"You WILL learn to obey!"
I watched through characteristic squint, my father's mouth form an 'O' as he roared out his ultimatum for the hundredth time. I felt like one of Swift's Lilliputans, but in a hapless reversal of roles, I was the one in captivity.
I was ruminating about my situation and studying Father's flared nostrils, when I felt him shove my naked body, but not without some violence, from his knees. He stood upright, his back astonishingly arrow-straight for one bordering on seventy and in defiance of the newly-diagnosed arthritic knees. More agile than a Hell's Angel's switchblade, he grabbed my wrist, held it in a grip so powerful that it could cut off the circulation of my adolescent blood, and pulled me with him towards the courtyard. I dug my heels in. My mother screeched.
"Have you lost your mind, man?" she scolded. I found her tirade somewhat lacking the strength of her conviction. "This is your son, for mercy's sake! Don't you think you have punished him enough?"
"Did you not hear him?" Father spat out his reply, "did you not hear Han say he will not obey on principle? That his principle was at stake? Principle! No, this is not my son. No one can be a friend to homo_s_e_x_uals and be allowed to remain in my house. Han must be made an example."
The skin flailing away from my heels, I surrendered to Father. Nor did I even care to resist him at this point for my aching spanked backside and sore throat were all that dominated my senses. But I found my free hand instinctively searching my groin to cover my exposed private parts as Father and I, and now possibly the rest of the family too, reached the end of the courtyard, the gate hurtling threateningly towards me. I recoiled, trembling, while a servant unbolted the gate at Father's order. That time seemed to stand still became all too real to me in the seconds that I heard an uproar, felt hands on me as somebody jostled for me, and then I was cast out.
I sank to the hard and arid ground while Father's last words rang in my ears. Ingrate....Disowned....Cut off....I was all this and more. I curled up into a ball as the neighbors encircled me, stared, sniggered a bit and then turned away, but not before stirring up some hostile dust in a wordless statement of assent. Guileless, I could feel no remorse, find no tears I could cry.
But Father could never fail to restore me to the wasteland of my childhood. As I re-visited the countless number of events that had me marked as somebody willfully immoral, Salman, a child-vagrant who begged for food from our servants, tossed me a soggy page from a newspaper. With a bitter burning on my tongue, I wrapped it around my groin.
But as dusk fell, so also dissipated the neighbors' interest. I drew up my knees and shut my eyes against the cold. I spent the night remembering.... remembering....
The world had gone mad. At least, it had seemed that way in my part of the world. The climate of homophobia was at the bleakest that I could remember it. The Provincial Council, led by its provost Chairman, had denounced all homo_s_e_x_uals with a hastily improvised decree going out to assemble all known gay men and women, and all known carriers of the virus that caused AIDS, to be marked and set apart as dangerous. Family members were accused of betraying their sons, brothers and husbands to the authorities. In a contagious and contaminating spiral of effects, colleagues at work, as well as friends, did the same.
Betraying loved and trusted ones filled the coffers and this became indispensable at easing the conscience. Thousands of _s_e_x_ually-active gay men and some women, young and old, healthy and sick with one illness or another, were dragged from their homes, hostels and hospitals, bundled into army trucks, bound by cuffs, and then penned up in the Town Hall. The mood of homophobia remained the same, but the penalty had changed: imprisonment and caning had proved archaic and barbaric, a failure as an effective deterrent and, most important, not good for commerce.
For many, suicide was inevitable. Black-market pistols provided the means to snap the thread. Others fled to neighboring provinces and countries when the police and militia were successfully deployed at uncovering hiding places. My mind constructed pictures of a post-modern pogrom as the histrionics were also conspicuously exploited as articulate synopses in the newspapers. In the third week, I knew I could no longer be a disinterested observer insulated within my father's house, a museum posing as fortress.
After rejecting my nurse's peanut congee that signified the passing of another morning, I took a bus ride into the city and in two hours reached the aesthetic Moor-inspired Town Hall that now looked deplorable because of the slaughter that was going on inside. I took possession of a niche behind the police line, an anonymous young man among hundreds of others - church council members, gay rights supporters and human rights activists, health care providers, all united in a pledge of solidarity for those under persecution. Someone pushed a peace-balloon into my palm. I clenched the knotted end nervously.
In the hollow atmosphere of that late morning, I heard loud cries. I heard stories being told and re-told of how, within the walls of the dank building, only a stone's throw from where we stood with our protest banners and symbolic balloons, innocents were stripped naked, forced upon their hands and their naked buttocks laser-marked. Foreheads were shaved before the flesh was incised. There was not even the benefit of anaesthetic. I was depressed, nauseated and filled with pity at the ignorance and superstition of my people. In this state, I broke through the line and found myself forcibly yanked by the nape of my neck from the ever-growing throng and then taken into the Town Hall.
"Wait here," my uniformed captor said to me. "Do not step out of this box."
