9781529929386 by Smakprov Media AB

manboobs

a memoir of musicals, visas, hope, and cake a very queer memoir

komail aijazuddin

abrams press, new york

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Komail Aijazuddin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBNs

9781529929386 hb

9781529929393 tpb

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I dedicate this book to you, with the hope that in reading my story you may find the strength to tell your own.

Our love is God.

from Heathers: The Musical

Author’s n ote

By the time you reach the tap-dancing breasts, you will probably have pieced together that this book is more than a mere retelling of my life. Names and identifying characteristics have been changed and some conversations have been re-created from memory. Please accept the following pages as more true than real. Now that we’ve dispensed with business, let me just say: Hello, welcome, I love what you’re wearing, and I’ve been waiting to meet you for a very long time.

“Tits A nd A ss!” i s A ng, mimicking the blond dancer on-screen singing about her breast augmentation. “Can change your life! They sure changed mine!”

“Perhaps,” my grandmother said from behind her steaming tea cup, “A Chorus Line isn’t an appropriate movie for a four-year-old.”

“He just likes the dancing,” my mother assured her as I pranced off our dining table in perfect synchronicity to the lyrics “debutante or chorus girl or wife.”

Like many gay boys (we sometimes answer to “old souls”), I adored dance movies growing up, but A Chorus Line, that Lycra love letter to leg warmers, was singularly fabulous. A movie version of the hit 1970s Broadway musical, A Chorus Line tells the daylong story of a group of backup dancers auditioning for their big break in front of a famous choreographer played by Michael Douglas, who doesn’t dance in the film but still looks mortified through most of it anyway.

I spent years perfecting my lip sync to the blond girl’s racy number “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three,” my favorite from the soundtrack not simply because the song has the phrase “tits and ass” in it but also because the woman in the movie who sang it wore a flesh-toned bikini, high heels, and, for reasons best explained by the 1980s, a

black buckled belt. I desperately wanted to be her. But other than mosquitoes, Lahore had no real leg warmers to speak of, and so I’d strip down to my Superman underwear and secretly wear my mother’s silver stilettos over an old pair of fuchsia woolen socks that slumped around my ankles with pleasing period-piece accuracy.

“Perhaps a cartoon would be better,” my mother said.

A Chorus Line was a holy text ever relevant no matter my age, which I suppose is often the case with adult movies one sees young. I was eight, for instance, before I learned that “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three” was actually a song about body dysmorphia and not, as I’d suspected, an ode to young motherhood; it wasn’t until acne slapped me that I realized the youngest dancer singing the word “gonorrhea” as a Gregorian chant was really singing about puberty; and it took an argument with a woman dressed as a carrot at a 50 Cent concert in Montreal for me to finally recognize the character who falls down in the third act was a drag queen. The movie holds up. Even now, whenever I watch the ensemble cast singing in harmony about having sex in a graveyard interrupted only by saxophone solos and wisps of hairspray, I think, What child wouldn’t love this?

My favorite character wasn’t Ms. Tits, though; it was Sheila, the ancient thirty-year-old dancer who took aspirins by wee fistfuls and chain-smoked with blow-dried abandon. Sheila reminded me of the women I saw around me in Pakistan, those thin-lipped, well-coiffed, razor-tongued aunties who sat morosely at dinner parties puffing mutinously on their tenth Silk Cut in cynical silence, both prisoners and patrons of our shared patriarchal penitentiary. Sheila too had that look of resigned depression buttressed by designer perfume.

My early exposure to American musical theatre—in the name of the Fiddler, The Phantom, and The Wiz, amen—was probably a result of my parents’ relative age rather than any deliberate curation, but I happily grew up on a diet of old Hollywood musicals and original

Manboobs cast recordings. It later came as a slight shock to discover how much of a gay cliché my interests were considered when I finally moved abroad, but my deep familiarity with Broadway tunes freaked out enough white gay men to be well worth the time.

“How did you even watch A Chorus Line in Pakistan?” a hipster named something unforgivable like Hunter might ask me in a dimly lit Brooklyn restaurant. From his expression you’d think I just revealed I ran a low-end wine bar in Kabul called Bacon ’n’ Booze.

“We had VCRs in Pakistan . . .”

“Isn’t Pakistan against, you know . . . musicals?” This he whispered with a worried sideways glance, as if an errant suicide bomber was mere moments away from jumping out from behind the retro jukebox with the words Death to Liza scrawled in Arabic across his angry forehead in blood and lipstick.

