Inflamed with the desire to change the world, my parents moved so much that I felt I lived in a washing machine. Each time I tried to fit in with a new culture or skin tone at school, the spin cycle came on. Human connections seemed pointless, lasting only as long as we remained in town. My sense of estrangement was the only constant, following me like a dependable pet across the years and continents. I felt so hopeless, so in thrall of a mushrooming interior darkness, that my company turned even the most misfit of my fellow students off.
At the time, I didn’t realize that a deeper reason for my malaise lay hidden, something more incendiary than just our frequent relocation. My mother and father remained oblivious—beyond food, shelter, and clothing, they possessed only a hazy awareness of what other nurturing parenthood might involve. The fact that I found it impossible to get bad grades meant my school performance never cued them in on how little I worked or how despondent I became.
In Geneva, on my fourteenth birthday, I straightened out a paper clip and stuck it through my tongue. Then I tried to pierce the end back through again to form a ring, but couldn’t, because of all the blood. I wiped my lips clean and returned to the dining table, where my parents waited, editing book proofs and sipping gamay. Mouth closed until the last instant so nothing dribbled out prematurely, I blew out the candles on my birthday cake.
That finally got their attention. The white of the whipped cream icing provided just the right foil to give the red I contributed a breezily decorative effect. Once we returned from the emergency room, my parents began to notice other things as well—the anti-Arab posters nailed to my wall, the swastika imprinted on my neck, the razor blade by my bed. I listened to them talk late into the night, their shock permeating through the wall. What an amazing notion that all that jetting around may have fucked me up!
Their solution was to move once more. To Mother India this time, which would unscramble my identity, fill my heart with pride in who I was, where I came from. That’s how the young and still impressionable Jaz found himself sitting in the green-walled annex to the Byculla mosque in Bombay, fitted with a skullcap and equipped with a Koran. Each evening, as the adults prayed upstairs, I stared at the paint peeling off the benches, trying to tune out the hadiths being explained by the imam. Could I escape again by piercing some other body part?
Fortunately, my cousin Rahim, who attended the same class, had alternative plans for my edification. My parents, ever pressed for time, arranged for me to spend the evenings at his home afterwards. At sixteen, Rahim not only exceeded me in age but also in girth—I experienced his weight firsthand, each time he sat on me at the end of our wrestling bouts. He insisted we strip down to our underwear like Sumo wrestlers—his sweat marked my body, smelling of whatever spice lingered most dominantly from lunch.
Rahim’s mother had died a decade ago, and his father worked late, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone supervising us. Soon we were undressing completely and wrestling in the buff. I’m not sure if my technique improved or if Rahim simply let me, but I started ending up on top more often than not. My thighs straddling his hips, my seat pressed into his crotch—even though I left his hands free, he never pushed me off. One evening, I had the bright idea of slapping him in the face with my penis as we horsed around. He looked at me strangely, then leaned forward and took me in his mouth.
For an instant, I hung there, suspended over him in alarm. Then I felt someone older, more experienced, take over. This person seemed conversant with the geography of Rahim’s mouth, seemed to know just how fast and how deep to thrust, and how much to pull out. I found my neck arching back, my hands grabbing Rahim’s head as he made soft grunting sounds. Perhaps the person was not as experienced as I thought—before I could stop myself, I had transacted my first orgasm, with my cousin’s mouth.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, survivors of the coming October 19 holocaust or future alien voyagers: this is where my journey takes its most dramatic turn! The before and after, the B.C. and the C.E., the divine revelation that swept away all my baggage from the past. Suddenly I didn’t feel hopeless, suddenly I found myself in control, suddenly the answers to all my questions popped and burst like fireworks. My identity flashed on, my confidence powered up, the path to my fulfillment in life blazed in the sun.
Over the next few weeks, Rahim and I poked and probed and plumbed. We matched appendages to orifices in every combination that sprang to our fevered minds. Dispensing with the wrestling, we dove directly each evening into racking up the notches on the bedpost (not to mention the sofa, the dining table, the kitchen stool, even the telephone stand, before it broke). The arduousness of some of our experiments eased appreciably when we discovered the lubrication properties of pantry ingredients. (Jam was too sticky, butter worked better than mayonnaise, but nothing rivaled the glissance of pure ghee.)
My parents couldn’t stop beaming—how eagerly I trotted off to class every evening, how well their mosque experiment seemed to be working. (They even published a paper on this, “Therapeutic self-affirmative effects of religious instruction on troubled youth,” soon after.) The fact that I’d begun paying attention to my physique was an added bonus. “Healthy mind, healthy body—just like the Book says,” my father remarked, each morning he saw me performing calisthenics. In reality, roles had begun to emerge in my after-curricular activity—clearly, I was the boinker, Rahim the eternal boinkee. If I wanted to fit my emerging self-image, it behooved me to start pumping up.
A year and a half later, little remained of the boy from Geneva with the paper clip in his tongue—in his place stood the Jazter, virile, self-assured, buff (not yet, but working on it). Buoyed by my recovery, my parents again succumbed to wanderlust. Rahim had become too attached, boinking him too rote, so I felt ready to move on as well. What better place to complete my education than the great cruising expanses of America?
We ended up in Chicago. It didn’t take long for me to notice the line of men lounging in their cars (all potential teachers) as I skateboarded past after school in Lincoln Park. Some of them took me along to the baths near the Loop, where I tried out threesomes and foursomes, to see how high I could go. The conspicuousness of my skin tone (which, while never debilitating, had often made me self-conscious in school) worked wonders for the trick count—I even switched v’s and w’s to accentuate my South Asian origins. Occasionally, high on Quaaludes, I spent a Sunday afternoon romping with the runaways at the bird sanctuary (even at my most stoned, though, I took care to protectively glove the Jaz-in-the-box). On a trip to San Francisco with my parents, I sneaked out to an all-night orgy in the Castro, making them wonder the next morning what had tired me so. As a side benefit to all these extracurricular opportunities, I felt easier and more relaxed around my classmates—in fact, I even initiated a few.
The two years I spent in the U.S. were like finishing school. I learnt etiquette and protocol, the right amount of sauna small-talk (both before and after), the polite way to guide a pelvis into the position I preferred. More importantly than picking up such lifetime skills, I liberated myself from doubt or shame. Sex was my true calling, my raison d’être—as guilt-free as yoghurt, as natural as rain. Such was the self-affirming sweetness of those days that looking back, even my most brazen exploits seem choreographed by Norman Rockwell himself. There I stand, above the mantle, in adorable congress with someone picked up at the baths, and on the wall of the dining room, the kitschy tableau, “Jaz gets blown in the park.”