I looked down at my moccasins and the large chalk-lined cube stenciled onto the floor within which I was told to stay. I remember wondering for a moment what they would do to me if I disobeyed but far more important things than this box were going on in the room. My eyes shifted to my left.
A man, by no means in his first youth, but still very handsome so that I was certain he must have sown some wild oats in his time, was giving his defense before an inquisition. He seemed weary but spoke with a virulence that evinced the torture he had just been put through. Soon after I saw him give a cordial bow to which in reply he was asked if he thought it appropriate to the contrite spirit befitting one that was condemned. He gave only a defiant smile in answer and I could tell from the inquisitor's displeasure that the smile was taken as but a repetition of the scandalous bow. He was interrogated a few more times but always he remained silently calm and unsuppressed. At last, the inquisitor threw down the gauntlet to the man and ordered that he be taken away.
The next time I saw the handsome rebel, he was a different person, somewhat defeated in appearance. He was naked from his waist, and as he was led away, I saw that his shaved buttock cheeks had about as many scars as a village road map. On one of his cheeks were the words in our vernacular, HIV+, on the other HOMO_s_e_x_UAL, both cut deep into his flesh, now bloody repoussed on his skin's surface.
But that was long after I had made my own ingression before the inquisition. For hours I was interrogated. They wanted to know who I was, where I came from, what designs I had. What's your _s_e_x_ual orientation? Are you sympathetic towards homo_s_e_x_uals? Why were you trying to obstruct what was an official duty from being executed? Who sent you? Where are your identification papers? Question after question was served up to me ad nauseam.
By the time they were finished with me, I was exhausted, hungry and sleepy. They had used subterfuge to determine my identity and familial connections. It was late afternoon that I was released unharmed to Father's lackeys, who were told to be sure that Father be informed that I was a sympathizer.
On the way out with Father's assistants, I witnessed two of the instruments of persuasion the central authorities employed to force their prisoners to denounce their homo_s_e_x_uality. I had heard that the State would give the people every possible opportunity of redress. In one cubicle I saw a naked youth running on bare feet in tandem with the ceiling fan that spun at full speed just a foot above his boyish head. He was compliant, although not from lack of wanting to resist. Had he resisted, his penis would have been ostensibly torn with the wire that was crudely strung from its pulled-back hood to one of the twirling blades. He was pale and close to a swoon, his penis reduced to a diminutive semblance of his own youthful mirth.
In another cubicle, a faceless man was bent over while a bicycle pump was inserted into his exposed anus. He entered no plea or confession. His tormentor appeared the more exasperated thus blurring the line between who was the victim and who the victor.
I saw nothing more after this.
And so this was the reason I was now cut off from my family, and from the perversely comforting vicissitudes of family life.
"It's true then, dear God," someone cussed.
I looked up into a face that was ghostly white against the moonlight.
"You," I said.
"You're coming home with me," he said kindly.
Wrapped in a PVC mackintosh, I rode back to Ky's dormitory in his beaten Fiat. As I studied his straight nose, a useful legacy from his French mother, I wondered whether to be grateful for his knack of turning up at my most humiliating of moments. This would not have been the first time he had saved me. But later as he put me to bed, he promised me a spanking the next day that would make all others I had had so far merely token.
He kept his word. Late the following morning, I was dragged from the shower, the shampoo suds on my hair scarcely rinsed out yet.
"Good," Ky said, "you're naked. That'll save us time getting you out of your clothes. And wet, too. That'll add to the pain."
With the blinds drawn, the turn table blaring 'Karma Chameleon', squeaky now from the spoils of time, and the bed sheets newly changed and pulled taut across the four corners of the bed, I was put naked across Ky's laps. I felt him pull my hardened penis out and tuck it between his thighs. I had no chance of escape. I was then spanked. After an hour, my bottom was afire, we were spent, I was repentant and in pain.
"Why?" I wailed stupidly on his shoulders.
"Because you'd promised me not to go near the Town Hall, but you lied," my learned tutor, and on-again off-again boyfriend replied, pushing me onto my stomach to rub the flame out of my bottom. He also took playful jibes at the oleaginous parts of my flanks.
I was crying for the next two hours. Not fair, not fair, I sobbed. Nothing had been fair for as long as I could remember. I was only after all trying to make a difference.
Ky pushed a pen and some scratch paper in my face.
"Write a story about it," he suggested, "as a monument for the rest of us. At least it'll have a purpose, which is more than I can say for the intolerable jeremiad about family that you so obsess about in your current writings."
I turned my nose up at his suggestion. I scattered his papers onto the floor. "I've been told my writing is pompous and self-indulgent. But intolerable! A jeremiad! You hurt me," I snarled.
"Do what you will. But I'm going to get us some lunch," he continued. "By the way, I've spoken to your Papa. He's forgiven you. Oh, and keep the clothes off. I want you to remain naked till I get back, or there's going to be a repeat spanking. "
Much later, between mouthfuls of pizza, I picked up the pen and scattered papers. Chapter One, I wrote.
(Not quite) THE END