“Only Starlight Express,” I replied, but Hunter didn’t get the joke. Of course, what he was really asking was: “How were you gay in Pakistan?”

But after twenty years in and out of New York City, I also recognized the more fundamental prejudices hiding behind his incredulity: When did you begin your journey to our deliverance? How did you see the light of our rainbow from inside one of those dark brown countries that hate freedoms? Where does a gay-brown-Pakistani-American man like you fit in here anyway? Are you with us or against us?

No one likes to be reduced to a string of epithets to explain their infinite splendor, but to paraphrase Toni Morrison, everyone has to hyphenate in America unless you’re white. Hyphens are the price of my admission through the gates of the American dream, and also why after two decades I still feel perpetually outside its vague but promised deliverance. I grew up being told I was too gay to be Pakistani, so I left, only to be told I was too Pakistani to be gay. Eventually I reconciled that no matter how many Broadway tunes I knew or pop

culture references I recognized, a vital part of me would never be accepted, no matter where in the world I was.

I’m not sure when exactly in my childhood I internalized the belief that it was fundamentally wrong for me to find love, but in the late eighties the world was as hostile to queers as it was to minimalist makeup. TV and movies both assured me that the answer to the unending question of my gayness—the answer to any question, really—was waiting in the United States of America. There, and only there, would I be free, accepted, and loved. It would take three decades, two passports, and an unfortunate perm to discover that homophobia is no more a problem solved by geography than any other kind of hatred, and in the meantime I unwittingly carried the weight of other people’s expectations wherever I went (yes, Hunter, even into Brooklyn). It’s taken my entire life to learn how to put that weight down, and it will take the rest of my life to keep it there.

So, if you must know how I “loved musicals” in Pakistan, the question you’re really asking is how I found the courage to be myself no matter where I was. The short answer is “exquisite tailoring.” The long answer is in your hands.

Chapter 1 s ingul A r s ens A tion

“It’s my toy!” i shouted, but Tara snatched the tiny plastic mermaid out of my hand and squatted in the corner of her room like a venomous toad.

“You shouldn’t even have a mermaid doll!” Tara snarled. “Mermaids are for girls. Are you a girl?”

“It’s still mine,” I reminded her for the record. There is always a record.

“I’m going to tell everyone you’re a girl then!” she said. “Komail is a girl! Komail is a girl! Komail is a girl!”

“You’re adopted,” I said, watching helplessly as Tara mangled the mermaid fins I’d spent the last half hour molding into an arc of graceful whimsy. “I hope you know that.”

The surly spawn of family friends, Tara was my only playmate when we first moved to Lahore, but even at five she was an insufferable little shit. I tolerated her because playing with Tara allowed me unfettered access to everything a girly gay boy could need but never buy: Rainbow Brite cassette tapes, My Little Pony figurines, Disney princess makeup tables, a sorority of Barbies, and even a Malibu dollhouse complete with sun deck and the optional jacuzzi. Tara’s company was the abusive price I paid for access to these wonderful

things, not unlike the inane conversations one has to endure with talkative pot dealers at college (“No, Kyle, no one actually cares what you think about communism. Put the weed on the table and fuck off back to your incense sticks”). Tara would unleash torrential temper tantrums if I so much as looked at her toys, and her nanny, an early believer that screens make the best babysitters, always suggested a movie to calm things down.

“No!” Tara screamed. “I don’t want him to choose the movie.”

“Tara!” said the nanny in a honey-dipped voice. “Be nice to your guest and you can have some ice cream!”

“OK,” Tara said later, glaring at me from behind two scoops of chocolate gelato. “Which cartoon do you want to watch, guest?”

Like most elections in Pakistan, movie time was a rigged event, and so this next bit took some planning and not a small amount of thespian commitment.

“Let me think . . . what could we watch today . . . hmmm . . . something with fighting, of course . . . and it has to have guns . . . perhaps tanks . . . oh, I know! Why don’t we see . . . G.I. Joe!” I already knew that Tara hated army cartoons, despite the bowl cut that made her look like a Russian henchman named Boris.

“NO!” she screamed. “No! No! No! I want to see—”

“Don’t say The Little Mermaid!” I moaned, clutching my ears like an extra in Doctor Zhivago wailing against the bitter injustices of this cold life. “Don’t you dare say The Little Mermaid. Please not The Little Mermaid. ANYTHING BUT THE LITTLE MERMAID!”

