The Third sex

A short story!!

After loading up its share of commuters, the electric train trundled to a slow start from Saidapet railway station.

Ramesh heaved a long sigh. He shifted away from the grab rail he had been leaning on. With a careful effort to compensate the train's acceleration, he pulled the hanging strap he was holding on to and straightened himself. For the hundredth time since he had entrained, his fingers moved down to fiddle along the border of his white dhoti. He stooped forward a little to scan the front side of his garment, then arched his back, whirled his head around, first to the right then to the left, twisted his neck to its limit either way, and surveyed his back, buttocks down. A satisfied expression came to his face once he had verified the perfect whiteness of his costume, and he leaned on the grab rail of the adjacent seat again.

The train had gained enough speed for the compartment to resume its jittery tremble now.

"What time is it?"

Ramesh looked down at his wife, Malarvizhi, who sat cross-legged on the seat he was leaning against. Her tired face looked up at him with something close to a scowl in it. Beads of sweat littered her forehead though it was still early in the morning, a time at which Chennai's climate was not even close to popping open the real extent of its ferocity.

"Time?" he asked, and for a moment the black anger so original to him threatened to surge. He nearly spat a curt reply that would shut her up for all the journey. His eyes then fell on her disproportionate belly and his features softened; the bulge in her stomach held beneath it the promise of his lineage.

"Asking it again and again won't make the time go slower, Malar," he said with a strained hint of sarcasm. He switched the hand that held the hanging strap with his free hand, and glanced at his watch. "Time now is seven forty-five," he said, then squinted at her with a corner of his lips drawn up in a derisive leer. "Not even a bullet train could take us from here to Chengalpat in fifteen minutes. We are going to be late for sure."

She psted, and said, "Dad is going to be mad at me." He chose not to respond and switched hands on the hanging strap again. She rubbed her sweaty forehead haphazardly with the back of her hand before turning towards the window.

A curious scene at the far side aisle of the compartment got Ramesh's attention. A knot of people were huddled around a drunkard who reposed snugly across the aisle, his arms and legs splayed in an untidy sprawl. Another guy sporting a visored cap was hunched over him, pulling at his shirt and shouting something. All Ramesh could make out was 'Our station is arriving'. The onlookers studied them, some with a look of revulsion, some indifference and some amusement. A bald man standing by the capped guy suggested something. The guy gave a diffident nod and talked back in hushed tones.

The vibration of his phone in his breast pocket tickled Ramesh out of the concentration. He pulled the phone out and saw that the caller was his friend Raja. He debated whether to attend the call or switch it to silent, and settled for the former.

"Hello," he said, and looked again at the drunk's scene. The drunk man was sitting now with a lost expression. His eyes were bleary in a dopey squint.

"Hello da, Raja here," said the excited voice of his friend.

"Hi da."

"Where you at?"

"Me, I'm on my way to Chengalpat to attend the marriage of a cousin of Malar's. I'm on train, actually."

"There's a good news here."

Ramesh frowned. "Is it about the land you were trying to sell?"

"Right you are."

"Wow, super da. Tell me."

His friend started to explain the story of how he had managed to sell the land. Malarvizhi cast a questioning look at her husband, and he mouthed 'Raja' to her. She nodded, reclined, and held her hands protectively over her swollen belly. He saw her lick her chapped lips and wince. Before she could notice he had seen it, he turned away and nodded at Raja's explanation. He thought she often showed off exhaustion these days to gain his sympathy. He would not fall for it, of course.

"So the document works are yet to be done, right?" he asked after a while.

"Yes. I'm starting them tomorrow." said Raja.

"Cool thing," Ramesh glanced briefly at his wife to find her looking out the window. In a manner of looking innocently around, he ogled at the bosom of a girl who stood by the entrance of the compartment. He had been doing this occasionally since she had got in, and now she had let go of the stanchion and was holding the handrail above, a posture that gave him a better view. She seemed more occupied with gibbering and simpering with her friends than with covering up her breasts with her ill-fitting shawl, thank god for small favours. Ramesh felt a bit disappointed to see her now in the line of people waiting to step out in the next station.

