The God I Cannot See
In a stone-encrusted cave, barely two miles from my home, I chewed my first grains of rice.
I was taken to temples from the time I was an infant, my body made of thickened flesh and soft skin, like moons drawn upon paper, like my flesh were a tangible of sheet of color, my body barely real. My mother would wrap her arms around me, my body covered in a navy-blue dress, white polka dots stretched across it like grass in a lawn, a dress my sister had chosen for me before I was even born. It is said that a baby’s clothes should not be bought until the birth, the revealing of gender happens after birth in India. Thinking on it now, maybe that was the first sign. The assumption on my gender being made months before my birth. A thin yellow blanket was curled around my belly, my eyes shut, eyelashes fluttering like the thick flecks of dust across the air.
Loud incantations of prayers always floated around me, words made of gold and glitter dust, the space etched on stone, each wall engraved with sculptures of God and stories of their victory. I was blessed by the priests, my astrology proclaiming that I was born in the same zodiac sign as the God my family worshipped. Inside that temple, made of sloping stone ceilings and gold-encrusted sculptures, stood my mother, with me in her arms, my body dressed in that navy-blue polka dotted dress, the skirt fanning along my knees as I held onto my mother’s fingers, my father looking down at me.
In the chill air of one night, darkness sweeping past the starless sky, I was inside the temple closest to home, one that held my parents’ wishes, prayers cast across stone, ceiling swooping down towards my head like a cave, like a blessing, and I was blessed by the priests there, by God. The first grains of rice a baby eats is supposed to mean the most to the parents, the grains should be blessed by God and priests in a temple, in a ceremony to call every person related to the parents, to watch the baby have cooked food for the first time.
Mine was at a temple too, at a time when my parents couldn’t afford a ceremony, and they took me to the priest, telling him it was my Annaprasanam or the rice-feeding ceremony, and he had taken a banyan leaf, pouring sweet pongal, a dessert often given as prasadam or offering to the devotees in a temple, without asking for a single sheet of money from us. He said, to my father, “She’s like my granddaughter, I don’t need any money from you”, and my mother had fed that sweetened rice to me, grateful.
I hadn’t known then, as a baby of six months, that I wouldn’t have been welcome there had he known I was transgender, had he known that I couldn’t be a granddaughter to anyone, being a bad enough daughter as I was, he wouldn’t have let me inside. Priests often treated transgender people like outcasts, like we weren’t supposed to enter the building, and tried to kick us out when we did enter. What he didn’t know then, saved me from pain.
I was often reminded of a story about a God that was cursed to be born intersex. A Sage’s wife left the Sage for a God, and upon returning to him, she was pregnant with the God’s child. The enraged Sage cursed the unborn child to be born with genitals that didn’t fit the gender binary, genitals that one can only be cursed with, never blessed. Bodies that didn’t fit the binary sex system were cursed. The God lived as a man, but their curse persisted. Intersex and trans bodies were cursed in the eyes of my religion, and despite not being intersex, I often felt cursed as well.
At two years old, as my mother, father, and I were walking back home from a temple, the night closing in around us like probing fingers curling into a fist, moonless, the streetlights blinking off. The world had seemed dim then, my body a dot in the darkness. I was clothed in a dress again, my foot tapping at the uneven ground.
I stepped into a hole in the ground, rocky, and had fallen down, hitting my head on the empty street. Mother rushed me to the hospital, and I got a few stitches across my head before leaving for home. This was a few months after my third customary hair-shaving ceremony. Each one done at a temple before sculptures of God.
My mother thought God had saved me from death, but it never felt like that. I stayed home for a few days after that, my mother praying every time she looked at me, fear bubbling in her like water did at the mouth of a drowning man. Of course, I lived after that.
A distinct memory, one that no one had to retell to me at midnight as I grew older, one that was fuzzy as a baby’s blanket, as fungus blooming in the walls after a flood, as sunlight in the winters, was the first time I realized I was transgender. The moment is in my mind like a painting on the wall, hung to remember and to feel, to keep close in moments of mistrust and fear, for to only feel real, for once.
I was four then, walking along the pavements towards a restaurant, my family carrying large plastic bags of things for an approaching festival, when my mother pulled me aside, my eyes darting to the trans person walking past our bodies, their frame skipping past the buildings as they carried a paper bag in their hands, a bag full of things, bulging at the corners, seams coming undone.
