“We are feeling like homosexuality is a crime everywhere … there is not any protection here,” said one of the men. Their yearlong journey across more than 10 countries to seek asylum in the United States.
BuzzFeed
Millions of gay Indians suddenly became criminals when the Indian Supreme Court restored the country's sodomy law in December. But the ruling actually helped set one couple free.
When the ruling was issued, two men from northwest India had spent more than six months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in El Paso, Texas, waiting for a judge to decide on their petition for asylum. It was a bitter ending to their yearlong journey across more than 10 countries to reach the United States. They had left India after death threats from their family and being targeted for police abuse because of their sexual orientation, though at the time the law criminalizing same-sex relationships was suspended by a lower court ruling. And when they finally reached the country that they expected to protect their rights, they wound up in a facility that felt exactly like prison.
The whole experience had felt cruelly backward to the couple, so it was perhaps fitting that the U.S. released them from detention only when they formally became criminals at home.
A U.S. judge granted the pair asylum on Dec. 20 based on their experience of police abuse and threats from their families to kill them if they returned. But even now they don't feel that much safer than when they left India, which is why they only agreed to speak to BuzzFeed under names they chose for themselves, Manoj and Maninder, rather than their real names.
A cousin in a small city in the midwest paid their airfare to join him, but he kicked them out of his house once they'd worked off the cost of tickets at the restaurant where he works. They were then taken in by the owner of another Indian restaurant, where they now work full days without pay in exchange for shelter. They told the owner they are brothers; if he finds out the truth, they are certain he will kick them out. They could only speak by phone late in the evening, fearing discovery if their boss was around.
They also worried that speaking to the press could lead the U.S. government to retaliate by arresting or deporting them, though their lawyers have assured them this isn't possible. Their abuse in India and harassment while in detention makes it hard for them to believe their ordeal is over. Only Manoj speaks enough English to give a full interview; Maninder was too frightened to give an interview in Hindi.
Manoj and Maninder both group up in Sirsa, a small city about a four-hour drive to the northwest of Delhi. Manoj, who is now 28, is the son of a construction contractor, but as a boy he was drawn to dance and trained to be a choreographer, though his family disapproved. That's how he met Maninder, now 25, who also trained as a dancer.
Manoj knew from a young age that he was gay, but when his parents picked a bride for him at 16, he married her without argument. Two years earlier, he'd watched as his uncle — who was just a couple years older than him — was beaten so seriously that he wound up in the hospital after he tried to run away to escape an arranged marriage.
Manoj still had time to steel himself to consummate the marriage; under local custom, his wife didn't come to live with his family until a few years after they married. But he couldn't follow through when she finally came to live with him after he turned 19. His family said he was shaming them by not producing a child. His wife confided to her sister that they were not having sex; she believed he was instead running around with the girls who passed through his dance classes.
"I don't want to agree [to have sex with her] because I don't have any feeling [for her]," he said in idiosyncratic English. "I'm trying but I can't."
Word spread throughout his community and his family became violent. They "tortured" him, Manoj said, hitting and kicking him, and sometimes neighbors would assault him as well.
Yet in a sense he felt he was getting off easy, he said. Had they known he was gay, he said, "they would kill me at once."