From The Broken Mirror Of Hope
What is your identity? What is your eyesight, is it male or female? What is your heart? Do you refer to it as he or she? What is the colour of your emotion? Do you dress up your emotion? Do you flaunt it in ways that suit the coloured lens of the world you inhabit? Yes, we do. I stand guilty of not treating another human being just as me.
Emotion is as fluid as the water and blood running in your veins. Do you see yourself in the totality of who you are?
As I rummage through my things that are tucked away in some corner of my mind, I am forced to look at the summer noon of Delhi. Those lanes with the tree shaded pathways, homes with blaring air conditioners, windows tightly shut with the mind too. The troupe of Hijras who are dressed loudly with make up and low saris revealing their infertile tummies and an ill-fitting blouse with padded bras and one man among them as their troupe member.
They are tired of running away from corrupt policemen and searching home to home for a newborn or a newly married couple to bless, sing and negotiate the price for the blessing. We buy blessings like a commodity. It’s all a business that blooms in the name of faith.
My heart used to bleed to watch this glaring injustice of gender identity acceptance. Just the sheer shame I felt rising in my cheeks as I saw another human being being treated like a pariah for this difference. Yes, we live in dystopia.
I feebly smiled at them because I was guilty of not being able to help, eradicate this bias or even wipe their tear. I was always greeted with warmth that is found in the honesty of pain and an ardent need for redemption from this chain of identity that they fought forever.
Over time I realise how insensitive and inhuman we all are. All this mumbo jumbo of acceptance is beautiful in essays and writings and in LGBTQIA marches. No one really wipes their tears or give them equal opportunity in this unequal world of division on sexuality, monetary status and the list is endless.
As we celebrate this month of equality in sexual orientation, I shut my eyes and and I can vividly reminisce the bleeding lipstick, after an entire noon of running from home to home. The eyeliner and mascara that has dried on the face after streams of tears that have not been wiped by one human to another.
Yes, my flight is not safe like yours.
Yes, my step doesn’t match yours.
Yes, I don’t glide over the turmoil of the tide,
As smoothly as I should.
Yes, I crave my mother’s touch.
Yes, I crave the sunshine.
Like you I am human too.
My heart isn’t a vagina or a penis,
It is shaped and beating with trepidation.
Like you I am scared of the rain and thunder.
Take me as I am,
Yes, my flight is not safe like yours.
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