When my nephew came into our lives, he was only five years old. Since then there is no turning back. It has been a joyful relationship for me and my husband. We have always enjoyed his company. I not only like him, but also I am an admirer. With the background he has, one has to admire his spirit in going about everything in his life. He just doesn’t come from an ordinary Indian orthodox family. He comes from a PRIEST family. I am sure the reader can grasp the intensity of the heat this beautiful human being has gone through and still going through.
As a child, I have always seen him as a cheerful and focused person. He is the first boy in his family to go beyond high school. Because his parents do not have the educational background, and especially, they are unable to understand the ways of the West, I have seen my nephew come up in life on his own. There was no guidance. And there was no understanding either. But my nephew did not come out of the heat as a burnt out individual in life, instead he came out as a pure Gold, with full of integrity.
Now, universe is making him to go through another fiery test as to how he would integrate his personality in his new identity as an out gay person. I have no doubts in the positive outcome as he has already demonstrated in so many ways.
Let me talk about my feelings even before my nephew revealed to us about his sexual identity. More than a decade ago, couple of times I had a passing judgemental thought that the suffering the LGBT community has is self-created. Books by Donald Walsch knocked me on my head. And in addition, in one of those self-reflective moments I realized I was the creator of my own suffering. And here I am having a judgemental thought about another human being. From that moment on I had no problem in accepting anybody as such.
There is also another dimension to it. Why can’t, we Hindus, accept the LGBT community? We worship ‘Ardhanareeshwara’, the God whose half-body is male and other half is female. We worship God Ayyappa who is the son of Shiva and Vishnu, both male. But we have disdainful attitude towards this community. We come across as a bunch of hypocrites who make the invisible and intangible as divine but treat it’s creation as devil.
When my newphew came to us revealing about his true self-identity, it didn’t come to me as a surprise. I had been suspecting it for sometime. But it didn’t make any difference. It was a privilege to know he trusted us to be open to us. A throbbing artist in him, as a singer and dancer he is always alive. In whatever part of the world he is, however busy he is, a “hello” from him is never a lapse. The moments we have spent in laughing are very precious to us. And we always look for more. We know he never disappoints us. My nephew’s name befits him…not just a king, a happy king.