A few months ago I met a young Indonesian man, who started working part time at my place of work. He is very pleasant and after a while he told me rather more about himself than I thought was expected.

I will call him “Nur”, but that is NOT his real name.

Nur is about 26 year old. He arrived in London about three years ago, in very peculiar circumstances: After he had met a much old English man, let's call him “Arthur” on a gay dating website, they met up in Jakarta, and to cut a long story short, they decided to live together in the UK as a couple.

Nur would not apply for a partnership visa because this would mean his family may find out about his relationship, so he applied for a student visa, which he keeps renewing.

He told his family in Indonesia that his Arthur met him during a business trip, and because Nur acted as a guide and translator, Arthur decided to “sponsor” him to go to university in the UK.

The deception goes on much further: there are photographs of Arthur with his sister, pretending to be Arthur’s wife, for the benefit of Nur’s family, stories of “business trips” complete with edited video, and much more such things, all designed to deceive Nur’s family into thinking Nur is doing something quite different in the Uk to what he really does.

They even rented a house for two weeks for Nur to stay in on his own (in true “La cage aux folles” style), when his aunt, living in Amsterdam, decided to come and visit.

Well, so far they got away with it… I told him it is only a matter of time before Nur’s family finds out what is going on. Surprisingly, the ONLY worry Nur has is to ensure his family will not discover his secret. He is not feeling guilty about telling his own mother such lies at all. As long as she does not know, there simply is no problem.

He still attends a mosque some Fridays and on feast days, but he quite happily leads his family to think he prays 5 times a day…

A more recent complication for him is that his family is considering various girls to introduce him to with a view of a possible marriage, for laughing out loud…

Nur is quite agitated by this as he cannot think of a suitable subterfuge to frustrate such a plan… This is in fact why he told me all this.

My advice was to stop lying to to put his cards on the table, but he thinks that this is totally mad… He is now hunting around for a girl with some considerable acting skills to take to Jakarta to introduce to his family as his fiancée …

There is no talking sense to Nur. As long as nobody in his family knows his secret, he has no concerns, and he seems to go to any length to keep it that way.

The maddest thing I heard him say is that he even would consider marriage to the “right” girl, i.e. a girl which will keep silent about his other life. He has no idea at all how cruel to his prospect wife such a “marriage” would be.

There is no guilt in Nur, none at all, but a huge amount of shame…