"So, is forty okay for the land?" Ramesh asked.

"It does not matter what is okay and what is not," said Ramesh. The visored guy was now wrestling with his drunk friend to get him close to the exit. "If you find someone who is willing to give money, you should suck out as much as you can, man. If you ask me, you could have demanded more of them."

"Hmm," said Raja, thoughtfully.

"Now now," said Ramesh, and his voice turned into a bare whisper. "There's the question of taxes. You are not going to hand over the land to the other guy with the whole lump of forty documented, are you?"

His friend thought for a moment. "Do you mean I should not?"

Ramesh sighed. "If you wish to be a clean soul, you can do it. Be a man and save some money. Don't be a fool. You know the drill, don't you?"

"Hmm. I do. Let me see Ramesh."

"See all you can. I would suggest you don't document the whole sum." Ramesh said.

"Hmm."

"Now, Raja. I'll call you later. It's too noisy to talk here."

"Sure da. Bye."

Ramesh replaced the phone in his pocket. He could see outside the raised platform of a station running along with the train. His eyes moved again to the curves of the girl's b***s. He saw her wince at the sight of the drunkard and move aside to give him a wide berth. It reminded him of the grisly image of himself hobbling with the effect of alcohol, his wife covering up her nose with the hem of her sari. He shook his head a little as if to clear the image. He was planning to feast on the Signature nestled in his refrigerator tonight, and he did not want to spoil the fantasy of the wait thinking about the dirty aftermath.

The train slowed down to halt. He stole one last look at the girl before she stepped out in a hurry with the crowd. With a monumental effort, the capped guy butted his friend out of the car. A new set of people rushed in, some wearing scandalous looks for having to wait for a drunkard to get out. And then, they entered.

There were two of them. For one buoyant moment, Ramesh felt his antennae for opposite sex wriggle up to train on them, and then he realized what they were. They stepped in, one after the other, with no hint of feminine grace. The first one was wearing a sari, and the next, a chudidhar. They were talking animatedly with each other, their voices deep and repulsive, their gestures exaggerated and weird, like they were part of the normal human population. They seemed oblivious to the fact people they came near to either turned away or looked cautiously at them. Ramesh was a part of those that turned away.

They did not move until the train started again. They stood just inside the entrance, blabbering about something in a shameless, irritating tone. As soon as the train was on the move, they got around to business.

Ramesh repeated the routine of checking his attire once again. He turned his eyes away and prayed for them to not come by his way. He despised them. Transgenders was what the world called them, but he would not approve of it. Those scum did not deserve a decent name like that. Scum was what they were, and they needed to be treated such. He hated every single thing about them.

Quick images whizzed by in his mind's eye. For a moment, he was a teenager huddled in the corner seat of a bus again, watching a man escort a neuter into the bus, frowning over the ruckus it made all along the journey, wincing at the faux pas it committed while both of them were stepping out by craning and kissing its escort on his cheek, not giving a s**t about the public. The image lingered for a moment, then morphed into another. This one had him as a skinny man whose Hero Honda would not start. He was straddling it and kicking the lever with all he had got, but in vain. He looked up to see a bunch of them, eunuchs, poking their heads out of a nearby bus, jeering at him on his inability to even get a bike started and making sexual comparisons. He shook his head a little as if to clear the images.

The sight of them right before attending a prosperous occasion like marriage was clearly no good omen. Not that he held any noble intention or high impression for the marriage of his wife's cousin; she had to beg him for days before he agreed half-heartedly. He was just piling up his reasons for vindicating to himself his grudge for the neuters.

