All part woman

By Sukant Deepak 

Patiala, March 13,  The aunt kept stopping her. She was angry. Very uncomfortable. But Gazal wouldnt listen. The aunt then shouted. She still wouldn’t stop. The dupatta was way too fascinating to let go. Its colours, the pattern…

It was the sound of the slap, not the pain that stunned her. Now there was quiet. For a long time. She was five-years-old that time.

Gazal Dhaliwal always loved playing with her mother’s dupatta, the printed one. Wearing it the way she did. And the aunt just couldn’t digest that. After all, she was a boy that time.

It has been 32 years since that happened. A lot has transpired in these years. An engineering degree, writing the screenplay and dialogues for Vinod Chopra’s “Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga”, dialogues for “Lipstick Under My Burkha”, co-writing the screenplay for “Qarib Qarib Singlle”, being the lead writer for an upcoming show on a major OTT platform, and yes, a sex-change surgery…

It is now raining in Patiala. We are in a cafe. She looks outside the huge glass window, sipping the horrible coffee. She says a lot has changed, just like the city which once had a balmy subaltern rhythm to it, now lost in the maze of expensive restaurants, bulky SUVs and new-age hang-out joints.

“That slap told me something was off between how I understood myself, and the way the world did. Of course, that time I couldn’t put it in those many words. Ever since I have memory of memory, I knew I was in a body that didn’t belong to me. At any level. There was a time when I assumed that I was the only one in the world who felt like this. It was such a lonely feeling. So very lonely. So terrible. I couldn’t share its with any friends except one or two. Sharing didn’t really help, you know,” she says.

When she talks about all the harassment, mocking and teasing, there is no martyr in her tone.

Everything is matter-of-fact. She says all that became so �usual’, that she can’t recall ‘incidents’. “But yes, increasingly, I completely identified with girls, most friends were girls, my elder brother and his friends would ask me to join them for a game of cricket. I hated it.”

Her coming out in front of her father was straight from a 90’s film. She was 14-years-old, and had told her parents that she was going to meet a friend, but when to a counsellor instead. The friend called home.

Gazal told her father how hard it felt to live in another body. How everyday was a new torture chamber. He heard her out. “He said that he didn’t understand how a boy could feel like that. But acknowledged the fact that I was facing something. Now when I look back, I feel it was such an evolved reaction – despite their generation, those times – 1996. Post that, despite knowing that he now knew, we didn’t talk about it.”

And the mother? “Don’t they always know? They may not say, but…”

This was the time when Google had not penetrated. This was also the time when she didn’t know how to “box” herself. She says all she knew about was the term �gay’. Her “inability to do anything masculine – sports, gait, voice. In my teenage, I didn’t have the word transgender transexual”.

And Gazal, at 17, just before her boards, depressed, lonely, with hormones at their peak decided to run away to an aashram in Mount Abu. But she could go only till Delhi. “The journey from Patiala to the capital was traumatic. I always looked feminine. The way men would look at me, the way they said everything without uttering a word… I was shaken. I called my parents from from Delhi and my father’s friend picked me up from the railway station. During the drive back, my father, who had come to pick me up, didn’t utter a word. Two hours passed. And then three. After that he completely broke down.”

For someone, who scored 99 per cent in Maths and was always among the top students, it was suggested that Engineering would be the best bet. She went to NIT, Jaipur despite getting a seat at the prestigious Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. “I had to get out of this town. You know, even at NIT, I was better known for my extra-curricular activities – dramatics, debates and everything to do with culture.”

Joining Infosys, first in Bengaluru and then in Mysore, only to quit after a few years to enrol herself for a film course at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, Gazal feels that the reason her parents didn’t have a problem with the move was not just because she wanted to follow her heart. “I feel somewhere, they thought that my transition in a woman’s body would not be possible. Why deny her even this? Bet they didn’t know at that time that they would have a daughter instead of a son in a few years,” she laughs.

At St. Xavier’s, as part of the course requirement, she along with a group of friends made a documentary film “To Be… Me” on transgenders- Hijra, transexual, pre and post-op tans people. This required meeting several psychiatrists, endocrinologists and surgeons.

“Now when I look back, I feel the film was my catharsis. In fact, in the end of the movie, I �came out’.” When she showed the film to her father, the first thing he asked her was, “When are you undergoing the surgery?”

Then started a three-year long process. Psychiatric evaluation, hormones prescribed by an endocrinologist, and finally the surgery in Bangkok in the year 2007.

Post her surgery, she came back to Patiala for year and a half. “I wrote a dramatic letter to all my relatives and friends. There was a lot of support. Of course, those who were uncomfortable with the decision didn’t write back.”

But now came the time of facing the immediate world – the neighbours, the kids playing in the street, the shopkeepers around the corner of the house. “I didn’t step out for months. It was harsh winter. There was no sun for me.”

That is when her father and mother decided to visit the neighbourhood houses and tell them – “She is our daughter now, and we want you to treat her like that.” The sun now came out for Gazal, even metaphorically.

Stop. The music is just too loud. You tell her to ask the cafe manager to reduce the volume. And also foolishly add, “He will listen to a woman.” She just smiles and gets up. You now want to slap yourself.

We talk about identity. She says being a transperson is her primary one in the film industry. “I am also representative of the trans community. Before people say ‘the writer who wrote that’, they say ‘the one who is a trans woman’. But it’s alright, visibility is important when you are a minority.”

The dictaphone has been switched off. What is the best part of being a woman? “Bet you wouldn’t ask this to someone born in a woman’s body.” Maybe I would. “Ok, let me play along. Maybe I am loving the clothes, that I can now have long hair. And yeah, I can get that music lowered.”