—Anushree Majumdar

HEART LAND
Delhi
“I can draw an entire map of romance trails in Delhi,” says Ponni Arasu. The 25-year-old lawyer is one of the key organisers of Delhi’s Queer Pride March. Her fondest memories of the city are of the years when she had just come out of the closet. “I came out to my parents in my first year of college at Lady Shriram. I’d fallen in love with a girl and I told my mother about it,” says Arasu.
With her partner, Priya Thangarajah, 27, she has been running around to finalise every small detail for the march. Although Delhi celebrates its second Pride March today, Arasu and Priya remember another day in October 2005, when Anjuman, a queer collective in JNU, organised the Pink Triangle Day, where about 40-50 students marched with a big triangle in pink and the rainbow flag. “That was the first Pride March on the campus. I met Priya through a friend while I was at JNU and both of us had formed Anjuman with other queer students. JNU at that time was not completely okay with alternative sexuality,” says Arasu. In the midst of the university’s political turbulence, where queer groups joined the Left-wing to edge out the right-wing puritans, Arasu and Priya found each other and stayed together.
It’s been over five years since then. And although they’re based in Bangalore now, Delhi holds memories of finding each other and charting their love in the streets of CR Park, the dirt tracks at Lodhi Garden and the old lanes leading up to Jama Masjid. “The city is full of little corners, of memories. To sit on the steps of Jama Masjid, holding hands with my lover, in an atmosphere where homosexuality is viewed as a sin, I cannot begin to describe the thrill,” says Arasu.
But along with the experience of discovering love in the city, what has kept Arasu and Priya busy is the need to create queer spaces in the city. Arasu was instrumental in creating Nigah, a cultural queer collective in. “Back then, Sarai used to organise the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival where queer films used to be screened and it was quite the thing, to take somebody there and patao them. Today when we see an auditorium filled with over 200 people at the Nigah Film Festival, it’s a great feeling. We’re coming full circle,” says Arasu.
—Anushree Majumdar

... contd.