A sharp clap resounded across the compartment. He winced. God, he thought, who let these creatures in here? The clap was followed by a gruff, manly, yet lilting voice. "Kudunga pa.. kudunga..(Give it, you. Give it.)" Another clap echoed from far across the car. Ramesh made himself look at them. They had parted at the entrance. Just like cops did in some of the English movies he had watched, right after they entered into enemy territory or something like that. The thought brought a laugh, and he swallowed it down. The one wearing sari had moved to the right, away from where he stood. The other came this way. It was limping. He looked at it with a queer sort of amusement. A crippled scum.

It waded its way along the aisle, ignoring ladies, zeroing in on gents. He saw a man fishing inside his wallet, probably looking for change of smallest denomination. It favoured its right leg, which was twisted in an awkward angle at the feet, bending a little to its side with each shuffling step. The motion accentuated the proportion of its breasts held taut by a tightly clad chudidhar. The view of it, its swaying breasts and a faint hint of their cleavage, made him nauseous. He felt like retching whenever his eyes happened on the ill concealed tits or exposed waist of a transgender, the very sight of which, if it were from a woman, would turn him on instantly. He looked away again.

He found himself not thinking about anything else but the scum coming closer to him. Its voice stayed an octave above everything else, as most of the chatter in the car had shrunk to low murmur as if something untoward had happened in their midst. In a moment, the hoarse voice rang next to him. "Give it, you," it demanded. When he did not respond, it clapped its hands close to his face. This annoyed him, but he was not going to give it any credit by considering its presence. It muttered something to itself, apparently cursing him, and moved on. He understood the real extent of his dread as he appreciated the wave of relief that washed over him when it passed. He looked sideways at his wife. She was still looking out the window, cupping her chin in her hand, pretending not to have noticed anything.

The transgender proceeded to scavenge the rest of his side of the car. It came back after a while. This time, when he was sure it would pass him back to join with its partner, it stood right in front of his face and held an open hand at him. He started a little. A reflexive scowl creased his features and he hastily turned his eyes away from it.

"Umm?" it drawled loudly. "Now, why are you twisting your face like that? Did I just ask your entire property? You face twister," it continued in its high, drawling tone, now suffused with something inappropriate. Anger.

He looked back at it defiantly. It had begun to turn away from him, still murmuring afterthoughts of its reproach. He did not move his eyes away. He had never allowed anyone in his life to wound his pride, not even his wife, not even in their private quarters. All along their matrimony he had impressed upon her the importance of a man in the world, the need for his dominance, and subsequently, the necessity of a woman's subservience. Popular belief in today's world might stay the other way, but for him, a woman was a lowly being who must never try to stand up against a man. If a woman were a lowly being, the thing now tottering away from him was no being at all. It was a wasted creature God had decided to throw into ruins on account of its evil deeds in many of its previous births. It was born to be a trash. And a trash had no right to stand in front of a man as proud as he and tamper with his ego. It had no rights to disgrace him in anyway, let alone with a crowd and his wife playing spectators. He must show it right now who was in control around these parts.

"The money in your hand," he called out. It halted, turned its head around and looked at him over its shoulder. The authority in his voice brought about a sudden calm over the crowd. Malarvizhi recognized the tone instantly and grabbed urgently at his hand. "How did it come?" he continued, his voice rising. "It came because we twist our faces at you. You are living off our hatred for you. Even beggars are better." He grimaced.

A hurt expression came to its waxy face. He felt a sting of guilt for just a fraction of a second. Then it was overcome by the recognition of the nature of the creature he had hurt, and he felt a twisted elation for having brought that expression to its face.

After one silent moment, it turned around and faced him. The hurt was gone. Its features wrinkled now in an abominable scowl which made him scoff and look away. "It's because of people like you we have become such. When have you ever considered us humans?" said the scum. He regarded it coolly. Its face was distorted in a smoldering fury he had never seen among its kind. Its posture was sloped to its right because of its deformed leg, its hands were up on the air, wildly gesticulating at him. Somehow it all made him laugh, and he did not care to swallow his levity down this time. He sneered at it. "Vidunga..(Leave it)" whispered Malarvizhi, tugging at his arm. She was looking restlessly around at others. Voices had drowned across the compartment. Necks craned to take a better look at the brawl.

