Utopia / Utopia - Armaan Kapur

Content Note: internalized and external homophobia

At twenty one, the confession created a spasm in my mother’s eye. 

Inside cognisance, an image was breaking, alternatively transforming; the craters clashed and ruptured in silence, the little open mouth of speechlessness was insinuating something indelicate (grotesque is the curl of the lip that knows no answer). Incognito the unspoken fears swept up in my own words, that stuttered incipient incompetent and incoherent-ly, I had no defence for myself, in fact, I had been looking for some way into exoneration / tolerance of the very thing I didn’t understand, so I went to Her, who manoeuvred the decades with her silk flourishes of confidence, her encompassing axiom of the made-up face, besides the good / expensive lipstick, and her ostensible lack of scars, she had lived through her own stigma of incomprehension as a young subversive and somehow survived, and thereby was competent in my mind at narrativizing that which was incomprehensible hence brutish, and hailing such gushes of credence I took my mother aside, the night before the crucial segue, I perched her on the edge of my bed, ‘I need to tell you something—’ I somehow managed it.

It was atypical / abnormal certainly, to reveal your identity / lifestyle before the deed was done; the culprit typically waited until after, perhaps for years, or an entire lifetime, at least in the stories I heard / thoughtlessly regurgitated (all a whisper, anyway, like a beaded curtain or the fringe of an ignorant estimation – the low whistle of caution arrived, I looked over my shoulder, it was apparently gone). Across an ocean of youth, actualisation of my sexual identity was a lighthouse that blinked in the mental recess; warning signs accrued dust from my unwillingness to recollect a deeper adolescence, as floating / swept as I was in the cadence of my peers. Under their apple trees, Cautionary Tales were the asphyxiating antithesis of the Fairy Tale resolved, and it was an irony of meaning / phraseology that my desire somehow defined my distaste. 

Terminology and its consequent elocution were capable of determining outcomes; evidently, the warning spilled out of me, concurrent to the moment of confession. I didn’t need a lightkeeper then to dissuade further action, because I was myself dissuaded, and had known all this while what would happen if I took that final step, and yet, only to reconfirm to myself that I was indeed brutish, gross, and alive, desirous, I went for that first date, and had that first kiss, the hand-in-hand, blooming callouses of insecurity against the frictional tree trunk in the public park at midnight, and something else too, the nausea of same-sex attraction, impermissible on the dawn of self-awareness, but I did it anyway, against the order of nature* I was an assailant unto the Self, desperate to be included, to stake my claim in the beach as a model / representative image of society’s purported equality of right to self-detestation. 

The utopia / utopia I anchored myself in, proved not to be a Plumerian eu-topos of bounty of equivalence, as I’d envisioned, but instead, it was an ou-topos that signified diminution, of finding your journey’s end in a darkened no-place, having strived quite determinedly to become the King of No-Thing. Impoverished or enlightened, I sat down in the shade of this underworld and recorded the entire mess in words, with the hope that I might be exhumed eventually, and so accomplish a second life – inside the clenched fist of some stranger’s adulation. 

END 

* Indian Penal Code, 1860. Section 377. Unnatural offences. Life (or equivalent) imprisonment for voluntary carnal intercourse against ‘the order of nature’. 

Originally published by Mason Jar Press in special print issue "Transitions" (edited by Tara Campbell), 2023

Armaan Kapur (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist and clothing designer from India. His prose has appeared in Cutleaf Journal, The Reader Berlin, Chestnut Review, Helter Skelter Magazine, and elsewhere. His current project, a novel, revisits his time as a queer entrepreneur in the New Delhi fashion circuit. Find his work at armaankapur.com.