Why don't we kiss and go viral?
I first learned of the term "chumma-chaati" in the thrall of a decisive moment on the steps of one of the tombs leading to Hauz Khas Village. "Chumma-chaati," one of the two obese policemen said as if delivering a sentence. This was foreign language for the man I was with, my co-conspirator in this alleged crime. My womanly familiarity with the vocabulary of assault compelled me to take charge of the situation. A seasoned Catholic, I knew when to feign guilt and when to surrender to the powers that be. This was no occasion for impulse.
It was a little past midnight. It was imperative that we extricate ourselves from the situation without being arrested. My limited awareness of Hindi meant I had to word-associate. Chumma — Jumma Chumma— kiss — but I drew a blank at “chaati”. Was this a legal term for what we were doing, making out? Was it even criminal? Was it just me or did its utterance somehow cheapen the act of kissing to some sort of fumbling, incoherent, non-consensual articulation of one-sided lust?
“Under what law are you harassing us?” I asked in my faulty Hindi.
“Chumma-chaati,” they reiterated.
“What will you do?”
“We can arrest you.”
“But under what charge? We’re not disturbing the peace? There’s no one in the immediate radius to even observe us, so you can’t accuse us of obscenity. You don’t have a lady cop with you, so you can’t arrest me.”
“We can arrange for a woman police officer,” they cautioned.
“But under what charge?” I calmly asked again. “I’ll tell you what,” I said more confidently, “if you figure out what offence I’ve committed, you give me a call, I’ll come to the police station tomorrow morning. You’ve got nothing on us right now, so leave us alone.”
By now probably tired of my resistance, they let us off the hook provided we vacated the premises. We complied. Sparks still flew between us but the incident had put a dampener on the evening.
Cops make great cock blocks when they want to.
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| Such malice caused by puckered cheekbones! |
***
My first acquaintance with the landscape of desire was in my early teens, during a group expedition to the sea-facing Bandra Bandstand. It was Dalí-esque; the tide swept away from the shore exposing enormous black rocks; the horizon stretching out into the vastness of the aether, the glint of the evening sun spilling over the water; an allegedly innocent frame, until, on second glance, the camouflage was revealed. Each rock concealed a pair of lovers; some lip-locked, some with bodies grazing, some pieta-like, some sculptural even, some so drenched in their own lust they seemed as fluid as the sea; all of them veiled in the thin protective fabric of a dupatta, cocooned in a private world of which they the sole occupants. Their rationale seemed deceptively simple: if they couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see them.
As I travelled more, exploring the country, I would come to associate monuments with desire, particularly historic structures circled by vast gardens with landscaped lawns and fortress-like walls, quasi-Edens peopled by lovers in exile seeking refuge under leafy trees or solitary park benches. They bothered no one. It was like they believed they had put on a cloak that made them invisible. They were perturbed by no one, lost as they were in the lure of each other; faces flushed, bodies aflame, lips restless, fingers foraging.
***
Later I would hear of the self-appointed “moral brigade” who unearthed the lost lovers from their rocky hideouts, arrested them, and made them face each other and do sit-ups; an egregious abuse of power and a faulty understanding of morality. It was “decent”, it would seem, for a policeman to rape a woman in the presumed safe confines of a police station, a woman who, minutes before being picked up, was by the seaside with her lover, but it was supposedly indecent for them to have displayed affection to begin with? Her appetite for pleasure made her an easy target. She could be seen to be asking for it, perhaps. Her consensus with regard to accepting and showing affection could be misconstrued as looseness of character; a prostitution of lust.
***
To kiss in public is to upset the social order. Public unrest is at risk when two pairs of lips meet, as if the moisture from their heat could burn a cosmic-sized hole in the fiber of the country’s moral being.
Such malice caused by puckered cheekbones. Such danger evoked by these terrorist acts. Such righteousness induced by this basic lovers’ gesture of vulnerability.
***
How to counter this invasion of our privacy? Make it so familiar it no longer merits a second glance. Perhaps this is the beginning of the real sexual revolution, where we, the still young and restless, the still unaccepting of conservative-minded regimes, embrace our capacity for intimacy and wear our hearts on our sleeves. Perhaps it is time to relinquish the sanctuary offered by oversized rocks, time to no longer wait for the tide to recede so we can be accommodated by the shore, time we no longer hid beneath red veils or cloaks of invisibility. Perhaps it is time to spin the bottle and see where it lands.
You don’t need to march the streets and parade your sex drive. Just find a willing co-conspirator accepting of your kiss, click a selfie and post it online, out of solidarity with the zealous Malayali lot who dared to kiss and tell.