The Loneliest Boy in Male' ...a short story by Ali Anonymous

Only once did he get caught, by Grandmother, who, upon spying Ali with his eye on the peephole, screamed at him: "What the hell do you think you are doing!" and grabbing his arm, taking him away, and surprisingly, letting him go, without further reprimand.

This surprised him. Surely, Granny would have discussed this incident with Father and Mother, but to Ali's relief--and unease--they did not bring up the matter with Ali. Ali thought that the grownups might have not made much of a fuss over this incident on the grounds that Ali was only satisfying a childhood's naughty curiosity that was appropriate for his age.

It even surprised himself. He was only eight years old and his small mind was too young to comprehend why he was peeping into the toilet everytime someone went in and whenever no one was around for him to get caught.

It surprised him more when he realised that he was not interested in his secret pastime when women went into the toilets. It was only when the menfolk went in that Ali's loins were stirred.

Ali was too young to understand why his little organ down there stirred. He had a vague recollection of an elder schoolmate, from form six, once telling him about having vayah kolhu vaa erections.

"What's vayah kolhu vaa erections?" Ali asked uncomprehendingly, and Hassan, the elder schoolmate, his sexual mentor, told him, "It is when your penis is hard but nothing comes out."

"What doesn't come out?" Ali's bewilderment increased and his growing curiosity made him proceed with this line of questioning.

"Semen, silly."

"What is semen?"

"A white slimy fluid that whooshes out of your dick, you idiot!"

Ali was horrified. Never before had he ever imagined that anything other than urine could come out of his penis. He had developed this belief that only urine was meant to come out of the penis, and on a few occasions when he heard about people bleeding from the penis, he understood that it was a kind of disease, and that if he was careful (not to play with his manhood in an injurious way), no blood will ever come out of his penis.

But now Ali was finding it difficult to accommodate the thought that it was natural that anything other than urine could naturally come out of the penis. And he started wondering, according to what Hassan had taught, why "semen" didn't come out of his penis every time his manhood hardened ("erection" Ali corrected in his mind.)

After giving this some thought, Ali asked Hassan, "At what age does it start?"

"Oh, I heard that it's sometime when you are 15."

"How old are you?"

"Thirteen."

"Have you had any…?" Ali asked curiously.

"I do but it's only a drop or two everytime I jerk off. It's watery but not slimy yet."

Uggh, Ali thought.

And as the eight-year-old Ali continued his days peeping into the toilet, he realised that he got a kick out of looking at other people's manhood. He also developed a fancy for circumcised penises and found it exciting to see the head poking out of the skin. He especially enjoyed looking at stiff penises.

It was somewhere this time that Ali began to fantasize about boys. In his later years, he would wonder why, when he enjoyed looking at penises, the thought of sex didn't come to mind at the time he started daydreaming about boys. But the truth was that he was not aware then that sex existed. He thought the penis was only for peeing and that it was just a symbol which represented his male-ness, nothing more, nothing less.

Until he was 11, Ali only fantasized of hanging out with the boy who appealed to him most -- at any given time.

There was a long line of boys.

His "dreamboy" was always the one he would take a fancy to at the moment, and they came mostly from his class, or his neighborhood.

At that time all he would do was daydream. He would dream of running around the garden, he being chased by his dream boy (blame it on all those Hindi films he had been watching). In all these dreams, Ali was always the one who is chased after. He was the passive partner, the "girl" in this boy-boy relationship. He would dream of being swept into his lover's arms, taken out to dinner and then the usual hugging and kissing.

It was only when Ali was 13 that sex peeped into his mind. He started to ponder on why he took a fancy to boys, why he liked looking at them, watching them, and daydreaming of hanging out with them. Hanging out, that was the word that came to his mind, the interpretation of his intimacy with the boys he dreamed of.
Ali thought that the reason why he was dreaming of "hanging out" was because his overbearing and overprotective parents and grandparents never allowed him to take part in extra curricular activities or allowed him to play with other neighborhood boys for the fear of Ali "going astray." (In later years, Ali would realise that "going astray" means smoking pot and having casual, heterosexual, sex.)

Ali and his two sisters were virtually the only children in the household. Therefore, he spent all of his time playing with them, and at a later point in life, Ali would ask himself whether it was that factor (growing up with two girls, thereby getting exposed to and doing "female stuff") which made him gay. But then he would dismiss that thought and say to himself: "My cousin Ahmed grew up with two sisters two but he is the most heterosexually notorious guy I know in the neighborhood." Finally Ali would decide that his attraction to guys came from somewhere within himself. It was just his natural self.

