THE SECONDARY MARKET

The sex lives of India’s Power Uncles reveals a crisis of small heartedness. But problems of inequality, destitution, conflict and cultures of lovelessness—which they have the power to fix—need bold, large hearts

- Shrayana Bhattacharya

In the winter of 2023, I relentlessly stared at my phone, waiting for a 58-year-old posh man to read my WhatsApp messages.These missives were amateurish works of infatuation, oscillating between clever and caustic via cute. I alliterated a lot. The blue ticks that affirmed his glance at my crush-addled words would not confer any significant satisfaction, they would merely legitimate a climate of longing. One afternoon, as I jumped up in jubilation after receiving an upside-down smiley from him-the emoji accompanied a joke about his own "degrees of uncle-ness"-I realised that the phrase WhatsApp Uncle no longer meant to me what it implied in our wider culture.

Through most of 2022 and 2023, I had raged against the mansplaining monopolies and casual tyrannies enjoyed by Indian Uncles of privilege, prestige and power. Now, I had fallen for one. My personal life had become a casualty of my research; I had encountered this man as I tried to study elite middle-aged masculinity in our cities. Having worked hard to exile myself from the heteronormative hell of my 20s and 30s, abandoning all need to prove my sexual eligibility in the primary mating market full of unmarried mards with far too many dards, I had unknowingly tumbled into a secretive secondary market of married men and divorcees approaching their 60s.

My interest in the mental models of upper-casteupper-class middle-aged men arose from the control they seemed to exercise on the lives and livelihoods of everyone around me.