyone read it.
The thing about Indian LGBTQ literature is that you need to know the names already to start looking for them. I couldn’t go to Crossword and Landmark and ask the store people where they kept their LGBTQ books. Maybe I could now but not back then. So after my friend told me the book names I would be on the lookout for them. Much to my shock, I saw two titles in Landmark. Landmark used to have these huge sales at one point where they would have books for Rs 50, Rs 75 etc. The books I found were called Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Underprivileged India by Maya Sharma, a fantastic piece of work, and Close, Too Close: The Tranquebar Book of Queer Erotica. My mind was blown! I was like, “What? Landmark has erotic books!? And queer erotica at that?” I must admit that I didn’t dare buy it at that point. I did buy the Maya Sharma one. I was in 2nd or 3rd year of college and I was already buying a lot of books in India and I would arrange them lovingly on my table. But these 2-3 books were always in my backpack or in my cupboard. I wasn’t out to my roommate and I was studying in a Catholic college that had actually kicked out girls who were outed so I was really scared of that. Later I realised that there was no need for this because my roommate was fantastic.
FULL CIRCLE
You know how it all started for me with the Goodreads list? I found out that you could make lists yourself. Once my queer friend had introduced me to other queer people in the city, I made a list of Indian LGBTQ books. It didn’t start out very long, just 12-13 books, but soon more and more people added to it. I don’t entirely know what the point is of this long rambling but I think that if I hadn’t come across that one story in Chicken Soup for the Soul and then the list, or if my friend hadn’t recommended Indian LGBTQ books, I think it would have been much harder to live true to myself and I think it would have taken me way, way more time. The books didn’t just lend a certain sense of validity to my feelings and existence, they also made me feel like I’m not alone. If other people were writing stories like these, then there must be others like me. I think this is why it is so important to write about and show different kinds of people and existences in books, plays, movies, comics.
Thank you for listening.
(The podcast has been edited and paraphrased in places in the transcript for reasons of conciseness and clarity)