The Homosexual Curry Peddler

Owning up to the reality that maybe you are just not wanted

(Title courtesy of a man who has now blocked me after providing me with this absolutely brilliant moniker.)

I have considered myself relatively apolitical my whole life. However, at this point, I’ve been on enough podcasts to realize that despite my pretenses of self-proclaimed neutrality, I did indeed subscribe to a substantive personal politics for many years. This personal politics was a form of nominal multicultural liberalism combined with an optimistic attitude toward free markets and an equally laissez-faire attitude toward sex.

This political program died in 2020, along with many other things: my dreams of getting engaged to the only man I’ve ever been close enough to do so; my dog who I rescued from certain euthanasia only for him to be hit by an Escalade only six months later; my ability to work at a corporate job helping to the run the largest distributed computing system in the world without falling into regular episodes of exhaustion and binge-eating. Perhaps, as the rest of my life plays out, that such monstrosities occurred at 26 instead of 46 will prove to be an incredible blessing.

The intense grieving period that followed 2020’s multidimensional heartbreak included coping with the reality of an administrative state – of a country I’ve come to love so much – demonstrating their utter abandonment of liberalism proper; whether through their managerial imposition of lockdowns and vaccines, or their victory lap after implementing a groundless prosecution of a sitting US President just a couple years prior. Many of my fellow liberals went through their own dark nights of the soul similar to my own, and when they were ready to pick up the pieces, they, like me, asked: what comes next?

My parents, who are probably stronger American patriots than even I, came to this country – which I’ve proudly been able to call my home for three decades now – during a brief but special window between the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 and The Immigration Act of 1990. They were completely enamored by Ronald Reagan’s vision of pragmatic conservatism that prized industrious global capitalism as a national ethos balanced by an emphasis on the nuclear family as the fundamental social unit of civilization. When they voted for Donald Trump, they did so mostly because they saw in the latter a more boisterous and forward-looking version of the former, amid a polity that had lost its sense of unity and commitment to excellence.

Against the wishes of his parents, my father rejected the girl that was arranged to marry, because he fell head-over-heels for a different one – much more spunky and brilliant – who had entered engineering school, straight out of Catholic college in New Delhi, only a couple years after him. Right after their wedding ceremony, my parents took a brief honeymoon to Europe before landing in Illinois to start their respective PhD programs. It would take over another decade for them to finally be ready to start a family.

Being raised at the height of Millenial America’s self-affirming civic nationalism meant that my job was to take my role as a citizen seriously when participating in public life. This led to an extraordinary balancing act that required me to become an unfairly skilled cultural trapeze artist: raised at home within a fairly strict South Indian Brahmin Orthodoxy, but having a demand placed on me to ingratiate myself to the Protestant norms and attitudes within public school; complying with the edict to perform academically far beyond average as a sacred family value while also climbing the ranks in athletic and musical performance activities that conferred social status among my white peers; and, upon entering puberty, gaining a firm discipline on my burgeoning same-sex attraction that was highly tolerated at home – my parents have always loved me fully for who I am – and with a few close friends, but was met with hostility or ridicule in most other circumstances.

To say that my parents were typical Asian tigers is false; compared to most other Desi parents in my childhood environment, they were positively libertine. Yet, because they were both busy doing what it took to establish a stable career and high reputational capital within our larger local ecosystem, they were hard-pressed to provide any therapeutic support beyond the basics for navigating existential quagmires. This they did well; additionally, my brother and I were never left wanting for any materialities. We both even had the pleasure of accompanying my dad on various international business trips once we were old enough.

I will never be the type of person who pretends that I haven’t lived an extremely privileged – maybe even indulgent – life. Nevertheless, I was left lacking for connection and support at particularly crucial moments by everyone around me which inculcated in me a deep loneliness that persists even within the words I type here. Of course, it probably didn’t help that for much of my adolescence, my father’s alcoholism became both more intense and more hidden. Or that he, the oldest sibling, and the first to claim U.S. citizenship, was responsible for taking care of all four of my aging grandparents and setting his younger siblings up for professional success after their emigration from India: a monumental task for any patriarch.

When I look back at the enormous amount of pressure placed upon me, sometimes, even if only implicitly, to accede to all of these conflicting and contradictory exigencies, I’m honestly quite surprised that I coped nearly half as well as I did while still succeeding in my external duties. At the same time, with the benefit of the rearview mirror, it’s not surprising that by my early 20s, the eating disorder I had unconsciously developed as form a deep rebellion against my lack of freedom – paired with several co-morbid self-harming behaviors – was at the strongest intensity it had ever been. I can still remember the fine spring day during my third year at UChicago when I was fully prepared to follow through on the well-crafted plan to take my own life; the closest out of a handful of ideations that I came to executing.

The fact is that as much as I want to present myself as a dauntless existential trapeze artist who found a way to meet every single expectation, I also failed at my role in the circus at double the rate. In writing this article, I aim to to come to terms with the fact that I have failed once again – this time in particular in the metaphysical high wire act; something that has now been made crystal clear to me by the Christian right in the last few years, and especially the past few weeks here on Substack.