“I want to see,” Tara said, her boss eye aflame with cruelty, “The Little Mermaid!”

Bull’s-eye.

Obviously, Tara wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. She grew up to develop a buffet of eating disorders and eventually married a closeted gay man, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Manboobs

After the cartoon, we reenacted the best bits, Tara wrapping a red towel around her head to play Ariel because “it’s my house” and me having to play the hunky but problematic Prince Eric, forced to chase her in mock desire as she wriggled on the carpet like a leech with a sex addiction. But it wasn’t until we got to the parts of the villainous plus-size Queen of Calamari that is Ursula the sea witch that I could give my truly command performances.

“One shouldn’t lurk in doorways,” I’d purr in my huskiest drawl, unfurling myself from behind the bathroom door with aquatic grace. “It’s . . . rrrrrrrrrrrude.” Tara would scream and run to hide in her parents’ room, finally leaving me alone in the spotlight to sing the entirety of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” to her now utterly terrified caregiver.

Like A Chorus Line’s Sheila, Ursula the sea witch was a beloved early addition to my personal pantheon of strong women with smoker’s coughs. Maybe it was because Disney had based her character on the real-life drag queen Divine; or maybe it was because, like me, she too was voluminously fat, wildly misunderstood, and had a manic fondness for other people’s accessories. Whatever it was, watching her tentacles float across my screen, I felt a ping of familiarity that bordered on the supernatural. When Ursula tries to electrocute Ariel at the end of the movie for reneging on their contractually binding agreement, I’d always think, Now that’s a woman who knows her worth.

Every queer person born before 2010 had to be a self-taught cultural archaeologist as a child, forced as we were to sift through compacted layers of heterocentric history to excavate even the tiniest glints of queer representation. Most of the time there weren’t any, which made discoveries like Ursula magical and vital. We often found versions of ourselves in the camp villains of Disney—Maleficent, Scar, Jafar, Gaston and his chest hair—since they, like us, were gay jesters of nonconformity in an otherwise drab court of appeasers.

It would take some time for me to realize we were always the villains in their fairy tales.

Disney cartoons offered me an immediate escape from the rigidity of my new surroundings in Pakistan. I was not nearly as scared of my family’s move to Lahore in 1989 as I should have been. Born and raised in Abu Dhabi until age five, I spent my earliest years thinking of Pakistan as the hot, humid place I traveled to once a year to visit my grandparents. My parents had moved to the United Arab Emirates with their two daughters in the seventies—one small drop in the wave of South Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis) who began arriving in the UAE as the country’s oil exports boomed and its economy flourished. Gulf oil states like the UAE embody the diet cola of capitalist aspirations, a first world lite, if you will. Living there allows all the economic trappings of a developed nation without any of the human rights, not that most people who lived there minded. Yes, you were under the rule of despotic absolute monarchies, but there was also a Burger King, so, you know, choices.

By 1989, Pakistan was still teetering out of the decade-long oppressive rule of an evil military dictator obsessed with imposing hard-line Islamic ideologies on everything except his eyebrows. It was he and his political heirs who made sure the country became a repressive place where girls didn’t feel safe, you couldn’t kiss anyone in public, and there wasn’t a single Burger King.

Kings had much to do with my father’s family’s sense of identity. His side was a large and motley clan of jaded aristocrats addicted to sniffing the potent fumes of a storied but distant past. The family traced their superiority complexes back to a seventeenth-century trio of courtier brothers who served as royal advisors to the king of Lahore, a one-eyed Sikh man named Maharaja Ranjit Singh. My great-aunt khala Boob (shortened by family from her real name, the longer but admittedly far less suggestive Mahboob) retold the family

name origin story whenever I was forced to visit her art deco mansion for Sunday tea. So pleased was the maharaja with the fierce loyalty of the three Muslim brothers in his court, khala Boob recounted with pride, that he offered to bestow on their family a title of great rank so that they may be honored for all time.

“So, what kind of a name would you like?” the maharaja asked.

“Give us a title that humbles us when we are rich,” the brothers told him, “and lifts us when we are poor.” Sadly this didn’t leave much wiggle room, with the result that every male member of my father’s line carries the title fakir, a word that literally translates to “beggar,” as the kids on the Lahori playground told me shortly after we arrived.