"You do not deserve to be treated as humans." He said, still sneering. "You should care to not ask for trouble by coming among us, normal people, as if you are no different from us."

Seeing the trouble building up, the other eunuch had rushed past its begging dominion, and was now consoling its companion. It looked up at him with disgust, and said, "If you want to give money, give it or else shut your mouth and go. Don't you talk unnecessarily," it commanded.

"Ask that to shut down first." he pointed at the crippled one, ignoring the restraining hand of his wife. "Begging is what you do. Beggars must shut their mouth and beg."

"You are talking too much," the crippled one said. Its face was angry, but its voice would not get stern. It still had that drawling, lilting quality. He would not reply. He just snickered, and asked his wife to take it easy as if the two transgenders were not even present there.

"Why are you talking to him? We could talk only to humans," the one wearing sari said dismissively, and pulled its companion. "Come, Meena. Let's go. Don't you care him."

Before turning away, the transgender named Meena looked at Malarvizhi and her big belly. "You'll know the pain when what you're going to father becomes one like us." It spat out, and moved away with its partner.

Malarvizhi's eyes widened in shock. The remark caught Ramesh offguard. He looked at the two beings walking away towards the door leading to the next compartment. For a moment, his mind told him the remark defeated his whole argument. His senses went on an overdrive, and he shouted on impulse.

"I'll douse it with petrol and burn it if anything like that ever happened."

**********

"Come on, Meena. We are not seeing it for the first time," said Asha, placing one consoling hand on her shoulder.

Meena was still crying. They had come out of train in the very next stop, St. Thomas Mount, and had moved away from the thick of the population in the station to a lone bench far away along the platform. She succumbed to her weakness now, and she did not want anyone, particularly any man, to see her in her present debilitated state. Life as a transgender had taught her that much.

Asha stood by her side for a few more moments, fidgeting with the folds of her sari. Then she walked away towards the railway track in a manner of looking over for the next train to come. She knew crying was a routine. She also knew crying would stop. Eventually.

The words kept banging around Meena's head. I'll douse it with petrol and burn it if anything like that ever happened. It brought back the memory of another similar statement shot at her by another father from a time long past : I wish I had killed you when you were born. This another father, in fact, was her own.

She wished she had let it go when the guy twisted his face at her. Many did that; almost all of them did that. They got busy finding reasons not to look at her. They shook their heads insistently to the music in their headphones, kept their eyes glued to something perfectly familiar as if it were a cosmic wonder, talked and laughed with more intrigue than normal with their neighbour, craned their necks closer to their cell phones or newspapers. She felt like an apparition with them all, a ghost that could not be seen or felt or heard. And whenever she persevered to prove to them she was not a ghost, her presence, her reality, many faces did twist. She had become so familiar with this that she seldom cared about it. But it was at instances as today's she herself realized what she had on was an expertly tailored mask of indifference adorned over her deeper human hunger for recognition and respect. This tamed self within her, somehow, sprang out at times, like today. And, like this guy with loud mouth, the common world smirked at her when she held her head high, and slapped her mask back at her face. Every time this happened, this slap, its impact was so drastic that it pulled out the dark chest of hurt memories she had buried within a dense outgrowth of her daily activities for survival.

