I met Aditi in Coimbatore in 2022. Pooja and I had gone to the city on work and, always seeking a chance to hang out with queer folx, we announced a spontaneous queer meetup on our Instagram stories. Aditi and I had already connected on Instagram by then and I invited her to the meetup and she agreed. We were excited to meet her and her partner Ameya and many hours were spent swapping nuggets about our love lives. When I was looking for couples to share their stories for this book, I got in touch with Aditi and was delighted that she and her partner agreed to be part of this love project. I met Aditi online and spent over an hour listening to her. Though I knew bits of her story already, there was still so much I learnt that day. My heart was full.
Aditi was 28 when she met Ameya. At that time, she was still in a heterosexual marriage.
“I had a couple of relationships with men; I ended up getting married quite young and it didn’t work out. I was married for five years, tried very hard and it wasn’t really the best suited for me. Let’s just say that I had a tough time. It was a difficult journey of five years. And I think around that time, while I was still married, I had started going to therapy and, in that process, I started learning to acknowledge the voice, to say, ‘I think I’m attracted to women’. That was when it first came. I was 28 at the time.” Aditi grew up in a liberal family with certain privileges and freedoms. Her parents promoted choice and individual responsibility. Aditi believed that every individual should be allowed to live their own life. Despite this open and liberal thinking, somehow the matter of homosexuality never featured. “I don’t think we were educated on the topic of sexual learning and sexual orientation, the ability to explore yourself, your feelings, right? In effect, it was a standard, heteronormative approach. The way that society conditions us, it is not even taken into consideration that you could fall in love with a person of any gender.”
Aditi got married and thought she could live it out in a stereotypical way. “I think the marriage failed for its own reasons. My married life was quite stifling for me. I was very conditioned by my partner at that time to not speak to people that I love. There were a lot of restrictive conditions imposed on me by his family and him. I think nothing would have saved it and I’m happy it didn’t work in hindsight. While I decided to walk out of it, I think the first decision I made was that I’m going to go and explore myself, I’m going to go and try and find out. At that time, I believe I was using the word curious for myself.” We both smiled when she said that. Finding the right label that describes us, pushing against the stigma that labels already carry, is hard emotional work. For Pooja, it took 10 years to finally find the label “femme lesbian” to represent her gender expression and attraction for butch women. For Aditi, being an ally to the community and growing up with the belief that choices and responsibility go hand in hand helped her in her sexuality journey. It would be a disservice to her if any cause-and-effect links between her marriage and sexuality were made. Neither can heterosexual marriage “cure” queer women, nor can failed marriages “turn” them into lesbians. These are plainly prejudiced views.
For many women, a heterosexual marriage is a life reality given our cultural context.
Tejaswee, Sneha, Pooja, Aditi and even Shourya were all heterosexually married in their 20s. This often delays queer discoveries. “I was very low in terms of my emotional wellness or mental wellness but I still wanted to keep pushing forward and continued trying to meet new people. I had to consciously break open a lot of involuntary and voluntary conditioning. So the way I live my life today is really a middle finger to the way I was conditioned. If there is such a thing as revenge for me, it’s about living my life on my own terms, not having to care a damn about what anybody says. So I made that decision at that time. People may love you, people may not like you but nobody can save you, but yourself. And you don’t have to be ashamed of who you are. You don’t have to be ashamed of what you want, how you love, how you live as long as you don’t hurt another person. And I believe in that. I want to say I’ve never felt shame or I’ve never felt the need to carry shame for my orientation or for the fact that I’m attracted to people of all genders. I think for me it came quite naturally. So I was describing it as curiosity because I hadn’t really met women and then I met Ameya.”
Ameya was Aditi’s second match on the online dating app. “There was no looking back from that point. We just loved spending time together; we were inseparable, constantly texting. I was living at my parents’ place at the time. She is not from Coimbatore; she is from Bhopal, but had worked in Coimbatore for 12–15 years and had her own place. She was on a break from work. Both of us were trying to figure out our lives when our paths crossed.” Within three months, Ameya asked Aditi to move in with her. Aditi was still married (on paper) at that time, and her divorce was to come through after a few months. She had been thinking about getting her own place, so when Ameya asked, it felt like the right move. “We met at a time when I think both of us were kind of hurting and needing a safe space. All we wanted was just that love, that connection. We were ‘kids’ together; I feel like we have grown up and grown alongside each.” Aditi and Ameya went on a few dates initially. Then Aditi started visiting Ameya’s place. They enjoyed each other’s company. They would have coffee together, cook together, and work out together. They lived in the same locality but had not bumped into one another till they matched online. Aditi shares an incident that stands out in her memory as one that helped build trust and know each other better. They decided to take a car trip to a place 600 kilometres away. “I had a car at that time and it started giving us engine trouble. The engine started heating up and we could not drive it at high speeds. Literally every 15 minutes, we would have to stop, find a can, and keep pouring water on the engine because the fan was not cooling. At one point, she went to go find water. She climbed over the fence of some farm and she realised there were dogs chasing her. She had to climb back hurriedly over the fence again. It was a barbed wire fence, not high but her pants got stuck and tore.” When they finally made it to their destination, to Aditi’s surprise, Ameya had contacted the hotel staff in advance to decorate their room for Aditi’s birthday.
Ameya’s spirits were not dampened despite the arduous journey. The journey back too was a slow and long one. The car was temporarily fixed but it took them several hours to make it back home. Aditi recalls how Ameya jumped out of the car and declared that she would never sit in it again. This trip gave Aditi and Ameya a glimpse of how they were [together] when they landed in a spot of trouble. It helped build trust. “I don’t think we were snapping at each other. What the hell, we need to figure this out, right? Together, we needed to figure this out so it seemed to work. There was a very nice familiarity.” They also realised that they were actually having a lot of fun, even with the mess the car had landed them in. “Literally, we were so in our own world, like nothing mattered, we knew nothing, I didn’t care about anything. It was just me and her and this. Just doing our own thing. So I feel, our relationship survived that test.”
Excerpted with permission from Homo and Juliet: Queer and Lesbian Love Stories, Shruti Chakravarty, Yoda Press.