“It actually means ‘ascetic,’” I explained between punches, but they didn’t care. I bristled at having to haul a caravan of conspicuously unusual names behind me just because I was a boy, especially since both my older sisters got away with only two names, like normal kids (“kids” is a stretch; my closest sibling is nearly a decade older). I’ve often wondered since then how khala Boob reconciled her obvious pride of our family name with the institutional misogyny that meant she was never actually allowed to use it herself. I never asked her, and she would probably have told me to piss off if I did. My grandparents divorced in the fifties (escándalo!), and my father was very young when he and his siblings were sent off to an expensive private boarding school in a very racist postwar England thousands of miles away from home. Those early traumas might make some sense of his inextinguishable desire to root himself in the city of his ancestors, but I knew none of this as we landed in Lahore for our new life and was consequently resentful.

“Oh, look!” my mother said as she gestured out of the plane window to the dusty gray-green sprawl of Lahore below. “It’s so green!”

As if one could befriend a eucalyptus tree.

My mother never wanted to move to Lahore. Few people from Karachi ever do. Well-read, beautiful, and thirsty for global experiences, she looked down on the city as a pustule of Punjabi provincialism and feudal posturing. We all grew up thinking of Ma as a bit psychic, so perhaps she already knew back then the move would force her into decades of inane conversation with women who never read and men who never listened.

Thankfully, both my parents recognized that to send me straight from a day care run by cockney hippies in Abu Dhabi into the Pakistani local school system would be tantamount to child abuse, so I was initially enrolled in a local but internationally stocked kindergarten at the American school. The school catered to the children of a handful of foreign expats posted in Lahore (my first fight was with a five-year-old German lesbian over who was closer friends with Akari, the extremely chic Japanese girl who gave everyone kisses and, subsequently, chicken pox. I was more interested in Willam, the hunky Australian TA). We spent our mornings playing “show-and-tell” and taking power naps between chocolate milk breaks. It was a short-lived heaven. A year later, I was enrolled in the first grade at my father’s old all-boys school across the canal: the Academy.

Situated in a devastatingly beautiful but toxically repressive purpose-built fortress in the middle of central Lahore, the Academy was one of the many things the British forgot to pack up with them when they left the Indian subcontinent in 1947. As far as anyone can tell, the Victorian-era institution’s main goal was to colonize South Asian children to serve in nineteenth-century British colonial bureaucracies, though many people also speak fondly of the kebabs.

“Our family has been going here for generations,” my father said as he tied my shoelaces on my first day of school. Dad was always the one who got me ready in the morning, packed me a sandwich for lunch, and made sure that my morning tea wasn’t too scalding. “They survived, didn’t they?” he said with a comforting smile.

“Granddad died of a heart attack before I was born,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he replied. “Well . . .”

He drove me to school, as he would do every day for the next decade, and walked me to my classroom door, where he knelt down and kissed my cheek. “I love you,” he said, his eyes slightly teary. “Be good.” I spent that first day in petrified silence, desperate to hide the fact that I didn’t speak a word of Urdu, Pakistan’s national language, in a classroom full of children who spoke little else. The Academy grounds resembled a venerable college campus more than a children’s school. The high school classes were held in the older buildings—nineteenth-century domed structures lined with arched balconies and sumptuously decorated in slabs of veined marble and carved limestone—while the middle and primary schools were in the relatively new brick buildings across campus, though these too had domes. Towering trees flanked the dozens of paved roads and dirt paths that crisscrossed the beautifully manicured school grounds. Inside the fortified boundary walls of the Academy was everything needed to run what amounted to a small town: Aside from a plethora of administrative buildings, the campus boasted hockey fields, cricket pitches, squash courts, swimming pools, football fields, rose gardens, hospitals, mosques, tailors, grocery stores, cobblers, dormitories, teachers’ bungalows, libraries, stables, aviaries, and even an amphitheater. Most of the classrooms were large and bright, with built-in wooden shelving already smoothed by the touch of thousands of inmates by the time I arrived. The ceilings were unusually tall, well over forty feet, and lined at the top with slits of narrow windows, an old South Asian architectural trick to let warm air escape that was just effective enough that the school never invested in air-conditioning despite the hundred-degree Punjabi summers.

The regal beauty of my new surroundings did nothing to temper

the school’s pervasive culture of brute aggression. Our English public school uniforms were meant to obscure any economic difference between the students, but it didn’t take long for me to become impatient with the prickly collars (who wears a cravat before seven A .m. , who?) and the daily inspections into the state of my hair or shoes, violations for which children as young as six were routinely beaten with bamboo canes. I could already tell there was no show-and-tell here, no chocolate milk, not even the suggestion of a nap. In the first half hour of class, the boy in front of me took a poo on his seat and began wailing.