“Stop, they’re transgender, wait until they pass by”
I knew then what she meant by letting them pass by the undertone that the words were glued to, it told for me to never walk in their path, to never get close, but I saw myself in them, like a star tucked inside the brown eyes of a newborn, the silver a spot of familiarity, a spot of brightness. It was like toys saved from the elder sibling for the youngest one, a sort of thing that continues past that moment in time, like a moment that never ends. Like torn clothes being repaired, to be kept in the closet, in the memory, for longer than it should be, there was something in them that I saw myself in, a part of an older memory that is refreshed to stay in another’s mind. Something in them that made sense to me, like hair falling into place after being combed, my mind fell into place as I watched them leave my field of vision. They felt real, like thunder did after the silver flash of the lightning, like clinging drops of rain did at the glass of clear windows, like loneliness did in the nights, with no one else in the room. And that was when I knew who I was.
***
My mother taught me to never get close to transgender people. They could curse you, she said. My sister and father believed that too. I believe my father was the one that taught my mother that, and my sister followed along. They said transgender people’s curses always came true, that they could ruin a life as they’ve suffered all their lives. I briefly wondered if I could curse them, if my suffering was enough to have that power, if suffering was a prerequisite for joy. I never tried once to know.
My mother, when I asked for food at midnight or took a leave from school, often cursed me. It was like the curses were ones that were created having me in the mind. Words that wished for my disease and rotten body, ones that propelled me to think of my death in all the ways it could happen. There would be no funeral for me, my body only food for wild dogs, rotting in a trash can. My mother apologized later, of course, but the pockmarks of the pink scar never entirely left my skin. I told myself to never ask her for food after dark. It was only fair for both of us.
Once, at a festival, we sat in a circle on the floor at home, cross-legged, my extended family surrounding my shadows, and mother said I should never waste food. Not like my sister. Then, I would end up without food forever. I never wasted food after that. Food was tied to god, I was often told. It is sacred. There was a story my aunt used to tell me and my sister to get us to finish our food. The story always started at sunset, like romance that buds at the dip of the sun, at the tip of the tongue, at the edge of the fingers, and there stood the Goddess of Food, of rice and prosperity, of grains and everything edible. As the sun turned orange from the yellow, like petals of a flowers peeled apart, the wasted rice and vegetables from our plates turned up alive. They rose from our plates, from the sink, from the drains, and found their way out the home. They ended up in sand and water. In the beach. In the sea. There, they kneeled before the Goddess and wept. They wept until the sun dipped across the horizon and turned into a black smudge at tide. And, the Goddess listened to their relentless weeping. To not finish the food was to hurt the Goddess, to let the wasted rice weep at sunset in the sea, to watch our plates contain lesser and lesser food until the day there was no more. Empty plates made of stainless steel. Crying rice made from lightless nights in the sea. I always finished my food at the end of the story. I always imagined the rice sobbing. I always feared going to the beach at night and to see the bowing rice and angry Goddess. Ghosts lurk in the dark beach. Dead bodies drown in the tide. Angry goddesses and sobbing rice planned their revenge in the sea. I never visited the beach at nights. I never wanted to see the weeping rice. I didn't want to be a witness to an impending curse. I didn’t want to be cursed.
I was told all my life that God didn’t love transgender people, that my curse could never be lifted, and as I sat down to pray, I only felt the contempt radiating from the sculptures and the gold. Religion was the illusion of a distant light, never close enough to grab onto, to hold, always cold and far away. When I realized that God hated me, I never wanted to get close to religion.
When the priests preached of religion, I felt as if there was a gap in my mind, a tug at my chest to follow something I didn’t understand, a touch at my cheeks to give up, my memories clinging to me like a dribble of water on glass. It was like I was seeking something I could never get, like I was to be cursed for never being the same as others. Loud incantations travelled to my mind in whispers, itching at my memory, like verses spoken from the throat that travels to the tip of the tongue, like the fear that comes from being in an unfamiliar dark room, like words that could never be taken back after being spoken. Prayers were distant, words I couldn’t understand in an unfamiliar language, and I strayed from the path my family wanted for me.
Transgender people aren’t loved by God, I told myself, I’ll never be loved. In all honesty, that didn’t hurt as much as the love I could never get from my family were they to know I am transgender. I believed that for a long time, I wasn’t worthy of love for what I was, that there must be a reason they viewed me with contempt. I thought of my religion as a distant part of my life, barely there, almost disappearing into a vacuum, meaningless to my existence. God couldn’t love what I was, and a part of me, after over a decade, still believes that.
