Asian Pop Sexing Sri Lanka

How a Tamil immigrant girl grew up to become an erotica queen and new voice in South Asian literature

It was going to be a Sri Lankan immigrant fairy tale come true. Groomed by nuns at Holy Cross school in Connecticut, Mary Anne Mohanraj, the daughter of Tamil immigrants, would go to college, become a lawyer or a doctor and then settle down into a happy arranged marriage ...
Mohanraj has indeed found success, but not the kind her parents can brag about at potlucks in the Tamil community. Instead of curing infectious diseases, she writes erotica. So much of it, in fact, that Intersmut magazine dubbed her the "queen of the alt.sex.stories newsgroup."

Now after several hot-off-the-Internet collections of steamy sex writing, South Asia's most famous smut author has expanded her literary repertoire. HarperCollins has just published Monhanraj's debut collection of short fiction, "Bodies in Motion," which follows two sprawling Sri Lankan Tamil families joined by marriage through interlinked stories over several generations, crisscrossing between America and Sri Lanka, scarred by civil war and immigration. (Mohanraj reads from her book tonight at A Clear Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco at 7 pm.)
"It's a more wide-angle lens than my erotica," says Mohanraj, 34, who is currently a visiting professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

But whether it's 1939 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, or 1999 in Berkeley, California, some things don't change -- the secrets and silences around sex and the collision of desires and expectations. Or as Mohanraj puts it, "Will you do what is conventionally expected of you and can you find pleasure in that?"

"This book is bigger than its treatment of sex," says fellow author Abha Dawesar, whose own book "Babyji" raised eyebrows with its subversive take on South Asians and sexuality. "The interconnected stories are as much about sex as gender." And sexuality and race and class and how they all rub up against each other, Mohanraj adds.

When Mohanraj left her sheltered von Trapp family life in Connecticut and moved to college in Chicago, she began experiencing some of these collisions of sexuality and race firsthand.
"I started dating white boys and started several years of arguments with my parents," she says. It was very typical immigrant drama, she remembers -- big fights when she came home followed by her mother cooking her favorite curries. But as she became more independent and aware of her desires, her parents told her they should have sent her to a convent school in Sri Lanka.

This is ironic because in Sri Lanka girls her age were being drafted into the Tamil Tigers at the height of the civil war -- or going clubbing in Colombo. "But the immigrant comes to America with a fixed awareness of the homeland as they left it," says Mohanraj, whose parents moved from Sri Lanka to the United States in 1973, when she was 2, before civil war tore the island apart. "They carry that world in their head while the homeland watches MTV."
Her parents, like most couples of their generation in Sri Lanka, had an arranged marriage, and it seems to have worked out well. "According to old photographs, my father was a good-looking young doctor. So what's not to like?" deadpans Mohanraj. Mohanraj remembers that when she turned 16, her mother sent her picture to India on a sort of exploratory mission to fish for marriage prospects. "I threw a fit," says Mohanraj.

But it was nothing compared to the meltdown her parents had when her Internet exploits came to light. Thanks to the Tamil diaspora gossip-vine, friends of family friends in England called her parents to ask, "Do you know what your daughter is putting out on the Internet?"
For six months they didn't talk to each other. It wasn't just the odd story being posted on alt.sex.stories. Mohanraj was busy being, as she calls herself on her own Web site, "something of a sexuality activist." She was the editor-in-chief of an online erotica magazine, Clean Sheets. She founded and moderates the Internet Erotica Writers Workshop. She's put together anthologies like "Wet and Aqua Erotica" (which, she says proudly, is in its fifth printing) and her own collection of Internet erotica, "Torn Shapes of Desire."

This was all a little too much for a family where even her doctor father had never had the birds-and-bees conversation with her, leaving it up to the nuns at Holy Cross. The nuns drilled in the message that sex could get you into big trouble. But Mohanraj says it was at least better than the sex ed some others were getting, as she discovered when she moved to Utah to do her Ph.D. "Some of my college students thought you couldn't get pregnant if you had sex standing up," she recalls, still aghast.

But Mohanraj felt that, come what may, she needed to tell the truth about sex. Julie Shigekuni, who was her adviser when she was doing her master's in fine arts at Mills College in Oakland, noticed that passion. "Mary Anne wanted to be known for something she hadn't yet pulled off, which made being around her feel a little dangerous," says Shigekuni, now a professor of English at the University of New Mexico. "She was ever interested in exploring ways people become physically entangled and emotionally intimate, yet she felt like someone who had been well loved and protected."

The "queen of alt.sex" was just as happy babysitting Shigekuni's daughters while she was at Mills and concocting delicious Sri Lankan dishes (she's even written a cookbook) as she was writing about a dangerous liaison between a gorgeous woman and a pizza delivery man in one of her Internet stories.

Mohanraj happened onto sex writing by chance. While scrolling through bulletin boards in the early days of the Internet, she stumbled upon the alt.sex groups. The first erotic story she read was so badly written she decided she could do better.

Her first attempt, "American Airlines Cockpit," about two women in, you guessed it, the cockpit of an American Airlines flight, was, she says, "embarrassingly bad." But she was amazed at how much people liked it and how they clamored for more. So she kept doing it. "Plus the Net gives you a sense of anonymity as if you were talking to 10 nice people you knew," she adds. "Little did I know that everything I said, everything I posted would be archived somewhere."

