Tuesday, May 23, 2017

A 'hijra’s' life and hard times

Reading The Truth About Me is like experiencing a unique friendship. Translated from the original Tamil by V Geetha, this is an autobiography that has never been done before in the English language.

"‘Do you want me to arrange things so that you pee like women do, from below? Or as men do, from above?’

‘I want to live as a woman, which is why I wanted this operation. Please make it like it is for a woman.’ I did not know how women peed, but I wanted to be a woman. After two hours, I was told it was all over.’”

After that operation, done with only her lower body under anesthesia, A Revathi emerged quite “cleaned up” of her masculinity, without, as her brother would say in abuse, “her bud”. And though it was terribly painful once the effect of the anesthesia wore off, she had crossed an unusual threshold, emerging from a conflicted boyhood into a less than perfect womanhood, observing the elaborate rituals of the hijra community after nirvaanam (the operation).

Reading The Truth About Me is like experiencing a unique friendship. Translated from the original Tamil by V Geetha, this is an autobiography that has never been done before in the English language — A Hijra Life Story — as the subtitle informs you. There are some things that remain unexplained — why, for instance, are hijras called ‘Number 9’? That’s the taunt that’s frequently hurled at Revathi and others like her. But no glossary, no explanation. Familiarity with that vocabulary is assumed. If you don’t already know, go find out.

Revathi speaks to her readers like she might to a dear friend. She bares her heart, recalling her childhood. While she was still known as Doraisamy, son of a truck-owner and driver in a village in Namakkal taluk, Salem district, Tamil Nadu, she had taken part in festivities at the local Mariamman temple festival disguised as a girl. At the end of that day, the adolescent boy looked at himself in the mirror, and liked what he saw. “I had not worn a disguise, I said to myself; I had given form to my real feelings.”

Those “real feelings” run deep, and shine with sincerity. Beaten and threatened by her own family, Revathi runs away. She lives among her own kind in different cities, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Faced with poverty, she is initially left with the two options most hijras have: begging and sex work. Revathi describes her experiences with both. Ironically, among the most humiliating experiences she endures is torture at the hands of a policeman.

There is warmth and humour too, and acceptance and love. Revathi’s brother, seeing her in a sari, remarks to his wife that perhaps she could learn how to wear her sari from Revathi — stylishly, and not too high. There is even a brief spell of married love, when Revathi settles into domesticity with a senior colleague at Sangama, an NGO that works for people like her. But the romance dies out soon, and she’s left on her own again.

“Finally, I went back to work at Sangama.” That’s the end of the narrative, also something of a beginning, in medias res.

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