***
School was constructed around religion, one that was supposed to be easy for me for it was rooted in my caste, but each prayer that I was taught in the mornings seemed harder to utter, like a tongue-twister forced upon a two-year-old, and I couldn’t comprehend the words that left my mouth. It was blurry, like eyes filled with coconut oil, like a foggy night, like curls of eyelashes poking into the vision.
It was a girl’s school, the school I went to for most of my childhood, and I wasn’t a girl. Sometimes, it felt like I was the only one in the entire building (the teachers were women too) that wasn’t a girl. And that stung like liquor on a fresh wound. I wore a pinafore, a grey one, to school every morning, and sat in that room like my mind wasn’t different, like I could one day be one of them if I tried hard enough. I hoped to be one of them, to blend in, to disappear. Afterall, that’s what they wanted of me.
One morning, I stood in prayer class, and watched everyone’s eyes come to a close, the room trilling with indecipherable words, my eyes open for a moment longer than the others’. My lips moved with the rest of them, but not a syllable left my mouth. I was standing next to a girl, the only Muslim girl in my grade, and I watched as she shut her eyes, palms pressed together, mouthing along to the words like I did. I leaned in close, and whispered, the prayers echoing in my empty ears, “you’re not Hindu, isn’t it hard to say a prayer you don’t believe in?” And she shrugged, whispering back, “I don’t actually say or mean it, and it doesn’t matter, does it?” We were seven then, and had prayer classes every week, memorizing the words for we would be tested on it in the mornings, and grades were always important.
There was certainty in the way I had to live for most of my life, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, asking my sister to choose all my clothes for I didn’t know to dress feminine, to dress in a way that wouldn’t let me get caught for my difference. Femininity brought me affection from my family and school, a sense of safety in the streets, a certainty that if I could pretend, I can have that love forever.
At that time, Transness was like the harm done by the dead, it was not to be talked about, it was to be buried in their ashes, floating in the sea. In the film rolls and photographs of my childhood, I saw a sliver of myself, and hated it. Now, in those photographs, I see the things I cannot hide anymore. To know I was trans wasn’t a boon, it was merely a fact like the need of air is to the body, a necessary information I could never ignore. I circled female in every form, the black ink of the letters glossed over like water on my hair, glinting at a reflection of my eyes, like sun on skin.
There was a form I had to fill out every month at school, my notebooks proudly proclaiming me a girl, every sheet lined and scribbled on, my mind a tangle of thoughts I couldn’t ever untangle. I didn’t know a name for it then, of the feelings that my mind harbored like murky water after a flood in an uninhabited home, moss and algae growing upon the walls, tiles ruined like a scar left behind after a burn, something that would stay until it is replaced or changed. There’d always been a name for what I felt, dysphoria, something so simple, and yet, it was the taboo of my existence, a weight that held onto my body like rocks suspended on strings that hung down my shoulders, dragging me down with it. Dysphoria.
***
I never believed myself to be real, my skin spun from the base of my imagination, my flesh the yarn I couldn’t weave. I thought I was a character in a book, that a child would one day flip to the last page, and I could end, that my life was merely fiction, a picture book of past moments I couldn’t change. And change scared me as certainty grounded me, my mind strung from fiction, the thread loose and languid, inky.
Like a waking dream, my body was a blur, the prayers echoing in my ears like a warning, like a chance for me to ask for forgiveness, to be the child that could one day be loved, free of the mortal sin I was given at birth. My flesh was a home to disassociation, reminding me of the time I spent wanting my body gone, lying next to my mother on the bed, the room made of floating breaths, of silent ghosts and their desires, of fear, and I held onto that orange blanket, a way for me to grip onto reality. I thought when I awoke, I would begin attending the boys school from across the street. I thought it was only a nightmare. Something to leave behind in the mornings.
I contemplated suicide from the time I turned four, weeping at the version of myself that I saw in the mirror, the version that stabbed me at the tongue that could never speak of my transness, at my closing throat and frail veins, like that of a voiceless stem in a drooping plant. It was like my body was created as an afterthought to my mind. Suicide was glamorized in the television, one that could relieve me of pain, and I was ready to do anything to relieve myself of the pain I felt looking at my body. A body that didn’t belong to me.
