Gender rights activists and supporters of LGBTQ community during the Queer Pride Parade in New Delhi on Sunday. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna)
My country took away my childhood dream of marrying the one I love
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It is my sister’s wedding in three days. Everyone is talking about it. I have been able to make the most of my own choices in life, except this one. I chose what I wanted to study and I chose my friends, but I cannot choose her. I cannot choose to marry a woman.
I grew up planning my wedding in India with my family. But India made no plans for a wedding for me. We celebrated the 14th Delhi Queer Pride Parade this Sunday, but just a couple of months ago, the same-sex marriage verdict wrote me off to some other country that would let me marry my partner or simply slashed my name from the list. My sister’s wedding and the verdict conspired to make me write this article about them. My sister’s concerns about her wedding dress, cake, and corsage sound like a privilege to me when ahead of me lies a whole life of secrecy that I must navigate with my partner.
Taking away the right to choose the one I marry also takes away the smile from our faces when we see someone looking at us as we walk, holding hands. It takes away the pleasure of inviting my relatives for dinner to the home I might make with my wife. It takes away the dream of the 12-year-old in me, of getting married in her country and feeling the sense of belongingness that marriage would bring. The verdict took away my partner’s dream of being my partner-in-law.
Growing up, I knew very little about the law but a lot about romance. Movies I watched, fairytales I was told, and people I loved taught me so much about romance and love. I grew up thinking that I would marry who I loved, and who I loved would be a boy.
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Why did no one tell me that the neighbours next door were indeed a couple and not best friends? They were the happiest people I knew when I was 11, and yet they were not allowed to tell me their love story. Everyone believed all along that theirs was perhaps less beautiful than my parents’ love story only because a man chose to spend his life in a forbidden union with another man.
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I ask all these questions today because I am privileged enough to be able to do so. I live in an urban setting with the resources to speak for myself. But a verdict that allows same-sex couples to marry would ensure that queer individuals, regardless of privilege, live a life of normalcy and not of revolt, where marriage stands for love and not protest.
The verdict acknowledged queerness as Indian and thus proved to be an important step forward in the movement to provide equal rights to queer individuals. Acknowledgment is crucial in the process but it cannot be the final step. Years of added discrimination can’t be nullified by the age-old argument that stems from a comparison of today with a time when it was worse.
And so, as much as I am proud of who I am today, I am also scared as I write this. This fear will take a long time to subside, and I will need a lot more from my society to feel accepted and loved.
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The writer is a final-year journalism student at the University of Delhi
