the time i met my prof off grindr

this guy had taught us in our first semester, online, 2021. and he was hot. he would appear in his little zoom square sporting tank tops and leather jackets. my friends and i made a whatsapp group called *prof-name* Fan Club where we would thirst about him during every class.

then when campus opened up we arranged a little meeting with him and the entire batch in our department. he came in the tightest, sluttiest shorts you could imagine and all we could talk about afterwards were his perfectly waxed legs.

and his ass. goddamn his ass.

that night, i stalked his instagram. making my way through his highlights, i stopped at a particular book he posted a picture of- a biography of Veer Savarkar. i spent the rest of the night reading all about that man. and i woke up the next day with a pit in my stomach.

two years later, he ran an optional course and all the faithful sluts of the fan club opted for it despite our seniors warning us against how difficult it was.

but guess what was on full display every time he turned to write something on the board? his goddamn ass.

the ghost of Veer Savarkar continued to haunt us. and those of us whose numbers he had saved on WhatsApp also began to notice that his Status almost every single day was a passionate call to Narendra Modi to kill all Muslims. i became curious about echo chambers as a phenomenon.

it was exactly around the time we were all deeply regretting taking the course but also enamoured by his ass and his clothes and shamelessly speculating about his sexuality, that one day, as i was killing time on grindr, i decided to text an account that i had seen a couple of times but never texted before.

the account was straightforward. as straight as forward gets on grindr atleast. three body pics from neck to thigh. two in the beloved V shaped briefs. one flexing hard earned back muscles.

my profile pictures were just my face, so why the fuck did he reply after recognising me? a few messages in, we talked about meeting and he said, ‘we can meet but we will need to maintain some boundaries.’

alarms started echoing through my skull. I immediately ran to the room of another Fan Club slut. bro. look at these pictures-

“YE TOH PAKKA VOI HAI” he yells.

he was mostly offended i didn't recognise that ass. sure enough, in a second, came the next message, “i’m in your Machine Learning class.”

have i said Fuck AI on substack before? machines should only be learning to suck my dick. call it deep learning.

“nice shirts, lol” i replied.

“i hope you’ve recognised me.”

motherfucker, why are you texting your student on grindr? “i should probably attend class more often lol”

he agreed. THEN he proceeded to tell me he had been observing my grades the last two years and he was disappointed.

on grindr.

have you seen the UI?

anyway, somehow, we decided to meet and talk in person. so i got some THC into my system first.

he arrived outside my hostel on his scooty. then we decided to go somewhere on campus that wasn't swarming with his students. he came on the scooty. i walked.

we sat in a dark corner of a closed canteen and talked, barely looking at each other in the eyes.

turns out he had his eyes on me for a while. he knew i sang for the college band. he knew what project i had done for the electronics department’s elective because he was friends with a professor there too?

now side note about both of them, they did their btechs from iitr and came back to teach after their masters cuz their life clearly peaked in that wretched hell. this makes sense in retrospect considering iitr is a sanghi haven.

to add to this, he was one of the top ranking CS students during his btech and he spoke very proudly of all the power of superiority he used to feel on campus. he boasted about ragging, about giving chaapos, and whatnot. he fancied himself as a defender of ✨culture✨ in general, which again, makes sense considering it was the source of all his privilege.

it was the evening of raksha bandhan so i asked him if he had any sisters. once again, he slipped into defense. he said, “Raksha Bandhan is not just about brothers and sisters. All this happened after the Mughals came to India. It used to be a thread that could be tied in any relationship where one felt protected by another.”

i tried not to laugh. the Hindutva distortion of history is no laughing matter but i was tempted to say, “oh didn't you know the Mughals don't exist anymore according to NCERT.”

i kept quiet though. it was the next sentence that really shook me.

“for example, factory workers would tie rakhis on their owners to thank them for protecting them.”

...

idk if he could smell the commie on me and was just trying to bait me but apart from being based in no fact whatsoever that was an insane example to even CHOOSE to fabricate.

i kept quiet once again. i had to pretend to understand Machine Learning in a paper he would grade yaar.

anyway, the conversation floated around until we arrived at the elephant in the room. being gay.

see, whenever i narrate this story, i’ve had many people ask me things like how someone can be both right-wing and gay, “but didn't Hitler kill homosexuals”, etc, but that was never really surprising to me? i met my queerness in my body, not in labels, or in discourse. and i don't want to say Islamophobic and casteist gays aren't really pOLiTIkALly gay but i know it's a softness that can be recognised in all bodies. regardless of where you think you sit on the political spectrum. everyone's gay and commie and maybe just doesn't know it yet.

this man had shame. so much shame. at the end of it, all he wanted was to belong somewhere. and i wonder how he survives with the cognitive dissonance of posting those WhatsApp statuses to date when Modi is never going to fucking see it. and if you wanna suck Modi’s dick- if that's the culmination of your queerness- please go for it. just don't be surprised when he cums in a minute and it tastes like battery acid.

he spoke of our queer collective, Qagaar, hesitantly. i tried to encourage him to join us and involve just as an ally- a professor doing the right thing. and he seemed to want to so badly but he kept talking himself in circles out of it.

finally, he said he wants me to focus on academics more to prove to others that a gay guy can be successful. and god, the way that broke my heart. suddenly, the man's entire life made sense- all his pathetic conquests, all his misery- all simply a series of attempts to prove that he was just like anyone else. that he was worthy of happiness.

then we said goodbye and went back our ways and never met outside a professional capacity again. you could call that one time a confessional capacity lol.

i don't know if he causes a lot of active material harm. i don't know how he grades his Muslim students. i don't know anything that really matters. it was like i met the devil and all he had to offer me was his emptiness.