Her thoughts backtracked in leaps and bounds to the day it all started. Things were very different back then: Her name was Karthi (her parents had named her such), her gender was socially acceptable (masculine), She, or he, was in Madurai and he was eleven years of age. Karthi was the second in a family with three children. He had an elder sister and a younger brother. On that ill fated day, Karthi had done a profound error of judgment. He chose the day to exhibit the beauty of his recent change in interests to his mother. After making sure his mother was washing clothes in the bathroom by the back of their home, he sneaked into her private closet and fished out her garments. After fifteen minutes of diligent activity in his room, he tiptoed back to his parents' bedroom to stand in front of the vanity mirror and admire his handiwork. Tommy, their pet Pomeranian, was wagging its tail and following him wherever he went, seemingly intrigued by his actions. Karthi smiled at the reflection of himself wrapped in his mother's green sari, at the delicacy with which he had donned the costume. His three month practice in wearing sari during his hours of loneliness in home after school had perfected it to an impressive degree. He retrieved his mother's bindhi that was stuck to the mirror and fixed it between his eyebrows. Perfect, he thought. He heard the rustle of his mother's footsteps as she came into the house. With a childish excitement, he patted Tommy, who was sitting ramrod straight and watching his master's preparations, gently on the head and scampered lightly to the kitchen.

"Mom," he called, barely able to contain his grin.

His mother ran a tired hand across her forehead before turning to look at him. Her first reaction was a surprised smile. She laughed and opened her mouth to say something. Then, in an instant, her stretched lips froze in place with all their mirth drained away. An alarmed look came to her face. Karthi thought she looked cautious; and a little scared. "How is it?" he asked quietly. He found his smile had vanished too.

"Why are you wearing my sari, Karthi?" she asked, approaching him. Karthi was perplexed. He had anticipated many responses from his mother. He thought she would appreciate him with a look of admiration and approval, the way he always felt on seeing how beautiful he looked in female attire. Or, worst, he thought she would laugh at him and wave his attempt off as a ludicrous childish frivolity. He never imagined this response; this angry, scorching look. "I.." he stammered, suddenly feeling very frightened. "I.. love to wear it, ma." It was the day his life changed; for the worse.

His mother shouted at him and asked him to never try it again. She kept a suspicious eye on him at all times after that. Like any normal child in Tamilnadu, Karthi was forced into waiving what he liked for the sake of his mother's wishes rather than for its moral evil. He bridled himself away from his perverse desires to look girlish. He tried to concentrate on his studies to ward himself from the effects his hormones played upon him. No matter how hard he tried, they gradually overwhelmed his resolve. His whole family came to know his predicament in a few days. He refused to have his hair cut; he chose to adorn himself with his mother's jewels and apparel; he loved applying profuse amount of turmeric to his face while he bathed. He became an outcast in his school in no time. He made the mistake of confiding in his close friends his desire to look and feel feminine, and his efforts in home to achieve that. For the first few days, they were laughing it off. They began to find his activities queer in line with his desires, and gradually all of them moved away from him, citing petty reasons. Nobody wanted to be found in his company. Teachers heard rumours, believed them readily and made him a sorry victim of their prejudice. Karthi understood how grotesquely big mistakes became when love thinned. He noticed all these changes happening around him helplessly, unable to pretend to be what he was not, hard to cope with his alienation.

He succumbed to his wishes; he grew long, flowing hair; he walked out the streets one day boldly with his hair plaited and jasmine-laced, his hips swaying on their own accord, his feminine clothing clinging to his unshapely frame. That was the first day he saw the world around exactly the way it would appear to him for years to come. There were laughters all around; stifled adult laughs and brazen, explicit urchin laughs. He laughed back at them, mistaking their derision for amusement he thought they ought to feel to see a guy wearing girl clothes. He identified the nature of their laugh only when his acquaintances and friends he had known well for God-knows-how-long took one look at him and turned their heads away in every other direction. They did this with such a rapidity that Karthi had a subconscious thought they might get a cramp to their necks. The budding child in him realized the faint rays of this harsh world's reality just then. He understood that his desire to look girly had somehow lowered the scale he stood with respect to the rest of the world to a lower ground in the 'Grand Balance' (a funny term he would later coin) that they could all stand high atop him and laugh at his decline. What made him the sole victim of the decline, he did not know.

