This is so true. Stereotypes, the discrimination, the heartbreak of liking a
home for rent, and being shooed (rather mercilessly) at the last minute just
when you were about to sign the lease agreement. All because your profession
and your marital status (let alone sexuality) are something most of the city
seems to have sworn vengeance against "singles".
Thanks for sharing this.
Regards
Kshitij
--- On Mon, 1/9/08, gay_bombay moderator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: gay_bombay moderator <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: g_b Mumbai not or bachelors, gay or str8
To: gay_bombay@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, 1 September, 2008, 11:23 PM
city is not for bachelors
BY ARAVIND ADIGA (Guardian News Service)
30 August 2008
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Shabana Azmi, an Indian actor, recently kicked up a stir by claiming that
Muslims cannot easily buy homes in Mumbai. This may well be true: but as
someone who recently looked for a place to rent in the city, I assure Azmi that
there is a category of person even less wanted in this city than the Muslim. I
belong to this category.
Mumbai's real-estate market suffers from a perpetual shortage of good,
affordable housing. Landlords are picky. The lack of any real
anti-discrimination law in the city means that the rental market is a bigot's
paradise. Some landlords rent only to non-Muslims; some turn down Hindus; some
permit only vegetarians in their flats. But almost none of them will gladly
rent to a bachelor.
In the rest of the world, unmarried men are called by their proper, varied
names - singleton, gay, divorced, celibate — but Indian society still lumps
them into one Victorian-era category: the bachelor. And the landlords of Mumbai
want nothing to do with this fellow. Where the bachelor lives, there the orgy
follows; this is the great fear. In the landlord's imagination, half-clad women
appear and disappear all day long through the bachelor's door; gasps of illicit
pleasure rent the middle-class composure of the building; disgrace and scandal
follow. Interestingly, the unmarried woman is not regarded as a sexually
depraved type, and many landlords are prepared to rent to them. It is only the
bachelor who is taboo.
Like so many of the stereotypes cherished by Indians, this one needs to go. All
the unmarried men I know are hard at work — on a screenplay, a novel, or trying
to find a wife. It's the fellows with the wedding rings, I notice, who get up
to the debauchery. But even in India's most liberal city, old attitudes are
surprisingly resilient. I spent a week looking for places — and got told the
same thing every time I liked a flat. Even if the landlord was
bachelor-tolerant, he was helpless; many of Mumbai's buildings have rules that
explicitly forbid unmarried men from renting or buying apartments. Especially
my kind of unmarried man. Three species of bachelors inhabit Mumbai, it turns
out. First comes the "company bachelor" — the fellow who works for American
Express or another multinational; most landlords will take him on, grudgingly.
Lower down the real-estate food chain is the "married bachelor" — who is living
alone, but has a wife in Canada (or
so he says). Last comes the "single bachelor" — no company job, no wife in
Canada. This is me. Making things worse is that I describe myself as a
"writer", a category that doesn't mean anything to the landlords of Mumbai; any
young man sitting in front of a computer and typing all day must be playing
games of some kind. Instead of doing solid, virtuous things like looking for a
wife.
In Versova, a beach suburb in the far north of the city, I saw a second-floor
sea-facing apartment with large glass windows. The waves came almost to the
foot of the building. I imagined myself here, at a table, drawing energy from
the ocean and hammering away on a Remington: I could turn out a hundred pages a
day here - I could write a Les Miserables in a year.
"Just one question," the landlady said on the day we were to sign the lease.
"When is your wife coming to join you?"
I explained; she stopped smiling.
"The last tenant was a married bachelor," she said. "He had a wife in Delhi,
but he lived alone in this flat. And guess what he was doing here?"
"Tell me," I said, my heart sinking.
"He was familiar with young ladies."
"You don't say."
"And he was coolly running a brothel service. In this very flat."
The waves at Versova will never beat near my Remington. Some other writer will
finish his Les Miserables in that flat — with his wife looking over his
shoulder.
After two weeks of hunting, I did find a place — at a price far below what I
was prepared to pay, and in a part of town with too much noise and pollution.
I'd like to get out of here in a few months, but where can a bachelor go? A
cousin of mine suggests that there is only one solution: marriage. Otherwise I
should just pack up and move to Bangalore. He's probably right. I love Mumbai,
but my time here may be drawing to an end. This city's not for bachelors.
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