It isn't hard to recognise them, standing uneasily on the dark inner fringe of CP in the shadow of a brightly lit Nirulas. We are uncertain about where to go; which place will comfortably host both of us. Their comfort zones are the many gates of Palika Bazaar where pick ups are routine and dark corners conceal quick sex (they tell me). Mine is the brightness of the Nirula's sign. They hesitate; its price, its brightness, its clientele... but they are also easily persuaded.
Inside they sit closely by each other. Jeet looks down, unable to look me in the eye except once, briefly, to tell me that I should stick to Hindi. Mandar is more open, his rust coloured nails grazing his partner's hand as if to encourage, to draw out, to convince a sceptical Other that I mean no harm.
Orders are placed after some further persuasion, a tea and two coffee's arrive. They are served and the conversation begins, catapulting itself uninhibitedly into the privacy of two entwined lives.
Mandar is my case study. Despite being queer, his family unknowingly married him off two years ago and now he has both a one-and-a-half year old baby and a floundering marriage. His wife doesn't know he's gay, but long hours away from her especially at night have led her to suspect he might be seeing another woman.
"It's hard to maintain both lives," he tells me. "The sexual urge goes down." He goes to work all day, one day job that is he is vague about and another as a dancer at a bar.
He talks about his last few years with a string of brief relationships, one "close friend; no sex, nothing, just close friends jaise voh kehte hain na?", an oppressive family and a wife and child he speaks about dispassionately as if they didn't belong to him.
Jeet is beginning to look up more and more through our chat and finally, one hour down the line, a little whisper ("Tell her?" "Yeah, tell her") results in a frank re-telling of a two year old story.
It was the night of February 14th two years ago, after a common friend's wedding. Jeet and Mandar had just met some weeks ago. Jeet, HIV positive for almost six years then, was seeing someone and Mandar, just out of a hopeless relationship had fallen madly, irrevocably, in love with Jeet.
"I told him we could not be anything more than friends," says Jeet. "I was positive, I could not place him in danger."
"And I was adamant on seeing him," says Mandar. "I had never been in love like this before. I told him I would get HIV just to be with him."
And that night, after the revelry of the wedding, he did. From Jeet who finally gave in and slept with him in a dark and dank basement.
The next two HIV tests Mandar did showed up negative. And then the third, over six months later, showed he had contracted the virus.
"When you get the first HIV positive result," says Jeet, "you feel like laughing. I laughed when I got mine. I was so young then, there was no awareness. I thought: how could this happen to me? It was a mistake. It must be a mistake. It hits you only much later."
Now 27, Jeet is unable to live in a family pressurising him to get married.
"I want to run away to somewhere where no one can find me and live with whom I want to," he says. Instead he works a seven-day week as a waiter and with a poorly paid NGO, unwinding at gay parties at Shahdara every Sunday afternoon. "People told me not to tell you I work as a waiter," he says, "but I am frank. I am not hi-fi, I don't live in South Ex, I am a regular middle class boy."
And Mandar, unable to live a dual life with a wife and young baby is preparing for a divorce.
"I will tell her family it's because we don't think the same way." he says. Jeet points out that his family might already suspect Mandar is gay; they often sleep on the same bed while visiting each other and think that neighbours might have spotted them together at home.
As with many others, their first gay experience was with a family member they could not speak out about.
"It was my uncle," says Jeet. "I was fourteen then. I often wondered why he was so friendly, always taking me on his lap and cuddling me, till one day he performed oral sex on me. My aunts knew but no one said anything."
With Mandar it was with cousins. "They are all married now," he says, somewhat ruefully. "When their weddings got fixed, I felt let down, but we are still close."
It is well over two hours since we first met, the last remnants of our coffee tasteless on our tongues. Their voices have risen increasingly through the conversation and somewhere from the corner of my eye I am aware of people looking at us, an odd threesome, two clinging young men and me, voyeuristically devouring the stories of their lives.
"I have such stories to tell you," Jeet says slowly. "Of cross dressers who live at home, of men who look just like women but are married, of friends who are married, of male prostitutes... sit with me one day and I will tell you stories you have never heard before."
But tonight it is too late to go down those roads, and a little past eleven we leave the restaurant. Tables have turned and I follow them uncertainly in the hostile darkness of inner CP as they gauge the suitability of cab drivers ("too drunk", "too aggressive") to take me home and haggle expertly. They seem at home in this hostile blackness, and as I get home, I follow their instructions and give Jeet a missed call. His night is just beginning.
