Who sets the limits to human erotic behaviour in public? And how are these limits to be policed? What are a society?s stakes in such definitions of ?decency?? City parks are often comic-pathetic theatres in which are played out all sorts of confrontations between licence and law. The latest expression of official puritanism in greater Calcutta is also a mix of the comic and the pathetic. The forest department has banned umbrellas from parks, together with large pieces of cloth and newspapers. The logic is that these things can all be used to create makeshift screens behind which two (or perhaps more) persons might commit all manner of lewdnesses in public ? like kissing, and sometimes even sex. Sitting behind bushes and walls is also forbidden. ?Some?even stoop to having sex behind bushes or umbrellas,? the deputy conservator has said. (The stooping metaphor conjures up, rather vividly, the acrobatics demanded by sex or foreplay in public, particularly under the roving eyes of forest-department peeping Toms.) Parks are where respectable citizens and their unfallen young gather before dark, and they cannot be allowed to become veritable gardens of earthly delights. Hence, too, the stalling of the plan of keeping parks open till late.

A common sight in Calcutta, therefore, usually on a balmy evening in spring, is a beautifully maintained park, blindingly lit, forbiddingly fenced, its gates grimly locked, with not a soul inside, looking sad and pointless in its isolation from the rest of the teeming neighbourhood. There is another side to the problem. Where do the urban young (and sometimes the not-so-young), especially from the middle classes, live out their libidinal lives, if they do not happen to be married or are not of opposing sexes? Parental homes are notoriously devoid of private space. So parks, taxis, cinemas, toilets, campus grounds, train compartments, stations and other public spaces become important sites for the creation of contingent privacies, which exist in some sort of a fraught grey zone between licence and law. Not that the keepers of the law do not gain from this: abuse and extortion by the police are common in homosexual cruising areas in the city. The relationship between individual discretion and official prohibition should always be subject to good taste and sensibleness. But the balance may sometimes tip towards the ridiculous or the repressive.