Soon, home started to look no different from the streets. The only difference was the absence of laughter. Not just the cynical laughter from the outer world, but laughter, in all of its forms, had evaporated within those walls. It was replaced by shame. There were complaints from his sister, accusing him of the reason for her having been made the object of ridicule in her class. His father was furious about the damage his name incurred because of his son who roamed the streets, clad in sari. His mother's face always looked swollen; the bulges beneath her reddened eyes seemed to hold in store abundant supply of flood that threatened to inundate her face once her son showed slightest sign of his 'sexual malfunction', in her terms. She pleaded him to give up his 'bad habits', cut his hair and wear pants and shirts like any normal boy would. Making no progress on that front, she resorted to not talking to him. His younger brother, whom he had played all kinds of games and picked quarrels with, never came within ten feet of him. He bowed his head whenever he encountered his elder brother and quickened his pace to clear the room. Karthi was treated like a dead weight in his own ship. The only semblance of love he received was from his dog. It never cared how others saw it or talked about it behind its back because of him. The gratuitous love he was lavished on for eleven years of his life had dwindled to a mere trickle.

His decision to leave his home, when it came at last after a tough year of patience, brought with it more of a relief rather than distress. He knew very well he would not be missed. His absence, if anything, would be a blessing in disguise for his family members. He cried only when he came to the entrance of the house. Tommy looked up at him with alarm as he stepped out of the gates. It started to bark at him. He swung the small rucksack he had packed his clothes in over his back and waved at Tommy. The dog had every reason to stay in the home; it was bathed everyday, fed affectionately, talked to by every member of the family, given the right to roam around the house without offending anyone on account of its presence, shown the love every living being yearns for. In his family's Grand Balance, Tommy stayed in a higher scale than him. He was still crying as he disappeared into the night. And the real war started for him.

He started to feel an urge he never knew existed: hunger. What started as a slight nudge inside his stomach grew with time into a monstrous void that sucked in every ounce of his strength and will. He pleaded for some decent work in every shop and company he came across. Shopkeepers shooed him away. Hotels and restaurants never paid him any attention. Workshops spat at him. Markets drove him off, calling him 'Ombodhu (Nine)' with various profanities attached to the word. The ferocity of hunger pushed him into delirium. He staggered, cried, begged. Nobody cared. The only thing that came close to him, even if it was only to hurl him off his feet, was a red car with a drunk driver behind its wheel. He sped off, not even caring to stop. Grand Balance was at work again. A bleeding, unconscious Karthi lay in the platform with death buzzing over his head while a crowd of spectators stood around him, vacillating between a conscience of their own and the superior power of others' gossip.

Karthi would have ended up in a wheelchair were it not for a kind lady (he thought so then) who admitted him into the only hospital that allowed his kind, GH. The kind lady argued with doctors when they gave haphazard answers, and made them attend to Karthi properly. With her timely help, he bargained with disability to take the lesser risk; he became a cripple.

The kind lady called herself Padma. Karthi came to know she was not a lady after all. She was another victim of the Grand Balance. Padma made him a she, and named her Meena. Padma was living alone in a rented home. Meena shared the room with her. Padma did not toil with hunger like Meena did. She had her ways to find shortcuts to the higher scales of Grand Balance.

Meena was led into a curious world by Padma. Initially, Meena smelled fish in the business and resisted. But there was no better stimulant than the throes of starvation. She accompanied Padma into dark alleys. She was made to go down on her knees; she was made to take in her mouth unspeakable things and asked to do more unspeakable things to them. Her body changed over time, and fingers fiddled with new updates in the dark. Obscenities and moans rang in the night when she knelt down, and they turned into appreciations when she was on her feet. Currencies were pushed into her hands. Money from nights turned into food in the mornings and tasted sour and offensive with the remnants of previous nights. Her conscience chastised her in the daylight but hunger eventually took it over as the day waned.

For twelve long years, Meena let men exploit her body and sex. Her life changed again when Padma died one day. Doctors said she had AIDS. Meena thought her friend's demise gave her an opportunity to come out of dark alleys and start her life anew. She moved to Chennai in search of a better life.

