Cool couple: Deepak Kashyap and Jerry Johnson

The living room of their two-bedroom apartment in upmarket Mumbai is redolent with the fragrance of lilies. Siddharth, a software businessman, sits with his feet up on a wooden bench across from his partner, Kunal, an interior designer, reclining in an elegant easy chair.

Siddharth and Kunal, a gay couple, were engaged on August 30, 2010, at a palace hotel in Haryana. The invitation card — with a back profile of a male couple — to the “commitment ceremony” was handed out only to close friends.

From neatly typed out sheets of paper, the two read out vows they’d written, thanking each other for making life special, before promising to love each other, for better or for worse. As they recited their vows on that special day — Siddharth in a bandhgala and Kunal in a floral linen jacket — their friends watched them with an intensity frozen on camera. “Even the most stoic gay friends had tears in their eyes, as it gave them hope,” says Kunal.

“The ceremony gave a bigger presence — a sanctity — to our relationship,” Kunal adds.

For gay couples across the country, there is change in the air. The Supreme Court gladdened their hearts recently when it called for a relook at gay relationships. It asked groups challenging a 2009 judgment decriminalising gay sex to define “unnatural sex”. After all, relationships which were earlier termed unacceptable — such as live-ins and surrogate parenting — had become acceptable over time, it said.

The judges’ comments only underline the mini revolution that is already taking place. Gay couples are gradually living life on their own terms.

Many of Siddharth’s and Kunal’s gay friends have been leaving for shores that have legalised gay marriage, but the two are intent on staying put. “We’re very happy here,” Kunal stresses. “Living together has brought us a sense of security which we wouldn’t trade for the excitement of a long-distance relationship,” adds Siddharth, who moved from Delhi to set up base with Kunal, a Mumbai boy.

But, of course, it still rankles when they have to tell the world around them that they are single. Recently, when Siddharth was injured, Kunal had to sign the hospital consent form as his brother. “That’s when I felt disgusted with the system,” says Kunal.

What troubles most gay partners is their parents’ inability to come to terms with their sexuality. Last Sunday, gay couple Jerry Johnson and Deepak Kashyap exchanged garlands at a post-engagement party in Mumbai. They were engaged in a hotel in Udaipur. Friends were present, but their parents stayed away.

Yet once a week, Jerry, a marketing manager with a multinational, takes Deepak, a clinical psychologist, to meet his parents. Though the relationship is cordial, the senior Johnsons — conservative Catholics — do not approve of their son’s sexuality and lifestyle. “But their hurt arises from their own beliefs,” Jerry points out.

Gay women find it tough, with some guardians even opting for violent action, says Anjali Gopalan, executive director, Naz Foundation, Delhi, which has been campaigning for the decriminalisation of gay sex.

But change is taking place in the older generation as well. In Calcutta, Beauty and her partner of four years enjoy a loving relationship with their parents who’ve gone from being “very sad” to “cool”. In fact, when Beauty mustered the courage to tell her former mother-in-law of 15 years about her partner, the older woman had only this to say: “She will leave you and go.”

The two women are happy sharing “everything” and count themselves lucky in a society where lesbians are forced into marriage or even suicide. They enjoy watching movies and eating out. “If passersby point or stare at us, we do the same to embarrass them,” Beauty says. “We don’t dress or behave differently, but they do pick up the chemistry between us.”

One of the banes of a gay couple’s life — the landlord or the landlady — is also changing with time. So while Avatar, a 30-something gay tenant in middle-class Delhi, is regularly quizzed about his boyfriend, the latter’s landlady, in a more downmarket locality, is not bothered.

The couple also told their house help about their sexual orientation: Avatar’s help smiled shyly, while his partner’s employee seemed overjoyed. “Aisa bhi hota hai (does this happen too)?” the help asked.

Sunil Gupta, a gay photographer in Delhi, says he does not convey his sexuality to domestic workers in words —“it’s difficult to find non-crude gay terms in Hindi”— but lets the pictures on the walls do the talking. Once, when he did explain his sexuality to a house-worker, a middle-aged married woman, she dispassionately pronounced: “All this is fine, but everybody should be married.”

Gupta’s help tell him about a gay couple across the road who has a gym in the house. “Gay men are fitness conscious,” says Sunil. “It’s competitive and you can’t let yourself go like any middle-aged heterosexual man,” he laughs. Jerry explains: “Unlike women who are less focused on their men’s looks, gay men set very high standards for each other — opting for a muscular appearance and style.”

For people like Kunal and Siddharth, life often is as normal as anybody else’s. “Once a year we go to the Gay Bombay party to remind ourselves that we are gay,” jokes Siddharth.

Yet, in the absence of formal marriage rites, insecurity is a given in this gay society.

In a few months, Siddharth will be going to the US for a year and the pangs of separation have already begun to gnaw at Kunal. “He is such an important part of me that even when I travel on work for a few days I don’t know what to do with myself,” he says.

Jerry and Deepak are clear that if they reach a point where the romance cannot be rekindled, it would be best to be honest and part ways. In the early days of their relationship, Deepak feared losing Jerry to another man. “I was the woman in the relationship and had low self-esteem,” he laughs.

They’ve now figured a way to keep their commitment focused on romantic love, with some elbow room for a third partner. “If one of us is struggling with a sexual urge for another man, we would rather talk about it than be deceptive,” says Jerry, before spelling out an important ground rule. “We do not share emotional space with the sexual partner, and would inform him about us being a couple.”

Balbir Krishan, a gay artist who was assaulted in Delhi last month for exhibiting his homosexuality-based art, rues that it is “very easy” to say goodbye and walk out of a gay relationship. Balbir and his partner Krishan — their names were legally merged in 2003 — have been together for several years now. Krishan was Balbir’s caregiver after the latter’s legs were severed in a train accident in Agra in 2006.

“We care deeply about each other and draw the line when it comes to getting physical with another man,” says Balbir. “But if one of us decides to walk out on the other, there is nothing to stop him,” he adds. “But even if we leave each other, our names will always be together,” says the sentimental Balbir.