‘It was lust at first sight’ – you know you’re in a riveting honest memoir when you come across this sentence.
Cultural Editor at Verve, Vivek Tejuja’s memoir ‘So Now You Know: Growing Up Gay India’ gives us a much-needed perspective and is bound to make us more empathetic towards the LGBTQ Community as a whole.
For me, no other non-fiction goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience than a memoir. It has all the drama, pain, humor, and unexpectedness of life. What gives them power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, a memoir isn’t a summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.
The year was 1991 when Vivek was eight years old and he realized he was gay. Not only that, he had just figured that he wanted to be different and that he was in love with his best friend Deepak. Then Mast Kalandar released, with Anupam Kher playing Pinku, a stereotypical gay character and Vivek realized he didn’t want to be Pinku. So he tried to walk differently, gesticulate differently and speaks in a hoarse voice – all to avoid being Pinku.
The book cover gives us a perfect glimpse of what we can expect from the book and contains everything that Tejuja loves or has inspired him- his fascination with the Catcher in the Rye, Bollywood movies, music and books.
The best part of the book is when the writer explains how Vivek pretended to be straight in front of his cousin. This reflects how Bollywood or mainstream media has managed to create an image that gay characters are comic and rarely do they mention the relations they share with parents, family members and closest of friends. .
The literary connections of J.D. Stalinger and Walt Whitman are sure to enhance your reading experience further. Funny, poignant, heartwarming and heartbreaking. this memoir has it all.
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