Where Harold met Hanif

Eunuch Park brings back memories of the reviewer's growing-up and going-down years

Where Harold met Hanif

Eunuch Park brings back memories of the reviewer's growing-up and going-down years

Eunuch Park
Author: Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 250

Growing up in Kolkata pre-cable TV and post-Maruti 800, my only passports to adult fun were old issues of Debonair magazine bought from dusty bookstores in Free School Street and Harold Robbins novels. Sex wasn't education, whether at home or in school, and you had to dig Robbins to know how to seduce women older than you, and how to do it in ways that would even make the back-benchers blush. Debonair centre-spreads were more real and more effective and a single issue would keep us all happy for weeks.

The characters of Palash Krishna Mehrotra's Eunuch Park, a collection of 15 stories of love and destruction, as the writer puts it, are mostly from that period, the Eighties that is, when sex wasn't a click away. And you had to wait long and wait patiently for the real thing. Most often, in vain. It turned poets into pimps and boys into men.

Take The Farewell. A heartbroken teenager turns a cynic and a go-between. "...I was heartbroken. I vowed never to fall in love. I became a professional go-between. My standard charge was two Pepsis for every card passed. The Pepsis had to be paid in advance. Allahabad was full of schoolboys who possessed neither the courage nor the language skills to get their message across. At Flynn's Coaching Centre I would take on the responsibility and the risk of passing other people's cards."

Or the desperate search for a make-out spot by a young couple in Eunuch Park. "She lives with her parents. His hostel does not allow girls. The art school she attends is walking distance from Mandi House. The art galleries around Mandi House are mostly empty in the afternoons. They spend many hours there, kissing, groping, walking hand in hand." For this generation, it may not be hard work to get between the sheets, but for growing up in middle-class homes in the Eighties it was a different story.

But Eunuch Park is not just about growing-up pangs. Without warning the stories take on a darker hue, delving deep into the inner recesses of tortured minds. The focus is on the butterfly generation, which incidentally is the name of a book on new India Mehrotra is working on, that gets everything easy, has no role models to look up to, no social responsibilities whatsoever and no existential angst to suffer.

Like the first story of the collection, Dancing with Men, where a bored man with no fixed address goes dancing with other men to while away time. "It's a black Honda scooter. I sit in the middle. The man in front, the one in the driver's seat, smells of sweat. The one behind me, the one riding pillion, has got his penis adjusted along the upper crack of my backside. I am going dancing with men." Boredom, drugs, quickies, violence. Some of Mehrotra's heroes resemble characters from Hanif Kureishi's London novels. But then again the butterfly generation is not just an Indian phenomenon. They are here, there, everywhere, in the dark shadows of Eunuch Parks.

A riveting account of men and manners.

Pick it up.