The following is an excerpt from the new book Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake by Komail Aijazuddin, available now from Abrams Press.
Senior year found me as alone at home as at school. Both my sisters now lived abroad, so it was only me with my parents in the house. I locked myself in my bedroom to better focus on the raging anxiety of SAT prep and US college applications in solitude. It helped that my eldest sister was going to be married in spring, and my parents were preoccupied with planning the event. I worked on my applications as best I could and sent them off with hopeful excitement. On the windy spring night of the actual wedding several months later, I fell spectacularly ill with a stomach flu. South Asian stomach bugs are not mild conditions, the kind of serene illnesses that allow you to recline gracefully on a Victorian fainting couch while kindly matrons press bottles of smelling salts up to your nose. No, these are intestinal demons that turn your toilet into Chernobyl.
I returned from the hospital a mere hour before that night’s mehndi was due to start, still retching but somewhat rested after a restorative IV drip. My father was outside arguing with the florists while my mother was sitting on the living room couch chanting into a mound of dough, performing a spell her grandmother gave her to keep rain away on important occasions, which, judging by the dark clouds swirling outside, wasn’t working spectacularly well. The house felt tense, as it usually did around special occasions. This was the first wedding in our immediate family. Everyone was nervous.
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By 2002 Pakistan had moved on from Pulse Global tapes. Three years earlier, yet another overweight military dictator named Musharraf had couped his way to the crown (a chronic illness) and then used unending televised speeches to convince the nation that this had not been a Shitty Thing for him to do. Because of the vast reservoirs of money and temporary importance Bush’s War on Terror would shortly confer on Pakistan and its power-hungry army, the country, for the most part, agreed.
Many changes quickly followed: The single state-run channel Pakistan TV was now joined by hundreds of new channels that blossomed under more lenient media laws. Newspapers flourished, TV serials bloomed, and flamboyant fashion designers sent skinny models down lopsided runways, convinced without evidence that every stiletto stomp was a slap against the rising tide of extremism pouring in from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
At home, a gold-trimmed wedding tent was erected in the empty plot next to our house and, after throwing up a few times in the flower beds, I joined my family in the receiving line to greet the hundreds of guests streaming inside wearing their best diamonds and brightest silks.
I cannot stress enough to you how central weddings are to Pakistani culture. They are the Diana to our Supremes, the Dorothy to our Golden Girls, they put the Fun in Fundamentalism. Ever since Pakistan banned booze in the seventies as a short-sighted concession to the religious right (that one would subsequently have to deal with them entirely sober apparently never occurred to anyone), weddings are essentially all we do. Given that non-Muslims are technically allowed to buy alcohol in the country, there are actually some good distilleries in Pakistan. My favorite local spirit is called Murree’s Sapphire gin. From a distance, it designed to look like a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, but a closer inspection confirms that this Ms. Sapphire fell on hard times, pawned her larger jewels for rent, and now works at a plastic recycling plant sorting discarded take-out containers. I love it anyway because with Murree gin it’s not the glass bottle but the alcohol itself that is dyed a bright, incandescent blue.
If you drink enough your pee turns turquoise the next day. When people discover that Pakistan doesn’t serve alcohol legally, they either imagine a romanticized Prohibition-era cocktail orgy or else a dry tundra of judgmental teetotalers. The truth is less romantic than either. The generation that grew up before the ban speaks nostalgically of glittering masquerade balls held at private clubs and champagne flute dinners at hotel bars, nearly always airily glossing over their generation’s active role in the loss of all those things. The rest of us in the prohibitive present are forced to rely on jumpy, overpriced bootleggers. Most of them come in their own transport, nondescript vehicles cleverly retrofitted with smugglers holes so that police checkpoints won’t spot the whiskey bottle hidden behind the rearview mirror. Others are more inventive, like the elderly man who could produce bottles of chilled Grey Goose from within his wooden leg. At times like that, when you’re paying wildly inflated prices for a bottle of vodka that traveled to you in an appendage, needing a drink in the Islamic Republic can feel like being the only incurable resident at the Betty Ford clinic.