Maybe that was when it began, when I was four, staring at my body in the mirror. My skin felt as stained glass would, fragile leave for the sharp edges, edges that couldn’t be blurred, glass that couldn’t be warmed. I didn’t touch or stare at my naked form for the fear of not feeling what I wished I felt, I looked at the mirrors with confusion, it didn’t look like me, my reflection. I saw someone’s moving body in the mirrors and wished to see mine instead. My hair was short, curving along my jawline, and I refused to look at my naked body for the years to come. It wasn’t mine, I thought of my body, begging for it to transform before the mirror, to change, to shapeshift. When I watched a snake shed its skin on the television, I imagined doing that myself, in a dark room, shedding the skin I was born with. Shapeshifting.
It wouldn’t change though, my mind staying upon the little creases of skin under my arm, at my thighs, over my chest, everything seemed unreal, spun from the yarn of my imagination, the threads dark and curled around my past. I believe I began to feel unstuck from my mind, the only way I could describe it, when I turned three, the memories barely caught between the net of my mind, almost forgotten now.
In a painting, there seemed to be dripping colours, fallen paint and downward strokes of the brush, colours bleeding together like lives intertwined on the canvas, in the light, between the shadows, and I saw the moments of my life like that. As a poem, the parts seemed fragmented, like fractured bones, torn ligaments, cut syllables, sharp and harsh. As a painting, it seemed softer, less painful to look at, more complete, made of liquid colour. It was easier to accept, then.
My body seemed like a thick paintbrush had washed colour along my skin, like the parts didn’t belong to me, like I was a formless clump of flesh, coated in blood and skin, blood and skin that felt like paint on canvas. I felt like an outsider, peeking into something I shouldn’t see, a wall that was constructed to keep me out, glassy vision astray, fingers made of watercolour.
I wondered what it would have been like to have been born with a body, one that was real, not riddled with feelings of guilt, of regret for something that I cannot control. I wonder what my maternal grandmother would have said, a woman that had spent the last years of her life in long spells of hallucination, a woman that was alive ten years before my birth, one that I could’ve had in my life, one that I hoped would’ve loved me. She had been alive at a time when trans people were thought of as an illusion, like something that existed in a different plane of life, not this one, never this one. They were frightening, vicious.
As a child, I often looked at the parts of my body, embalming each throbbing part with a meaning, to give it life. The heart that bloomed from my mother’s body, beating for no reason but for survival, the voice that sounded less like me and more like a different person, a voice that echoed from my throat but spoke of someone else, the mind that made me pray for things I could never get, the mind that seemed like it were made of liquid thought, of tangible feelings and forgettable memories.
In that throbbing skin that only looked as an animal hide to me, I never saw myself, in my mind or in my dreams, and for a long time, I didn’t know how I looked, I didn’t know the person I saw in the mirror each morning, and I wept for the corpse of my mind, the carrion that couldn’t be revived, the distant body of my past. Inside little paintings of God, I saw contempt for myself, in the anger pasted upon their faces, I saw the intolerance of the temples, and in the mirror, I saw fear in my eyes.
Around that time, I drew little lines sketched from crimson ink upon my wrists, watching the ink rush along my skin like blood, a smile etched upon my face, hoping for it to be real, to feel the sting of a cut, to watch it bleed, to feel the static pulsing at my open flesh. The blood was like a painting upon my skin, created with intent, like watercolor splashed across a canvas, splintering like wood across my flesh, like promises did after years of keeping them, forgotten, fractured.
I did it every day for a long time, after school, hunched beneath the wood of my desk, washing my arm before anyone noticed, the paint falling from my skin in whorls of crimson, ink dripping into the drain, leaving barely the kiss of a stain beneath, like from a lipstick on the skin. Years from then, almost a decade later, I would come to realize that moment, looking back on it, as the manifestation of my suicidal ideation. Sitting in therapy, and hearing words that would’ve been foreign to my younger self. Listening to the words and watching my childhood come alive. Like a film played in reverse.
The bleeding ink started as a prayer, of the wish for my transness to be ripped away from me, for me to become the child my parents desired, to be the way I was meant to be. And as the ink bled down my wrist in splotches of color, my eyes stained with the murky liquid of my tears, I didn’t change, my prayers left unanswered and I awoke each morning to find a body I didn’t need, a body I couldn’t call my own, a home that was merely a building of ghosts, haunting my mind.
