Recently, I helped my partner, L, empty a house. It did not belong to us, although it has been my home for some years now. It belonged to my partner’s former partner, J. Once, many, many years ago, L and J bought it together. They lived in it. They made love in it. They threw dinner parties for large mixed groups of queers just as the language of identity was beginning to sprout. They fought in it. They raised dogs. They mourned the loss of their dogs. They held meetings about an offensive colonial law. They fought in those meetings (everyone did). They organised. They wrote manifestos. One wore skirts, large spectacles and oversized shirts, took copious notes and interjected with clarity and empathy. The other, short-haired and stocky, cooked elaborate meals and dropped truth bombs that sounded harsh but were vital. They sheltered runaway couples and friends in search of a quiet moment, away from the prying eyes of the birth family. They held taash parties in the Diwali season, cooked biryani for Eid and juicy roasts for Christmas. They preserved everything. A photograph of a friend who died in a car crash. A friend who died by suicide. Their dogs’ bones. Their domestic help’s old saris. Bedcovers. Masalas. Rubber bands. Old black-and-white photographs. Decade-old love (lust) letters with curvaceous stick figure drawings that enumerated all the places one would plant kisses on the other.
We hollowed out this home of memories, packaged them and sent them to different locations: to a bustling colony in Thane, where I live, to a quiet lane in South Goa, where my partner and her former partner share a new home and to Vaga’s apartment in Mumbai’s western suburbs.
Who is Vaga?
Vaga is my partner’s former partner’s friend from the kinky community. Vaga is my queer family. Since I don’t have a word to explain our relationship—he isn’t a brother, a cousin or even a friend—I will only use his name. Vaga organises a multi-city kinky film festival and lives with his two partners—Vasundhara, a forty-year-old cis-het woman and Yaara, a twenty-seven-year-old Muslim trans man and a person with disability—and Vasundhara’s partner, Aamir, a thirty-four-year-old Muslim cis-het femme-expressing man.
In an essay in the Handbook of Feminist Family Studies, R.F. Oswald, K.A. Kuvalanka, L.B. Blume, and D. Berkowitz spoke of heteronormativity as the convergence of at least three binary opposites into a singular theoretical complex: ‘real males and females versus gender deviants’, ‘natural versus unnatural sexuality’ and ‘genuine versus pseudo families’. However, they write, families of choice like queer families or polycules—the ‘pseudo families’—complicate the underlying assumption that the binary is natural and universal.
The work of complicating underlying assumptions is never completed.
Back in Mumbai, Vaga’s home will soon be filled with cartons from Delhi. If my cartons consisted of an old wooden cupboard, bedside tables and soup bowls, Vaga’s cartons mostly contained art supplies and clothes. Yaara, an artist, constructs works where he can see his bodies like his own. Vasundhara reimagines fabric into newer, fabulous things. A sari may re-emerge as a bag, a diaphanous dupatta as a negligee or a collage on a frame. It seems to be a metaphor for family and queerness, although she doesn’t identify as queer or like the word ‘polycule’.
Vaga’s flat overlooks a snaking metro line and a wide nullah where every other monsoon, a crocodile or two will give a nasty surprise to a passing pedestrian. It would have swum through similar drains—waterways created over 100 years ago for the rainwater to flow into—travelling the length of one of Mumbai’s rivers, hoping to find its way to one of Mumbai’s creeks. The adjacent one-bedroom flat, in which Vasundhara and Aamir sleep, and Yaara and Vaga work, is filled with boxes when I visit them a few weeks after our Delhi trip. The two flats share a kitchen, among other things.
‘I have a discomfort with words like “polyamory”, “polycule”, “metamour”, “queer”, because it feels like we are trying to imitate how Americans or Europeans define their families. Here, family works very differently. So to extrapolate the concept without taking into account the context makes me uneasy. It seems facetious and performative,’ Vasundhara says, adjusting her cushion on the diwan. We are sitting in a messy circle. Yaara’s walker is beside his chair. Vaga is perched on a stool. Aamir, who has made a fresh round of tea, slips into a corner on the floor.
The first time she encountered the word ‘polyamory’, she ‘hard identified’ with it. ‘I was married and lived with my in-laws and other family members of my husband at the time,’ she says. Ten years on, she realises that she simply ‘didn’t fit in that box’. ‘I spent years feeling guilty about not being monogamous, but I never thought of non-monogamy as a possible long-term situation either. So, when I heard about polyamory and relationship anarchy, it was liberating to find words that described what I inherently wanted. Now though, I just think of polyamory as an efficient term to describe my living situation,’ Vasundhara explains.
Each of them has arrived at this flat through a series of fortuitous events. Yaara met Vaga in Chennai through a dating app, when Vaga was attending to his father, who was undergoing cancer treatment. Their first date was on the beach and Vaga travelled halfway across the city to meet Yaara, who has progressive pseudorheumatoid dysplasia (PPD) and walks with support. Earlier this year, Yaara moved to Mumbai. ‘It’s only after I visited Vaga in Mumbai that I realised that it was possible to manage my disability with much greater ease,’ he says. Yaara’s appreciation of the city’s infrastructure may seem misplaced to those of us that have lived here longer, but it carries a far more damning indictment of Chennai’s accessibility.
Aamir, who hails from Uttar Pradesh and works as a script writer in Bollywood, moved in to stay with Vasundhara, because he could not imagine being in a romantic relationship in which the partners live separately. ‘I may sleep with whoever but I am monogamous when it comes to ishq,’ says Aamir.
All four date other people who they meet on an app popular among polyamory practitioners. In fact, the app shows the four of them as a ‘cluster’, a feature that signifies a polycule. They negotiate timings of visits of new lovers, and joke that if any of them fall in love, they’d have to find another flat in the same building.
Imagine that. A seven-storey building in a crowded Mumbai suburb gradually filling up with a queer poly network of relationships.
Excerpted with permission from Queer Directions, an imprint of Westland Books.