And already I’m fourteen… and now I am fifteen. What was I doing all those years? I was in my cage, studying, reading, only occasionally joining my cousins outside. The library in my grandfather’s room that my grandmother had so reverently packed with arthritic hands, then unboxed and displayed in the new house as a marker of our learnedness was full of Russian literature, history, psychology, religion. And in the layer of books behind them: Russian porn, anthologies of erotica, books on the psychology of sex. In the shelf above the Quran were the anonymized confessions of Victorian whores, Olympia Press high art porn, fervid novels by Burroughs, Miller, volumes of de Sade, Anaïs Nin, The Story of O. There were cross-cultural histories of fetishes, and The Notes of a Sex Psychologist. I guess in some ways this library did prove the collector’s erudite taste. But then there was no shortage either of paperbacks with obscene covers, collections of lewd limericks, and the exploits of three nymphos in the Urdu pulp called Haye! Mein Mar Gayi. I left Pushkin and Tolstoy musting on the shelf and instead thumbed through the serialized Adventures of a Moscow Dandy. This is how I improved my English, reading smut like, In the dacha, the muzhik relinquished all inhibition. With callused hands he kneaded my arse. His excitable staff…
How serious I was, reading these sentences. I obsessed over who else had read them—that was part of the thrill. Who had bought these books and from where? It had to be the grandfather I’d never met. Or maybe my small uncle? My other uncle rarely managed to finish the newspaper. Ammi, who squirreled banknotes in old socks, would be far more secretive. As for my grandmother, I only ever saw her read in Urdu, mostly religious books and translations of Muslim history written by British orientalists.
So that’s what I was doing on those studious afternoons: stealing from the bookshelf, locking myself in the bathroom, or hiding in the backyard with my cousin where we read together and used the dictionary to find the meaning of “areolae,” “clit,” “impale,” “mound of Venus,” “parsimonious,” “pecker.” It was while reading a fantasy of Greek gods “buggering” each other on Mt. Olympus that I found the word “rape,” and then there it was in the dictionary, the same as the name for a seed.
I started peddling these books in school. In ninth and tenth grade, many of us didn’t have internet at home, or weren’t allowed access to it. My lending library became a great success. To quote a line from Haye! Main Mar Gayi: Their budding youth was at its climax. And in the wake of this “budding youth,” many other boys also turned away from football and cricket during sports period to chat up the girls in secret corners, watchful of teachers on duty who patrolled the corridors. There could be serious consequences for boys and girls found together outside class. A couple was even expelled for bunking class to sneak out on a date at Dunkin’ Donuts. But we were hungry, even the meek among us.
In the bathroom at school, you could always find a gaggle of boys styling each other’s hair into spikes, rolling up their sleeves. Shehbaz and Aslam puffed cigarettes in the stalls. We grew out our hair, though it was against the rules. If the usual fines didn’t work, the school would call a barber who’d snip off the most egregious fringes and spikes. Still, we strolled the school, arms around each other’s shoulders, slumped against each other, grabbed each other’s nipples, let out exaggerated moans when someone touched us. It was all play, a new sport.
This was a typical exchange in the boy’s bathroom: Oy, Ibbu, you took my comb.
You want me to give it to you?
Yeah, sisterfucker. Give it back. Give—
No need to beg for it. Turn around and tell me which hole you want me to give it to you in?
You should ask your mother which hole she took it in last night.
This kind of “juggat bazi” went on and on, and involved unsuspecting farm animals, politicians, teachers, imaginary sisters, dead patriarchs, and so on. These boys had picked this banter from the recordings of bawdy stage comedies that aired late at night on local cable channels. It’s easy to imagine why the books of erotica appealed to them—even if many of them couldn’t string together a complex sentence in English—and why they eagerly waited three years for the day we’d study human reproduction in O-level Biology. Almost none of these boys would have sex until marriage. None were “allowed” to have girlfriends, and many wouldn’t even kiss a girl until their wedding night.