I saw a ghost in the mirror, and tried to love it, to watch the rugged edges of my body transform into spilt color and cut flesh. I only saw the child I tried to will away in the mirror. The child I thought I had killed. The body I was bestowed upon never felt real, and the pages grew longer and longer till my mind died under the weight of the book, its shadow drowning out my thoughts in silence, slow and calm. And pretending started to feel harder, the character began to fade into me, and my memories grew tainted with fear, what if they found out? It was like a gamble to stay alive. To try to live was a sin. To survive was a curse.
***
My aunt died the winter of my third grade in school, tears dripping out my eyes like a leaking tap as I watched them cremate her body according to our customs and traditions. I imagined my own funeral then, thinking of the way there would be flowers under my picture, and that distressed me. I didn’t want a funeral after my death. I still don’t.
There were also the prayers, watching everyone’s palms come together, fingers pressed to each other, eyes shut, and I copied their movements like I was barely a carbon sheet, their movements sketched across the blue of my memory, doing what they did without ever understanding. I thought my decision not to pray was pointless, to avoid something my family treasured, to ignore it like it could hurt me. At that time, I never realized the way it hurt me.
When my mental health declined, I barely went to school. It were like a ghost was positioned in my mind, like trenches were created around its existence, to protect it from the others—my mind from the people—or to protect the others from it—the people from my mind—I didn’t know. The school watched me miss morning prayers and take too many days off for a few months, and, one morning, the principal called me into her office and told me I was no longer welcome there, “There are other students who can score as well as you do.”
I was enrolled into another girl’s school, this time one with a beige churidar as the uniform, my body stuck in clothes that brought me farther away from myself, ripping my mind out the body that inhabited it. I was still pretending in that body, dresses hanging off my shoulders like corpses from the ceiling. I told myself I was only playing a character, I believed it would all change soon to keep myself alive.
During that time, I began to lose my appetite, refusing to eat with the guise of a barely formed diet, an effort to lose weight, I said. And everyone around me was pleased, that I was trying to lose weight, to grow into the body I had, and I watched as their attitude changed with every time my waist shrunk, my belly caving into their expectations.
I started to feel less real as I grew thinner, losing over fifty pounds in a few months, staring at food with resentment, the way it made me feel unreal, bringing me back to the childhood I despised. The childhood that held my memories in a cage, a prison I couldn’t ever leave. In my dreams, I wished to be someone else, to escape that prison, but all around me were unyielding walls, and so, I fell beneath the shadows, and let them swallow my body.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be real. It was just that I didn’t know how to be real. Unreality shrouded me the way it would a corpse as it was lowered to the ground, the belief that the corpse wasn’t entirely dead, that it couldn’t be true covering the length of its past existence, enclosing its sweatless shiny skin and the cold meat beneath it. The unreality of a corpse’s existence was akin to that of my past and future. There seemed to be an element of fiction to my existence, a character that couldn’t escape from its body, a body that couldn’t leave its character. An entrapment that lasted years.
Puberty brought rolls of fat stuck under my skin, creases formed upon my chest, and I worried then if people would know I was transgender, if I wouldn’t be able to hide anymore. When I got my first period, my sister told me, ‘You’re a woman now’ and I screamed, backing away from her, “No.” That no carried me through the years of puberty. No. No.
I refused to look at my body for three years during that time, the mirrors lifted away from my vision, my eyes never looking down as bathed. It was easier to not look at my naked body, a form of escapism for me to ignore its existence, and I did what I had to to survive. I hoped to mold my flesh between my palms like dough, like clay between a child’s fingers, to crush my skin between my wet fingers, to meld it into the statue I could someday love. Like metal in a furnace, like frozen polymer clay, like flesh under knife, I willed for it to change, to morph into something recognizable, something lovable.
I stopped eating in the hopes of changing the way I looked, to finally look at my body and see me in my mirror the way I wished to, but not eating made me view my body with more contempt than I already did, and not looking was the only way I could stop myself from indulging in my suicidal thoughts. It was like a cork on a tap of thoughts, something that could only stop for a while, buying some time until the next fix. At that time, I didn’t know what the next fix was, I was clueless. No. No.
***
I changed schools again that summer, this time by will, my mental health still declining. It was a co-education school, this time, and I started to eat again, still not looking at my body as I changed, trying to blend into the buzz of the classrooms. It was like the noise in a theatre as the movie begins, the baby’s cry, the mother’s whisper, the father’s sigh, it was just in the background. My life felt more like a performance, a pretend show for anyone to watch, so unlike what I wanted for myself, I began to denounce my childhood.