When Ali was into his early 20s, he tried everything he could think of to make himself attracted to girls; he would secretly watch porn movies, secretly kept a collection of porn magazines locked in a shelf to which only he had the key, and always he found out that he rather enjoyed looking at the men's genitals and felt aroused by looking at them than the sight of the female genitalia. When he masturbated, it would be the boys he would be thinking of when he came. Thus his efforts to becoming straight stopped short of only actually having sex with them, the girls.

Finally, he came to the conclusion that though he found beautiful girls beautiful and could force himself to fantasize about having sex with them, that deep down, acts such as touching a girl's breast or inserting his penis into the vagina would not bring to him the excitement he could get by an act as simple as touching the naked flesh of a guy.

In the confused state of his mind, he refrained from any kind of a sexual experience whatsoever. Some may argue that Ali would not know what kind of sex he would enjoy because he had not actually tried it, but Ali's inner core told him he would enjoy more being in the arms of a man than a woman. That feeling was enough for Ali to decide that he was gay.

The idea of having sex with a guy was strong in Ali by the time he turned 13. But because his mind was still young, he thought that since it is prohibited in religion, he will just put away any thoughts of that kind behind him, and just go on with life, marry a girl like everybody else and have children.

The love of Ali's life came around that time -- in the form of a delivery boy. It was actually an emotionally turbulent time for Ali. His "dreamboy" kept changing faces; one week it would be Mohamed but the next week he might have discovered Hussain and the next week Ibrahim may appeal to him more.

He started thinking on this, and realised that his latest crush always had something physically more appealing than his earlier crush. He then realised that this type of attitude was detrimental to his mental ability to love and stay loyal to one guy. He decided that though beauty was appealing, he should start looking at people beyond their skin.

Thus the idea of love and loyalty and monogamy was born also at that time.

The day he met the delivery boy he then and there decided that this would be his first and last love.

In fact, it worked for sometime. Ismail, as was the delivery boy called, was around 10 years older than him, and he stayed in Ali's affection for more than one year, which to Ali, was a long time, because his earlier flames died within a week at the most.

Through both subtle and not-so-subtle gestures, Ali made his affection known to Ismail, but for some reason that Ali still do not know, and is afraid to find out, Ismail neither said no or yes to Ali's offer of love, but continued to be friends with Ali, and to Ali's relief, did not tell anyone of Ali's "condition."

Ali wondered why Ismail kept the secret. Was it because Ali was only 13, just a kid, and because of that, his advances on Ismail was taken by Ismail as some kind of childhood adoration for a peer? Ali would never know because the truth is he is embarrassed by having made his affection for Ismail known, and now in his mid-20s, is afraid that the truth (that Ali was gay) might surface if Ismail's memories of Ali's affection 13 years ago is triggered somehow. Some secrets are better kept buried, Ali decided.

As Ali turned 15, his testicles and penis and hormones did their job, and he was becoming restless. He then realised that he cannot just put behind his homosexual fantasies aside. He had to deal with them.

He began to masturbate regularly.

Ali couldn't actually bring himself to have sex with another man. He was still deeply religious and the idea of spending an eternity in hellfire gave him the jitters.

There was a muscular boy in his class whom Ali always fantasized, and though Ali got closer to him, he never did let on that.

Nihad, who sat next to Ali, when they were in form six, was the closest that Ali ever came to experiencing gay sex. They both talked about sex a lot and one day it got to the point that Nihad wanted to look at Ali's penis and he promised to show his in return. After class, Ali and Nihad stayed behind when everyone was gone, but Ali was still reluctant to do it though he was dying to see another man's penis up close and personal.

The fact was Ali was shy, and he thought that nudity was something so personal and intimate that only the one you love can be justified to show and share it with. But here was Nihad who was quite insistent, and when Ali was still hesitant, Nihad pulled out his own penis and asked Ali to touch it. Ali saw the muscle hanging out, felt an erection coming, and remained motionless, not knowing what to do.

It was Nihad who snapped him out of his immobility. Nihad took Ali's hand and put it on his penis and Ali squeezed it once.

Then suddenly Ali wanted it all to end and he feverishly worked to open his fly and when it did his penis stuck out, hard and erect, and Nihad squeezed it once, twice, and surprisingly did not question why Ali had an erection.

