Central Park. A slightly neglected green island in the centre of Connaught Place.  The area had yet not been put to rampant commercial use in the 1960s and ​'70s. The bustling underground market, Palika Bazar, hadn’t been constructed yet. Paradoxically, in the popular shopping area, one could walk into this island after sunset and become almost invisible.

The homosexual men of Delhi—they had no one name, for the word ‘gay’ was not in common use then—these men, all of them, without exception, hiding their true nature, came to this wooded park to become invisible, and thus visible to others like themselves. Or to become visible to those who had only contempt for their kind but came looking for them anyway. All bodies, after all, can be used for pleasure.

In the green-shaded night, men, including ageing worthies who had been young boys when the new capital announced by India’s King-Emperor was being built, sat on the toadstool made of concrete.

Their hair and brows dyed black or brown, or orange with henna, they looked with unconcealed desire at the stream of shadowy men that began to flow in this secret garden, wandering, stopping every once in a while, going round in slow circles, as if they had lost their way.

Willowy men in coloured kurtas flowing over jeans or lungis; or muscular men in more plain kurtas or white shirts; even some policemen in khaki…but of course, little of what they wore was visible in the darkness. They were shadows, seeking, wanting, hunting. Some coughed in practiced staccato; others asked what the time was and some would then raise a radium-lit watch to peer into it and whisper something. And then the little green or blue disc of radium would light the way for the shadow to move behind a bush.

There was a clear division in those days. The men in printed kurtas over jeans and bell-bottoms were termed ‘maid’, ‘rani’, ‘kothi’, ‘randi’ by the heavily built athletic men who said that they were in search of woman but, for a price, would release their load wherever desired.

And so these self-consciously male men, many of them policemen in civil clothes, unzipped themselves in the middle of the traffic island and permitted the maids to go down on them, only to push them away roughly afterwards and empty their pockets of wallets or crumbled notes. If coins were all that the fallen men had, they were slapped and spat upon. The maid who protested, or panted for more, were roughly kicked aside; some were arrested, others taken to the nearby police station to be buggered all night by a platoon. ​