My childhood reminded me of the times I looked at my body, and felt the cold scratch of ice cubes down my throat, cracking at my voice, creating a space in my memory that will one day melt and leave me. I wanted those feelings to leave me as well, my mind a block of wood that couldn’t be chiseled or sculpted, my body made of brown metal that couldn’t melt in any furnace. Two things that wouldn’t change to accommodate the other. Two things that I had no control over.
People often read into my masculinity, from the time a girl in kindergarten told me that I was too masculine when I said my favorite color was green, to the way I refused to accept the changes that came with puberty. It was like my body had failed in something vital, like it hadn’t developed the way I had wanted it to. There were the jokes, a sense of discomfort rolled into them, that I was transgender, first said by my father, sitting before him cross-legged on the cement floor painted a fading maroon, “you sound like a transgender” he forced me to accept it, but I only wept, tears thrashing at my eyes like a fish dropped from a jook, and onto the ground. Mother and my sister defended me. Then, the jokes oscillated through my life by other voices far from my father’s own, spread because of everyone else. It seemed conspicuous to others that I wasn’t a woman, that even if I tried, I was obvious. When my body was fitted into frilly dresses as a child and then into flowing drapes of a pink dress as a teenager, I often thought of myself as a character, a body that moves but isn’t mine. I watched myself from afar, and then, I left.
Once, I stood in a shop, picking out a pale yellow and white striped hoodie, thin lines of cloth stitched together, cheap, and yet, I felt a sense of belonging in it that I couldn’t find in anything else. It reminded me of the first time I bought jeans for myself, without the help of my parents, as a ten year old, the time I refused to wear anything but loose-fitting jeans, blue and faded, it was like a sky I could swoop under and hide from the storm. My sister had grabbed a roll of fabric, unstitched pieces of a set of churidar, for me. She said, “You need to wear more of these, keep that hoodie back on the rack” and I shook my head, “No, I won’t wear that.”
My sister grabbed my wrist, her nails digging into my skin as she pulled me to the section with churidars, “you’re a woman now, you need to dress like one” and I pulled away from her. It wasn’t entirely malicious, she didn’t know better but it felt like that then, to be forced into those clothes felt like a noose upon the neck, like it could tighten around me any day. I walked to my mother, and told her I wouldn’t wear what my sister chose for me.
Mother let me get whatever I wanted, but my sister persisted. She said, stomping her foot on the white-tiled floor, grabbing a pair of gold-colored leggings and a kurti shirt in my size, “I need to get this for her.” My mother said nothing, and my sister grabbed the unstitched churidar material, and the kurti and the leggings, pulling my body to stand by her side as she said, ‘don’t try to act like you’re better than anyone else, I’ll get this stitched for you, and you’ll wear the churidar’.
I grabbed that hoodie, and bought another pair of jeans, blue, my fingers clutching the thick fabric like it would leave me were I to get distracted for a moment. The handful of clothes I picked for myself were like a refuge, a cave of desires for the dying heart, like wishes from an angel, like moonlight on a dark night, my only way to have something for myself that only belonged to me. I held onto the cloth as it was billed and put in a bag, my sister getting the churidar billed. She said, “They don’t let girls wear jeans in the temples anymore.”
It was a recent rule, for girls to not wear jeans to the temples, and I said I wouldn’t go there anymore then. My father said, “They can’t send you out for wearing jeans, wear whatever you want, I’ll talk to them” and my mother remained hesitant. My sister said, “You should wear churidars, you’ll have to get used to it, you’re a woman now.” My sister got the churidar stitched, but I didn’t wear it except for once when she forced me into it. I removed it barely two hours later, the night ruined, my mind crumbling into a pile of ashes like an incinerated uterus, no use for the ashes, grey and solid as dust in the air. Clothes were like fear to me, watching them fall upon my body and feel a sense of aversion to it. At first, I wasn’t certain what I found repulsive in it, it was like a cloud of feelings I couldn’t decipher, ones that ended with me avoiding any contact or connection with my body. I gave the kurti and leggings to my mother, never once wearing it. My sister was disappointed and angry then, but I didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t please everyone.
