The Events that Shaped Me

My mom and dad had an arranged marriage in the typical Indian fashion. Soon after they were wedded, my dad got a job in the USA as a typical Indian techie in a typical multinational company. The mom, coming from a lower middle class family, first educated woman in the clan, gave up her dreams of a lectureship and flew with my dad to Seattle. My older sister was born a year later in 1994. I was a late child, an effort to save their failing marriage, born in 2001. For a time, the little experiment that was me worked. Things returned to normal. My mom became cheerier, coming out of her gloom, having left behind her whole family, friends and aspirations behind in India. But she never did get used to the American way of life. 

A few years later, in my preteen years, I was perhaps just starting puberty, at 12, that my parents began to fight again. I did not find out until later that my mom and dad, both had been engaged in affairs for years. My dad, as a result, became more and more distant. I began discovering my sexuality by other, unhealthy means- namely, porn. Being from an Indian family, I never was very open with my friends (mainly other Indian kids) about sex. I gradually came to accept, by the age of 14, that I was gay. My parents divorced soon after. My mother got custody of the kids along with a hefty alimony. My dad moved out. My mom lost interest in her boyfriend of 4 years and dumped him, and homesickness and perhaps loneliness compelled her to move us back to India.

My mom, the only daughter of middle class parents, with her alimony and her new job as a lecturer in a local college, had become a wealthy woman in her own right. In India, we lived in one of the posh localities of the capital and I went to one of the best schools in the city.

In all this, I forgot to tell about my sister. She had been studying medicine in the USA but as my parents' marriage imploded, so did her academic excellence. My beautiful older sister, after relocating to India to be with me and mom, began pursuing a Bachelor in Biology from a small local college, back from the basics, not having bothered to transfer her credits to India. She began sleeping with every type of man she could lay her hands on and she was not discreet about it. My mom, her Indian prudish upbringing tempered by her time in the US, allowed her much leeway in this regard, as long as she took precautions to not get pregnant or contact STIs. Now, in hindsight, her behaviour, I understand, was a coping mechanism, her having seen many more happier days of our parents marriage than I did.

In India, I arrived still a virgin. Child of tall handsome parents and brother to a tall beautiful sister, I was the runt of the family. And a chubby one at that, hairy all over, with thick matting of hair covering every surface of my body. I had a thick beard at 16 already. Indians are a hairy people after all. I rather looked 26 than my actual 16.

We settled into a routine in India. Life amongst the privileged in India was no less comfortable than our life in the USA. I made a few new friends, all sons of corrupt politicians. My mom and sister did their own thing.

But too much background. Let's dive head first into the story now. 

A couple years after we arrived in India, our life fundamentally changed. On her deathbed, my grandmother made my mom promise to remarry. Everyone thought, in the typical Indian fashion, that a household couldn't function without a grown man, which, at 18, I was apparently not. They even believed that I needed a strong father figure in my life, my real father having been absent from much of it and now largely disappeared from our lives. My mom, low key, agreed. She had caught me masturbating quite a few times and seen the gay porn folder on my personal computer. To save me from the corrupting influence of homosexuality, she agreed to marry. 

After a frantic search, a suitable groom was found. Tall, fair of complexion, athletic and fit, my stepdad was a man of dreams, his fitness not fading even at 42. The catch, he also had two teenage sons, one my age and the other a couple years older, who would come to live with us, both as fit and hunky as my stepdad.

My stepdad's was a story of riches to rags. Despite being a sensible man after we met him, he had ruined himself due to his alcoholic ways in his youth, and spent all his inheritance from his rich parents. As a result, he had lived the life of a lower middle class man, a high school teacher, for years.

My life changed after my mom and stepdad married. My mom, largely busy with her work, left my step dad in charge of the children. He was a fair man, perhaps wary of falling into the negligent step parent trope, he treated me and my sister in the same way that he did his sons. We would come to understand that it was not always a good thing.

Story to begin in the earnest in the next part.