The Man Who Would Be Queen

‘As everyone knows by now, I’m homosexual.’ To write this sentence and to speak it publicly, which is a great liberation, is why I write. Provocative and percipient, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a collection of lyric essays on the self that flaunts itself as autobiographical fiction. In the words of its writer: ‘The art of living is the art of creating life-fictions.’ The first and second sections of the autobiography take us through the garden of delight or the no-man’s-land of childhood, and the circle of hell or the coming of age years; it is in the penultimate section ‘How I write/Why I write’ that the poet achieves the desired garden of bliss. Lyrical and erudite, playful and dark, The Man Who Would Be Queen is a significant landmark in Indian writing, both as the autobiography of a homosexual and of a poet.