E-Paper
'My mom injected some French feminism into my imagination'
When we talk about waking India up, we're talking about waking up a language from its slumber - Hindi can't be used to talk about sex, says an author whose introduction to sexuality began with violence. Palash Krishna Mehrotra writes.
I studied at an all-boys school in Allahabad. When I was 12 or 13, the word 'sex' started doing the rounds. It was at this age that we made the transition from junior to middle school. Standard six was when we got serious about maths, physics, biology and chemistry. There were always a handful of boys who'd find it difficult to make this transition. It was the policy of the school to hold them back for a year or two, until they got better at academics.
My introduction to sex came through the older boys who'd failed in class six. These self-styled gurus of sex education may have been weak academically, but they willingly, and happily, took on the mantle of educating us about the birds and the bees. They were the ones who taught us to look at the junior school teachers through powerful binoculars. In an instant, distances shrank; the terrifying Miss Gomes was now inside our eyeballs, and magnified into a sex object. Women would never look the same again.
The instrument deployed to impart much of this carnal knowledge was the humble hand. You arched the middle finger over your forefinger and that was the vagina illustrated. You wrapped the fingers of your left hand over the thumb to form a hollow fist, then inserted the forefinger of your right hand into it: This was the act itself. Someone did it and we giggled dutifully. It was a way of saying, yes, I'm in on the joke; I've grown up.