Over time, and more stories, Mohanraj started to get more and more interested in breaking the silences around sex. "I write about sex because it's about intimacy," she says. "People are different in bed than they are in the rest of their lives." She now describes most of her sex stories as "erotic parables" where "good sexual choices had happy endings while bad ones were punished."

What she found tricky in writing about sex, though, was not coming up with new plots for the old in-and-out but the words to describe them. "The language around sexuality is paltry," she says. "Words are either clinical or flowery or just crude."

She remembers the first time she got an erotic charge from the printed word. It was a young adult sci-fi novel about two marooned teenagers. "It went 'My thighs opened for him,' no further," she recalls. "But at 12, it was the hottest thing in the world."

When she started writing her own brand of erotica, Mohanraj found another problem. She says with embarrassment that in the early days only one out of 10 stories she wrote had brown characters.

That might, she speculates, have had something to do with the Polish American neighborhood she grew up in, where her she and her sister were the only brown kids in grammar school. Or could it be the way the children of many South Asian immigrants learned to compartmentalize their lives? Sex was part of the white American world you got to by sneaking out of your bedroom window at night while in front of the aunties you were a demure sari-clad pre-med student.

This brown-and-white tension has deep historical roots, says Mohanraj, who studied postcolonial fiction at the University of Utah. Some of the first English literature to come out of the Indian subcontinent was by Europeans such as Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, who wrote as outsiders about their passages to India.

Next, the Empire struck back, says Mohanraj, as Asian writers like Salman Rushdie penned "a response to white people writing about South Asia." Then came new voices like Chitra Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri -- immigrant stories that have brought gender and women's place in cultures into much sharper focus. In the last few years, Mohanraj says, the conversation has gotten more interesting and more complex as South Asian writers tackle queer issues as well as writing about "interacting with other people of color."

But while writers like Mohanraj open up the conversation, the audience for books like hers is still largely middle-aged white women. According to Mohanraj, this means publishers don't always understand that writers like her might be writing about sexuality from a place of anger and frustration. "I think there is a bit of wish fulfillment there," says Mohanraj. "They [the white female audiences] imagine themselves as the exotic other, trapped in a complex arranged marriage."

In "Bodies in Motion," Mohanraj shakes up all these stereotypes about love and marriage, arranged or not. In one story, young Thayalan elopes with his first cousin Savitha the night she turns 18. In another story, Kuyila leaves her comfortable home in Massachusetts to willingly enter into an arranged marriage in Colombo with a man she has never met. Meanwhile, her great aunt in Sri Lanka chooses not to marry at all, instead scandalizing her neighbors by living with her old maid in a little house with only one bed.

Mohanraj wrote "Bodies" about two extended Sri Lankan clans (the book comes with a handy family tree) so she could have a big enough palette to explore the many different permutations without being bogged down with "one iconic family representing all of Sri Lanka."

She knows of young women packed off to South Asia to get married at 17. At the same time, she says that she also knows men in their late 30s who now wish they had gotten married 10 years ago. While one generation may have felt they had few choices, Mohanraj worries that around sex and marriage her generation is "faced with so many choices that they sometimes get paralyzed."

Mohanraj herself has been involved in an open relationship for many years with her partner Kevin, a mathematics professor in Chicago. While her family might not appreciate her postings on polyamory, they aren't matchmaking for her anymore.

But she realizes now that all that matchmaking is really a sort of preparatory course for a new world rather than the idle pastime of bored housewives. Before birth control, marriage was the only way to protect young women, she says.

"You are perceived at so much risk until you are married off, that there is all this impulse to protect you," she says. But once you are married off, a whole world of conversation about sexuality opens up from the erstwhile sexually tight-lipped aunties. "Once you are made safe, you have access to the information," she says. Information like what? "I don't know," she laughs. "I am not married."

While other writers have explored the angst around immigrants and marriage, and the struggle between generations, where Mohanraj really scores is the "exquisite" prose with which she describes sexual desire and college relationships, says author Pooja Makhijani, editor of "Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America." "She seems to really 'get' young adult sex and sexuality," says Makhijani, who like Mohanraj grew up on the East Coast with immigrant parents.

"Bodies in Motion" comes at a time when the proliferation of South Asian literature has also meant some of the burden of representation of minorities has been lifted.

Abha Dawesar, whose first book, "Miniplanner," was written in the voice of a white, bisexual Manhattan yuppie, agrees that this is an exciting time for writers like her and Mohanraj. Though the Kamasutra stereotypes are not completely banished, and there is still a tendency to push immigrant writers into a silk-and-spices formula, Dawesar says the sheer volume of work has meant that "there's been an enormous exposure to South Asian literature that promises our exit from exotic."

Mohanraj herself remembers how 10 years ago dinner-table conversation would stop dead when she told people she wrote erotica. "And then it would explode into a three-hour conversation about sex," she recalls. Now Borders and Barnes & Noble have entire sections on sex and sexuality. But she's still fascinated by how culture continues to spread myths about sex and how "we still find pleasure amidst tremendous constraints and difficult choices around sex."
But has all of this helped her break the silences around taboo topics with her parents? "No, it's not any easier to talk about these things. But at least they come to my readings now," she says. And then she adds with a chuckle: "I choose the less sexy stories."