When I circled female in the forms at school, there was ice in my chest that made it difficult to breathe, like there was a thunderstorm waiting to come close. I sat in class, in the girl’s side of the classroom, and watched the boys with a sort of envy, a type of pain that festered like cold sores on the foot, like blisters on the chest that come with compressing your body with bandages and tape. I often imagined myself sitting in the boy’s section of my classroom, wearing their uniform, shedding my blue skirt and shirt for the trousers and button-downs, eating lunch in their spot, not trying to hide behind the cloak I’d stitched for myself through the years. The seams of the cloak came apart as I stared at them, their bodies resembling what I wanted for myself, mine a carrion of my childhood self, grown, rotten like ripe tomatoes after a week on the kitchen counter. I felt rotten on the inside. Like the tomatoes.
***
Sophomore year of high school, I chopped off all my hair, and wore trousers and shirts instead of churidars, the school was the only place I wore a skirt. The unreality started to fade as my hair grew shorter, my periods of disassociation rarer and less painful, my body starting to grow into me as I saw myself in the mirror for the first time. Me. My sister and mother began to suspect then what my father had always mentioned, thinking that I might be trans as the signs presented themselves to them, clearer this time.
My sister once asked, like it was an accusation, “Are you transgender?” And I laughed it off the way I did when she asked if I was straight in middle school. I wasn’t ready yet to tell them anything. I bought myself time like I was to face something that I can never go back on, I was buying myself time and only that.
I feared they would despise me the way I believed God did, and I couldn’t let them hate me. I feared mother would send me out home or refuse to accept my identity. I thought my sister would slap me, that they would both cease to love me for my identity was a huge barrier for their love. I feared so much I couldn’t utter the words, it was too much, loud against the back of my mind, always there, telling me they would hate me, writhing like a fish against a curved silver hook, the worm of courage devoured and gone.
Father died that summer, brain hemorrhage, and with him, departed a sense of myself. There was like a gap in my mind, one where I held him, and inside that crack, festered a million wounds that never healed. It was eight years after I lost my aunt to a stroke, and my father faced the same fate. I thought I would face the same fate as well.
Then there were the customs, watching my mother tear her mangalsutra from around her neck and throw it in a pot of milk before father’s framed photograph. Long garlands of roses hung upon the photograph like rope around a neck as one is hanged for their crimes. As I watched the man I’d known all my life transform into a two dimensional photograph, my mind splintered at the edges, like the wood that couldn’t be sculpted, like fear that never leaves your mind, fear to survive when the ones you love have already left. The priests offered condolences for we became fatherless children and my mother a widow, advised us to talk more to my aunt’s sister, one that despised our existence. I asked the pundits if they would let me do my father’s final rights, but they refused. You’re a girl, they said, you cannot do it. I only nodded.
I wanted to tell them I wasn’t a girl, but I feared the repercussions of coming out as transgender. I wouldn’t have been allowed to watch his final rites, not let close to the sacred building for I was an abomination. In their eyes, I had strayed from God’s Will, ruined my family. I never told them, tears stuck to my cheeks as I starved myself as a way to cope with grief, my resentment for food returning to my mind.
I had to bath multiple times a day after my father’s death for two weeks, and I couldn’t look down at my form as I bathed, years of escaping the body I had, it had become a habit for me to ignore my body. When I got sick, I endured the pain as I didn’t want to mend a body that wasn’t mine. I couldn’t look at myself without weeping at what I saw, tears streaked across my face as I bathed, grieving for the man I lost and the body I had. I hoped to tear open my body and leave the way he had. Like a snake would shed its skin, I wished to shed mine.
I prayed for the first time in years then, praying for something I didn’t believe in, hoping that my father didn’t go through too much pain on the cusp of his death. “According to our religion,” my sister had said one night, her eyes stuck on me as we sat cross-legged on the white-tiled floor, “Father will go to hell.” I wept that night, willing her words to the dust, to be the lie that it was even as I barely ever shared her beliefs. Just to keep my mind at ease, I never believed her.
God seemed like a distant star I could never reach, like flesh without blood, losing his role in my life. I continued to follow the rules of the religion for my family, the way I wore dresses and grew my hair long for them, the way I hid everything and wished it all away, for them. I thought it was only right to stay like that, to never let on, to live under a cloak of fear, of the failure that rose at night and kept me down on the ground, of the expectations that will never be absolved.
As I wept through the nights, my life turned into a watercolor, made for the book, flipping and flipping without an ending, a long book of pages that wouldn’t stop turning, an animation that meant nothing to the past and present, a way to guard my future from myself. The colors bled like an untreated wound, like gashes never allowed to heal, cut after cut on the same spot, and I watched my life through the painting, not through words that seemed too real, but through the lens of a photograph or the color of paint on canvas. The pages turned, and my wounds became paintings, and my blood became the paint. I lied then, that I was fine, that I didn’t need help, when I needed help more than anything.
