A unique kind of swag

In a country that surpasses the world in its paradox of innately elegant women & effortlessly dowdy men who dress in monotonous western clothes, Jivi Sethi stood out for being spectacularly inventive

When Anjali Gopalan, the head of Naz Foundation, decided to start a helpline in the mid-1990s to support the gay community, she asked Jivi Sethi for advice. She expected a conversation; instead, she received an intense commitment that ran for more than two decades. He helped set up a training protocol for people answering calls to the helpline. “We would get calls from people at all hours. He had no problem talking to them,” recalls Gopalan. His fluency in Punjabi, Hindi and English meant he could help a wide swathe of callers. “He is known as this incredibly stylish man, but the world does not know this Jivi who was so open to helping people who were dealing with the crisis of coming to terms with their sexuality.”

Jivi was a pioneer for living as an openly gay man decades before homosexuality was finally decriminalised last year, but also in his empathy for people coping with the societal pressure-cooker that being gay in India represents. If a measure of a person is how many people are willing to travel to his funeral, the AirAsia flight at dawn from Delhi to Goa last Friday, after Jivi suddenly died of a heart attack at 62 in the midst of cancer treatment, was a testament. On board were the seventy-something head of an eye care charity based in Noida, fashion designers, artists and entrepreneurial exporters. A 15-year-old, Lilah Singh, wrote a lyrical lament: “Realising that that number isn’t needed on your phone anymore, no one is going to pick up, no one is going to text back… hurts.”

This wealth of friendships was because Jivi had a courtly Punjabi graciousness coupled with being a Renaissance man. He loved Hindustani classical music and jazz. Among his close friends were Shubha Mudgal, who will sing at a memorial for him on May 13, and the superlative Goan exponent of Portuguese melancholia, Sonia Shirsat. He could be a theatrical name-dropper, but shared his friends with a compulsive generosity suggesting he was in a race against time, which, it turned out, he was. When I returned to Delhi in 2013 after three decades away, Jivi devised a crash course in the city’s conviviality and culture — qawwali and Hindustani classical concerts, an Onam feast above a metro station and even fashion shows at embassies followed.

On a much grander scale, Jivi gifted a similar cosmopolitanism to Assagao, the sleepy hamlet in Goa where he transformed what a friend describes as an “unpropitious, dark and neglected building surrounded by scrub” more than a decade ago into a chic homestay hotel with creative food that had travel writers searching for new superlatives. Assagao itself became a destination, replete with restaurants and swank home design stores.

In a country that surpasses the world in its paradox of innately elegant women and effortlessly dowdy men who dress in monotonous western clothes of white, grey, khaki and blue, Jivi Sethi stood out for being spectacularly inventive. In Delhi’s summer, he would wear a paisley shirt with a “gilet” (waistcoat) and a linen jacket, looking like a dashing Mediterranean ambassador sent to confer with Akbar about his syncretic religion. Jivi’s laying out of buttons for his achkans — he was a favourite at weddings because he had usually helped design aspects of them — was like a miniature march-past. He wore Kerala mundus with deconstructed white Nehru jackets. “He didn’t do sloppy,” a friend quips. “He barely did casual.”

This was not just a sense of style, but arguably a public statement of being gay. Most gay men and women, in India especially, have spent at least half their lives conforming, trying to fit into hostile schools or insensitive workplaces — even marriages — without drawing attention to this fundamental, unchangeable aspect of their lives. Jivi Sethi did not just live out of the closet; he let his splashy, stylish wardrobe speak for him. Applauded for what he was wearing often as he entered a dinner party, he would return the compliment and then banter in Punjabi: “Saadi te vadiya taur hegi, ji (I have a unique swag).” In more ways than even Jivi knew, he did.