Pakistan has little public life that doesn’t involve clapping for the armed forces or God, so a well-planned wedding fulfills the function of a matchmaking event, disco, restaurant opening, corporate retreat, nightclub, school prom, dance recital, fashion show, charity fete, and, in the case of the better ones, an open bar.
Unlike some of the marriages, desi weddings are not short affairs. It’s quite normal for a single couple to invite you to up to eight ceremonies—more if you’ve actually met either of them—and the numbers add up quickly. Say you’re in your midtwenties (#itgetsbetter) and you know six couples getting married one year. That’s already forty-eight individual events, all overlapping with one another in the span of four manic, overdressed December weekends (only the very rich or the very mad get married in the summer heat, often to each other). By the end of the wedding season, it feels like you’ve been gangbanged by sequins.
Given the centrality of getting hitched, it’s not that surprising that the first movie to show an upper-middle-class South Asian family on-screen with any measure of realism also revolved around a, you guessed it, wedding. Most Bollywood movies descend into the nauseating pit of nuptials, of course, but something about sari-clad brides forced to lip-synch on Swiss glaciers makes one doubt realism is a guiding principle. Monsoon Wedding was different—a realistic, tense, joyous explosion of a film that was set in a world so deeply familiar to me that watching it left me feeling less seen than caught. The bride’s younger brother in the movie, to pluck a triggering petal from the marigolds, was also a pudgy, effeminate English-speaking brown kid whose love of dance and cooking made his doting parents question his sexuality.
“He’s just like you,” mothers across South Asia commented to their closeted sons.
“Mmmm,” we all mumbled back. No one ever talked about that character being gay per se. No one ever talked about being gay at all, really, even though I saw more homosexual desire around me than not. It was perfectly normal, for instance, to see two boys at school or two men on the street in Lahore walking together with their hands intertwined like lovers. For an unmarried heterosexual couple to do the same was, by comparison, nearly unthinkable. College professors later called places like Morocco, Pakistan, and India “homosocial environments,” societies where the cultural separation of genders meant public affection between men became an act of social conformity to segregation rather than any conscious declaration of an individual sexual identity. In places like these, the segregation confers a sense of plausible deniability on homosexual relationships. After all, hiding in plain sight is one of the ways that queer people can live with some measure of agency in repressive states the world over (how else do you think we got through the Middle Ages?). How can you be gay where gayness doesn’t exist?
This lazy conceit works right up until boys are expected to marry, which is usually when things fall spectacularly to pieces. Most of the gay men I know in Pakistan, even Western-educated, quasi-liberal ones living in the twenty-first century—unclench, I’m not outing you—are intent on marrying women. These men rarely call themselves gay (though enough of their ex-wives do) because to do that would require an acknowledgment of a reality they’ve worked extraordinarily hard to deny. It’s sad but not incomprehensible that in a feudal country where most people are raised in clannish joint-family systems (a euphemism for when codependency becomes a parenting strategy), a homosexual man would choose to conform to the social contract rather than confront it and risk expulsion. Some do it to maintain their hold on family properties, others do it because of intense self-loathing, but most do it because they know no other way to live. There are some exceptions, mostly gay men from the upper classes who wrap themselves in the embroidered privilege of their position to live their lives with some measure of authenticity. They are tolerated because they are not seen as a threat so much as neutered courtiers in this cruel kingdom. I used to think of closeted men in South Asia like the White Witch from Narnia: angry, frigid queens trapped inside vast closets where it was always winter but never Christmas. We’ve never gotten along. They think I’m dangerous and naive, I think they’re cowards and hypocrites, resentful only that they can’t take on a more powerful role in the patriarchal system that oppresses us both. Homophobia is, I assure you, not exclusive to straight people.
Excerpt from the new book Manboobs: A Memoir of Musicals, Visas, Hope, and Cake by Komail Aijazuddin published by Abrams Press ©2024.
