The first day I came here, nobody talked to me, but the very next day they accepted me as a part of their family. People from slums accept transgenders willingly,” says Soundarya. Her one room house in Tondiarpet is painted in a bright, cheery pink; a cramped kitchen is at one end and a creaky almirah stands tall at the other. An LCD television that hangs on the wall plays a loud Kollywood dance number.
Soundarya walks with the gracefulness of a young ballerina. Dressed in a bright yellow sari, she sits with a laptop containing videos of her dance. Even as she speaks, one cannot help but notice the faint remnants of turmeric on her skin, which makes her resemble goddess Mariamma.
“I was 13, when my father first found out that I was in love with a guy. He was dead against it because it was abnormal for a boy to fall in love with another boy,” Soundarya says with a lilting laugh. “But I always knew I only had the body of a man; my mind was that of a woman’s. Even when the guys wore vibhuti on their foreheads, I only applied kumkum ,” she adds, adjusting the dozen odd glass bangles that sit daintily on her wrists.
At 29, Soundarya’s life is rich with experiences of an old soul. Her past, like many before her, is replete with tragic tales of dejection. It’s her present that draws people to her.
Born as Chinna in the fishing community of Royapuram, Soundarya was exposed to the harsh truth about her sexuality at the age of 12. While her adolescent mind was still learning to tackle the ongoing conflict in her body, others around her, especially her father, were not so helpful. Soundarya was driven out of her house by her father and her father’s second wife on a rainy night. Helpless and with nowhere to go, she took shelter at the Parrys bus stand. Penniless, she slept at the bus stand for one whole week before returning to her house only to face the wrath of her family. “When I came back, I was brutally beaten. He (my father) even tried to pierce a nail through my chest,” points Soundarya to a faint scar, which is placed next to a tattoo of a rose on her chest. “If I was a boy, I could have looked for a job. If I was a girl I could have married the guy I fell in love with, but in a situation like this, where could I go?” she says. “I wanted to know if there were others like me, who wore pants and shirts throughout the week and changed into saris on weekends. I wanted to know that I was not the only queer in this world,” she exclaims.
Soundarya today, lives with an adopted family—a son and a daughter, who came to her when they faced the same problems at home. She hopes to pass on her dancing skills to them. “I will teach them how to dance, because that is what Kala taught me. I could train them to beg, but I was not taught that by Kala amma ,” she says proudly. Kala amma , as she refers to her, is the woman who adopted Soundarya, whom she met through transgender friends of hers. “The first thing Kala amma did when I came to her was feed me. She asked me no questions, she just took me in,” says a misty-eyed Soundarya.
Soundarya not only carries forward the tradition of finding family in friends through her two children; she also acts as a counsellor and a care-giver to the newly inducted members of the group. For a better part of the year, she runs an open house, teaching techniques of video editing, video blogging and basic computer skills to the members of Sahodari Foundation, an organisation that empowers transgenders. But her dream, she says, is to become a background dancer in movies, “I want to dance, but cinema portrays us as objects of ridicule. If they have to show a transgender, they make a man wear a sari and show us clapping disrespectfully,” she says with anger.
Has the road been any easier after the Supreme Court’s ruling to identify transgenders as the third gender? “Even those of us who are educated and have respectable jobs are looked down upon. Then imagine the illiterate,” she says before calling the society selfish. “When a couple gets married, you (society) want us to bless them, when you start a business or buy a home, you want us to ward off the evil eye, but if your child turns out to be like us, you don’t want it anymore. This is why most of us live as orphans even when we have families,” Soundarya says.
Soundarya is no more a ballerina or a goddess, she is a brave warrior; one who has defeated her detractors and is waiting for the next challenge. Her voice, like her spirit, is beaming with conviction. “You can print my real name. Maybe then my father will realize that I too am a respectable human being,” she smiles broadly.
(With inputs from Susanna Myrtle Lazarus)
