Prince of gay storytelling
Kunal Mukherjee’s
“If I am the queen of gay storytelling in India, Kunal Mukherjee must be the crown prince,” writes poet Hoshang Merchant on the cover of Mukherjee’s first fiction work My Magical Palace.
Set in the ’70s in Hyderabad and San Francisco, the book takes a route less-travelled and narrates a sweet love story of two gay lovers. Kunal, who remberes growing up at Mint House (said to have existed around Khairatabad) in Hyderabad, is currently a San Francisco-based business and technology consultant. He, however, is a poet and writer at heart. But Kunal’s story in My Magical Palace is not very different from his real-life story.
“I wanted to write a book about the human experience of love, loss, betrayal and the feeling of being an outsider,” he says, before adding, “Mint House did exist for several decades before being demolished. It was a beautiful building and rumoured to have been built for the Nizams. The Mint House of my novel is based on the very same Mint House in which I grew up in and I took some of the original features and embellished them to create the magical palace in which Rahul grew up.”
The book
revolves around Rahul, his lover Andrew and the former’s early life in India and the circumstances that force him to move to a progressive city. “My character is torn from Mint House and the pain of the loss is so great that he never returns and moves to a different world. And in his struggle to find and accept himself, he is drawn to San Francisco. Like many young men who are torn between living the truth and hiding it from their families, he moves to a city where he can continue to hide his sexuality and still live the lifestyle he wants to. But as the reader will find out, circumstances force his hand and he has to deal with his past,” says Kunal.
Given that homosexuality is a sensitive topic and gay literature is still a developing genre, did Kunal ever suffer from the “what would people think” syndrome? “In my novel, I have tried to show the deep wounds that are created in early childhood by a society that does not accept and understand what it is to be different. To make my point, I had to set aside my concerns about ‘what would people think’ to write this story.
I wanted to give visibility and a voice to gay or lesbian adults and youth who are repressing their sexuality because they feel it is hopeless to try to live openly,”
says Kunal.