Ali returned home, guilty from head to toe and repented to God that he would never do such an act as long as he lived.

However, in later years, when he thought back upon it, Ali wondered whether he should have used that moment to the full because that was the only opportunity then he ever got, and he could have pushed it to the point of actually performing sex with Nihad. Anything could have been possible that day.

Ali would meet Nihad in later years but on those occasions Nihad never brought up the subject of their secret. Ali wondered whether he forgot about it because to Nihad it was unimportant; that to Nihad it was part of being naughty while being that age.

Ali wondered whether why he still remembered the incident was that because he was gay and that experience stayed with him because it was his first gay experience.

And he wondered whether Nihad forgot it because he was straight and therefore that incident was of no consequence to him but a part of innocent experimentation, like so many straight college boys jerking off one another in mutual masturbate sessions.

Whatever it was, Ali was determined that like the case of Ismail, this incident would remain closed forever. He was a public figure now and could not afford to be exposed by past "mistakes" coming back to haunt him. Sometimes, he wished that all those things did not happen; he wished that he had never fallen in love with Ismail and more or less never made his affection known to him.

He wished that he had never talked sex with Nihad during that particular day which led to both of them exposing to each other.

As Ali entered his early 30s, his condition became worse. Only two of Ali's closest friends became aware of his "condition." It was not that they accidentally became aware of it. Rather, Ali decided to tell them. But here also he took some caution, and without outright admitting that he was gay, Ali told Suhail and Mamdooh (on separate occasions so that they would not know that the other knows of Ali's secret) that he was having weird fantasies about cute men and that he could not get rid of those thoughts.

Ali's purpose in revealing it this way was to find out how much his two closest friends understood homosexuality and how much they would be tolerant if they came to believe that Ali was gay. On another level, Ali was expecting that they could be of some support to him; he was feeling utterly lonely in his suffering.

It provided some relief to Ali that they did not condemn him, but Ali was not happy because he found out that they did not understand why homosexuals are who they are and therefore they could not suggest any appropriate solution to Ali's preferences. Their consequent advice thus was more oriented towards "curing" Ali of his male infatuation.

"Get a girlfriend," advised Suhail.

"Sleep with a gal," Mamdooh was bolder.

Their approach was totally wrong. In a way, Ali was trying to make them realize that he was gay and that he would like them to understand that homosexuality was not something he took it upon himself deliberately but which came naturally to him without him anything to have done with it, and that therefore he would still like them to remain his friends and be there for Ali so that he could be open about himself and discuss anything that came to his mind.

Ali's frustration grew as he came to realize that there was no way anyone will ever come to understand or accept his homosexuality. If Suhail and Mamdooh, who were educated enough to understand things like this, could not grasp the secret behind homosexuality, there was no one who ever will, let alone Ali's parents or family.

Ali grew restless. There was no point in living any more if he cannot lead a normal life. A normal life for him was falling in love, like everybody else, and settling down. But since that was not possible with a gay partner in this small conservative Islamic society, and because Ali could never live in together with a guy because of his own strong religious convictions and beliefs, he started wishing that he would die soon. Although he could not bring himself to pray to God to end his life before it came to the point where he will be exposed to ridicule and social ostracism and alienation, deep inside his heart, he began to wish (or was his heart really praying, he couldn't know) that God will take his life soon, without letting him -- and his family -- become an object of ridicule and loathing.

Ali also had a strong belief that it was God's mercy to him to date that he had never actually indulged in gay sex. Although he certainly hated his autistic character, Ali believed that it was this autistic character itself that kept people from him at a distance and therefore never led to an opportunity where it could lead to sex, gay or straight. And concerning the case with Nihad, Ali inwardly felt that it was divine intervention somehow that day that prevented him and Nihad from actually indulging in gay sex, other than harmlessly touching each other's manhood.

Now in his early 30s, and very much confused, not a day passes without Ali contemplating suicide. Sometimes he spends hours lying on his bed, mentally tired, and seriously in thought, and there comes certain points where his mind stops thinking, and he actually touches the veins on his wrist; it comes to the point where his mind actually tells him that it will be quite painless if he cut it clean with a knife that is real sharp and that death like that will not be painful -- it would just flow out along with the rest of the blood, and he would wake up on the other side. Like coming out of a bad dream. It might even be a wonderful experience, like that feeling of immense relief one gets from waking up out of a nightmare.