Her search for a righteous life brought her back to square one. Chennai was a much bigger city than Madurai. But the expanse of the city, or its modernizations, had not stretched the minds of people any more than that of their Madurai counterparts. She had some money in her hands now, but the respect would not come yet. She could not rent a home for herself despite her numerous attempts. "Money never matters," many house owners said with pride, who, she knew, would not extend the same magnanimity with men or women. "People matter." they continued, hinting she was not a part of human species.

Her blind hope that things would have changed in the ten long years she had shut her up in dark causeways was faltering now. Many things had changed with the decade, she saw. People were crazy about something called Internet; young men and women, carrying stylish bags, were swarming the streets and railway stations and bus stops in the morning, their faces sweaty, their foreheads furrowed. World ran much faster now. Still, one of the many ugly things that had not changed was the discrimination against transgenders. Cinema had found a twisted humour in transgenders and promulgated them as laughing stock now. Her limits were pushed to a threshold one day when her bladder was full and throbbing and she was denied access as she rushed for the door marked 'WOMEN' in a toilet. The man was scowling at her and asked her to go away. She lost her temper and made a mess with his day. It was the first time she gathered her guts to stand up against complacent morons.

She came to know Asha when she was 'on her business'. Asha found Meena huddled in a seat in Egmore Railway station with a bunch of kids giggling and shouting (hey, ombodhu ombodhu...) at her from a few paces away. Asha drove them off. She took Meena with her to an upstairs room she had rented with a few other transgenders. Meena started getting along with her new friends. She gave her job hunting another try, only to be met with the same response. At the end, she came 'to business' with Asha, which actually was begging. Begging for change made Meena cry at times, but it never made her cry as hard as she did when she was in Madurai. She considered begging a better option than playing fiddle for men's desires.

"Train is coming, Meena" Asha said. The white-green face of a train was turning the corner.

Meena tried to bring herself back in control. Her grief subsided, only to be surmounted by a profound hatred. She loathed this society, every person that constituted it. She and Asha and Padma were all victims of the absurdity of people that had eyes for only their sex and not for their quality of being humans with the same heart, brain, lungs, skin, stomach and other organs like everyone else. This society had erected a stupid misconception on this third sex, and deemed it fit to abandon transgenders, not physically but mentally, as a race of people that had to live like they would in a marooned island but only with 'normal' people walking around, not caring them. These 'normals', they were not ready to understand it was nobody's fault transgenders were born transgenders. It was enough for them to have fallen in a category of gender that others accepted as legitimate so they did not have to worry about the mishap between x and y chromosomes which might result in another gender. Birth and its ramifications had set them in a motion with everyone else for luxury; they seldom worried about people whose birth sidetracked them to live a life where basic amenities came out of begging or fellatio, where respect was an unattainable dream. They were all anxious to jump in and whine about eunuchs that shouted, eunuchs that made sexual innuendos, eunuchs that beckoned for unspeakable services in exchange for money, eunuchs that behaved nonsensically in public, eunuchs whose gaffe spoiled the society. The past of these eunuchs, the painstaking string of events that spanned years of hardship and cruelty, which transformed them to what they were today caught no one's attention. The fact those eunuchs were human beings with abstract tendencies for love, affection, recognition, anger, lust and comfort was no one's concern. The Grand Balance aimed only at making this sorry race, which would blossom and droop in a lifetime leaving no offspring to hold its name, go unnoticed or lambasted.

The train had passed them now and was slowing down.

Meena blotted her tears with the hem of her shawl. The entire struggle of her life was wiped away in a second. Her stomach rumbled now, making its presence known, informing her she had left it unattended since last afternoon. Before she sighed and got up from the bench, her heart uttered one silent prayer.

"God, forgive me, I was lippy. Please don't curse that child like you did me. Let him live a prosperous life with his parents. Let this curse end with me. Us."

Author's Note

Please point any mistake, anything at all, for my improvement.