Sunny’s Story - Part 2
Part 2 - University and coming out to my mum
Being alone in a new place and not being able to form new relationships was difficult for me, but I didn’t complain. I just became stoic. I got my place through clearing so that meant I had no official place to stay. My first year was spent sharing with three boys - and I began to realise how very different I was from them.
University is often a time for drinking, parties, and sexual experimentation, but it was largely solo trips to the cinema and libraries for me. Arguably - I could have been meeting guys and going on dates. I had the means and the independence, but I could hear the voices of my parents in my head: stray from the path and you’ll fail miserably. Even though they had the best of intentions, they didn’t realise what they were saying.
My parents warned me off drink and drugs - suggesting that any foray into such things would surely lead to me forgetting about my studies. I believed it in a very black-and-white way and spent three years entirely to myself. I didn’t think of it then, but it was probably one of the loneliest periods of my life. I actively avoided making friends or doing things in groups, because I knew it would have led to questions - I would have had to let my guard down.
After my graduation ceremony, I spent the evening with my family at my uncle’s house nearby. I called Chiz, my flatmate at the time and mentioned that I’d be back at the flat to collect my things and say goodbye before term ended. I then left Birmingham for good.
It was done, I was back home to London - but this had triggered something vivid and visceral in me. I couldn’t go back to being that shy and quiet student. I had more to say, more to give, and more to do. I had realised that our time here is short. I didn’t want to marry a woman, I didn’t want to spoil another person’s life as well as my own by getting married. Even though I had sometimes fantasised about having a family with two children - it was an abstract dream - not one that I’d formulated honestly - just one that I’d projected onto myself from other people’s ideas of what was expected of me.
A good girl-friend of mine from high school had suggested that we take a flat together in London, so we could start a new independent chapter of our lives. I was really excited by the idea but had to somehow pitch it to my parents. What felt normal to me (through a western upbringing) would feel alien to them.
One evening, sitting with my mum, I mentioned that I wanted to move out. She didn’t understand why - so I had to start breaking it down into its component parts. I started with the practicality of being closer to my new job in London. However, she came back and said staying at home would be cheaper for me. I retaliated and said I’d have no social life and that it would be simpler for me to meet people if I lived in the city. This didn’t have the desired result. She suspected that I’d been having some issues with certain individuals and was trying to escape something.
You can do whatever you like at home, we don’t mind - is the typical response I’d been getting - even though I knew it to be untrue. I wasn’t really going to be having parties or inviting boys to my room under my parent’s roof - was I?
“Are you having any issues with Girls?” she asked. I said, “no”, “...are you having any issues with boys then?” she continued. I suspected she knew - so I said yes. In actual fact, she didn’t know. I told her I was gay - thinking she had some understanding of something. But she didn’t. She asked me to explain what it meant and I told her.
This was the hardest thing: for her to understand that it was about me liking other guys. There was absolutely no reference for her. No Punjabi gay man she knew, no public role model. She didn’t even know the likes of Boy George or George Michael - or other characters on British television. Our upbringing had been accidentally devoid of much western culture at all.
“But you’ve always been such a healthy boy,” she said. I didn’t understand this at all, or what it meant. I think it was a flashback to the horrors of AIDs that had been plastered over the news in the eighties. I had to explain that being gay didn’t mean you were automatically prone to catching things.
She said she’d have to tell my dad and didn’t talk to me for several days. Once, in passing, she said that she’d accidentally wished me dead when I was a child for constantly pulling her hair and how she had instantly regretted that statement bitterly. That was - up until now. I was hurt of course, but let it go, knowing it was due to the shock. The mother I know now, wouldn’t dream of such a thing and would naturally put her own life in front of her children- as any mother would - but my coming out to her had clearly destabilised her.