Losing my father brought me further away from religion. It brought me to a place where I could never return to religion or God. The distance was too wide to close then, and so, I didn’t return to religion or God for hope, I returned to the white-walls of my room, and mourned his loss alone.
On the cusp of spring, I told my family that I am transgender, weeping as the words choked out my wet mouth, spittle flying into the air like drones looking for skin to land on, and mother said she’d had the thought sweeping past her mind for seven years, but she’d ignored it. I imagined what my father would’ve said, two years from his death, and I still sought his opinion. His beliefs a way to validate my own. There was a silence in the room as I told them, hours after my appointment with an endocrinologist. Hours after she said I cannot start testosterone.
***
As I sit before the window, the night darkening outside, my body covered in a knitted white shirt and blue shorts, my shoulders damp with the testosterone gel, the room tinged with a quiet, I think of the times I saw myself as nothing more than a corpse, as nothing more than a thing, to be changed. I am not anymore stuck in that time, my mind made of spilling secrets, and a future where I could see myself.
I keep a photograph of my family in my room, one frozen in time, one that reminds me of everything that I once had in my life, of my father, of my aunt, of a fractured family that is now torn ligaments and shattered bones, structureless.
My eyes slip over to the glass-framed photograph of my family stuck atop a white shelf, one we took while on vacation, my aunt and father are still in that photograph, frozen in their spots like life-sized dolls, made to be moved and yet, motionless, stuck between my mother and me. A wetness sweeps past my eyes, and there are so many things I regret, of the way I left God when my family needed him, of my estranged emotions straying away from their presence, my mind always far from my body.
God was etched into every room in our home, pictures hanging upon the walls, nails protruding from the white walls as the thin thread of the picture curled around the rusted nail. God was there in every room, but in my life, and I stared at that photograph, the one we took at a temple, one so quiet, it felt wrong to breathe.
The chill air brushes along my damp cheeks as I stare at the photograph, the room darkening as the night wails on outside the glass panes of the rain-drenched windows. The moon limns at the clouds, the rain obscuring the color as the photograph comes to life before me, my aunt’s arm around me, my sister stuck by my side, my father and mother standing together at the center. All of us smiling. The moments before the photograph was taken weren’t captured, they were chaos, my aunt screaming at us to get behind the camera, my father telling me to smile, the photographer disenchanted by our words.
I look at the photograph of the fragmented sliver of God behind our bodies, of the God I hadn’t looked at in years, of the religion I had left long before now, and I am struck by the life-like sculpture stuck beneath the shadows, like a looming future, like darkness. It was made of stone, and I look at it, at the one I once prayed to, and not anymore. At what I once believed in.
It feels like a mistake now, to have promised to devote myself to a God I didn’t anymore believe in, to have uttered prayers that I hadn’t known the meaning of, and as I stare at the photograph, the remnants of my past stuck beneath the glass frame, I know I have not believed in what I once did for years. It was like I was trapped in a coffin made of glass, unable to look at the ones that hurt me, their eyes made of painted stone and dripping gold. Now, I am not free from anything, none had captured me before, but I do not look through a glass of what I could be, I only look in the mirror instead of a sculpture, peering into my mind than that of another’s. I look at myself now. I feel like I can breathe.
It seems fitting now, for me to not believe, and as my sister and mother, the only ones left off of my family now, pray in the living room before long pictures of God, the prayers whispering at the walls of my room, the scent of the burning wicker of a diya wafting into my room, sweet, like words spoken from the tongue, like relief after a period of fear, like ice cream cones in summer, I let myself be wrapped in the warmth of the room, of the loneliness that comes with letting go of someone, of the feeling of relief from leaving something that you believed in for too long, and I feel alive in my skin for the first time. In the dim light of the room, with rain at my windows, with distant prayers spoken aloud, with the feeling of certainty in my beliefs and body, I smile.
—————
Mrityunjay Mohan is a queer, trans, disabled writer of color. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, and Fourteen Hills. He’s a Tin House scholar and a Brooklyn Poets fellow. He's been awarded scholarships by Sundance Institute, The Common, Frontier Poetry, Black Lawrence Press, and elsewhere. He’s an editor for ANMLY magazine, and a reader for Split/Lip Press, Harvard Review, and The Masters Review.