“Are you English?” one of the other kids asked me during recess as we examined the turd later. He was intrigued that I couldn’t speak Urdu, a by-product I now trace to the severe Anglicization of both sides of my family and a personal dedication to Julie Andrews’s filmography.

“I don’t know,” I replied, in what I still think is rather prophetic postcolonial self-awareness, but he beat me up anyway. When I reached home I begged my parents to take me back to the naps of the American School, but they refused.

“But they hit children there!” I yelled, dimly aware that this was just the beginning of much longer prison sentence. “And there is poo!” I added. “Everywhere!”

“You’ll learn to like it,” they said. “Give it time,” they said. My mother saw my crushed face and touched my cheek gently. “It’ll get better,” she whispered.

“How do you know?” I asked though the tears.

She smiled and reached for her well-worn tarot deck, quickly shuffling the cards and laying them out in the shape of a cross. “See?” she said, triumphantly holding up a card with an overflowing chalice on it. “The ace of cups! That means you’ll have a wonderful time!”

“Can’t argue with the tarot!” my father said. To appease me, they

added that one of my favorite cartoons, The Jungle Book, was set in Lahore, and wasn’t it wonderful that I now got to live in the same place as Mowgli? But the veiled threat of infant homelessness did little to improve my mood. Besides, I reasoned, the Lahore I saw around me—with its choked roads, open sewers, and crowded concrete shopping arcades—looked nothing like the lush jungles in the cartoon. Forced to reconcile my glittering inner life with this rancid new reality, I took a full month to stop crying at the prospect of school every morning. Things didn’t improve much until I met Zariyan.

My family and I moved into a tiny semidetached redbrick town house nestled in a large, leafy neighborhood that was otherwise entirely overgrown with sprawling colonial-era homes. The proximity to VIP housing meant there was lots of ambient security but very little traffic in the streets. Being the youngest kid by a decade is quite like being an only child, and I took advantage of my independence by stalking the alleys around the house fairly unsupervised. Eventually a group of neighborhood children began including me in their daily cricket games. Their parents worked as cooks and drivers in the surrounding houses—distinctions that are allowed to mean nothing at that age—and I was grateful for their friendship. They all spoke a rapid-fire mix of Punjabi and Urdu, and through them I began to pick up bits and pieces of the languages (or “vernacular,” as my very colonized grandmother used to say between sips of Earl Grey tea). Months passed until one day an unfamiliar face with a decidedly American accent joined our afternoon cricket matches. (Before you ask, cricket was as indecipherable a game to me then as it is now. The truth is I didn’t play so much as lie in glorious repose on a tree branch channeling Bob Fosse while waiting for the captain to take his shirt off.)

Zariyan was skinny, friendly, and, despite our three-year age difference (I was six, he was nine), about my height. He too was enrolled at the Academy, a few years ahead of me, and it turned out he lived close to my house. He invited me over for a game of catch and we quickly bonded over our shared love of sketching and the American daytime soap opera Santa Barbara. That I now had a neighborhood friend I could visit without asking an adult to drive me over made me feel wildly independent, just like the kids on The Wonder Years. Zariyan had also moved to Pakistan from abroad, but unlike me, he didn’t need picture albums to remember his life there. We spent the long, hot afternoons of our first summer together inventing games under his grandmother’s knotted mango tree while he regaled me with fairy tales of American shopping malls, indoor fountains, branded toys, and miles of amusement park rides.

“Is America really as cool as it is on TV?” I asked.

“Better,” he assured me.

We became inseparable. Most days I returned from school only to drop my bag off before heading to his place until well past dinner. His whole family had quasi-American accents, affectations they maintained by spending their summers in Indiana, which I was disappointed to learn wasn’t a colony for Indians on holiday. Zariyan returned from his summer vacation in 1992 utterly obsessed with Disney’s Aladdin. He had the action figures, the bedsheets, the video game, and even a plastic model of the magical cave. We watched the cartoon every single day, excited by the fact that for the first time the animated world on our TV looked somewhat like the one around us. Lahore too had an old mosque with three giant domes and an arched palace surrounded by the winding alleys of bustling bazaars. Even the turbans in the movie felt oppressively familiar. (One of the Academy’s more indigenous rituals was its insistence that every Friday all students arrive at morning assembly wearing Punjabi-style turbans, dramatically flamboyant headpieces made