Hello, Darling: AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India

[Guest guest]

Siddharth Shanghvi writes on AIDS in India

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Special to The Chronicle

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Editor's note: Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who divides his time

between Berkeley and India, has written an essay, " Hello, Darling, "

excerpted below, for the forthcoming collection " AIDS Sutra: Untold

Stories From India " (Anchor Books; 334 pages; $13.95). All names have

been changed. Shanghvi will read from the essay Saturday during

Litquake.

Every time my friend Reba Khan spoke of Murad, her voice, darkly

nostalgic, was like a jazz tune on the run, at once spirited and

melancholic. " Murad was the original flamboyante. He was more than

life. He was a filmmaker, raconteur, vintage poster collector, an

outrageous flirt.

He never just went to a party - he always arrived, and then quickly

became the party. He was generous and funny and clever, and he always

said, 'hello, darling,' in a way that made me come completely alive.

I guess, " she said, her eyes squinting. " You think it's a cliche or

that it sounds queeny, but coming from him it was like a bolt of

light, and you felt, well, priceless. "

Murad himself thought he was straight, and even had a girlfriend for

one summer. His denial was not simply because homosexuality was - and

is - viewed as aberration in India, but also because Murad knew that

his father had reservations on the matter. If it has never been easy

to be openly homosexual anywhere in the world, it has been

particularly harrowing in India.

Not only is homosexuality frowned upon culturally, but Indian law -

Section 377, a colonial curse imposed in 1860 - punishes anal and

oral sex, even when it occurs between consenting adults.

The real power of Section 377 is not limited to the threat of its

enforcement: Its existence fosters a climate of hatred toward

homosexuals in India. After all, as Foucault noted, law is not

external to an individual and its real power lies in how it is

internalized: prohibitions are not always enforced by the law, as

much as self-imposed.

Film school

The '90s dawned, Murad wound up in film school in Australia and

returned to Bombay, fully reconciled with his sexuality.

In 1993, Murad made his first documentary, noted for the boldness of

its themes, as well as for its camp and feminist undertones. The

film, widely reviewed and keenly discussed, resulted in

extraordinary, premature praise for Murad, whom the press dubbed

a " Young Turk " of independent cinema.

A year after his second documentary, which had come out in 1996,

Murad and one of his pals underwent HIV tests.

Murad's friend was fearful that he would test positive (while) Murad

was confident he would be fine. Fate reversed the odds. That

afternoon they went home, altered forever. News of the infection

paralyzed Murad. He was in his early 30s, and he felt as if a death

sentence had been handed out far too early, far too cruelly.

But his dread would have had greater poignancy a decade earlier, when HIV really

did translate into a death sentence. By 1997, when he had

tested positive, HIV was seen as a long-term health condition for

those who could access the new drugs.

Murad started to sleep during the day and rise at night, scouring the

Internet for news of a cure. The more time he spent on the Net, the

more he grew vulnerable to rumours that AIDS was only a conspiracy

unleashed by pharmaceutical giants to make money off homosexual men.

Although adequate medical information was available at the time, the

doctors Murad met with were not competent at calming his myriad,

manic anxieties. Ever the nonconformist, he would not take any

treatment. Murad's sepulchral and inexplicable decision confounded -

and terrified - his friends. Did Murad really believe AIDS was only a

rumour started by pharmaceutical companies to rake in the pink rupee?

What could they say or do to make him change his mind?

Neurotic energy

Receding into a private existence, Murad plotted his next move.

Emerging from his hiatus he announced his incipient departure from

India. No one was interested in making his kind of cinema. The Indian

arts scene was conventional, unadventurous, docile. New York, with

its titanic, neurotic energy, with its tease of a dirty, luscious

salvation, was the perfect island. So, why did Murad really go to New

York?

Practical reasons could have driven Murad off. As (Bombay writer and

activist) Ravi Mehta explains to me, " It's certainly true that some

positive guys have chosen to go abroad because of the superior

medical care - or more precisely, perhaps the awareness of dealing

with HIV-positive patients that exists abroad. Here (in India)

there's a big NGO/medical structure built around prevention and

testing, and, to some extent, giving first-line treatment.

" But I think the awareness of dealing with long-term positive

patients, and all that that implies - for example, how to treat them

for other opportunistic infections, or surgery that is not

necessarily related to their HIV, but is affected by their being

positive - is much less here. I certainly know people who have, quite

recently, decided to move abroad, and their being poz was very much a

factor in their decision. "

Perhaps neither stigma nor fear - nor the profound, complex

intermingling of the two - forced Murad to New York. His future as a

filmmaker seemed increasingly bleak as it was hard to source funding

for a " gay film, " and nearly impossible to line up an acting crew

unfazed by the subject matter. More worryingly, Murad's own

directorial prowess was under question. His initial spark now seemed

to have run into an ignition problem.

Murad's debut documentary, charged with flashes of brilliance, may

have been admirably outré, but its substance was always suspect.

Similar complaints had been lodged against his subsequent two

endeavours.

End of romance

Although New York was tough on Murad - he was often broke and he had

to work long hours - it gave him the nerve to come to terms with his

HIV. By September 2001, after the towers had come down, the romance

with New York was wearing off swiftly. It seemed a relief, more than

anything else, to quit the Big Apple. (Murad) set sail for home, and

arrived to the loud cheer of his friends.

Delighted to have Murad back, they were also unsettled to see that

his health was faltering visibly. He had resolutely hung on to his

belief that HIV did not exist, resisting medication even as his body

was caving in, and the ones who were never told were curious why he

looked as if he had rickets.

But in spite of the gung-ho, the disease had chewed into his

indefatigable spirit.

There is no way of knowing what Murad's films, if he had been given a

chance to make them, would have been like. Would Murad's films have

been love stories? Stark, stylish provocations, much like him? Or

disdainful, existential kahaanian of mad, mad Bombay? More

poignantly, there's no way to know if he would have used his HIV

status - when reconciled to the magnitude of its experience - in a

public sphere.

During one of his hospital stays in Bombay, he mentioned to a friend

that he had " to do something about this HIV thing in India. " He

wanted, he said hesitantly, to speak up, talk about what was chewing

him up. Murad could have articulated not only the perils of HIV but

also its incandescent hope, thereby compelling millions living with

HIV in India to feel safe in their own skin.

Just as he had once talked about homosexuality with a bravura honesty, he could

have also gone on to become not so much a spokesperson of the condition but the

rock star of survival, and, along the way, inspired in others an acceptance of

self, so they too might find faith, relearn humour, and trust in love again -

which is also a kind of a gift to pass on, a gospel, galvanic legacy.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi reads from " Hello, Darling " as part

of " Around the World in 60 Minutes " at noon Saturday at the San

Francisco Public Library's Koret Auditorium. Shanghvi is author of

the best-selling novel " The Last Song of Dusk. "

" Hello, Darling " is included in the new anthology " AIDS Sutra:

Untold Stories From India " (Anchor Books; 334 pages; $13.95).

E-mail Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi at datebook@....

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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