Hijra

Most hijras who have a man have a panthi or a giriya — a boyfriend who is often married to a woman and will not be seen with you at a wedding. He may live in the house for a year and go. He may take money. He may also be the only person who touches you without flinching, which is worth a great deal when nobody else does.

Some hijras marry each other. Some marry a man in a ceremony no registrar will record. At Koovagam in Tamil Nadu every April, thousands marry the god Aravan for one night and break their bangles as his widows the next morning. A wedding and a funeral in eighteen hours, and for many of them the only marriage they will get.

Then there is the love inside the house, which nobody writes songs about. A guru who paid for your operation and shouted at you for a week afterwards. A gurubhai who sat with you in the hospital corridor at four in the morning. Family love, with all the debt attached.

And the flat part: in a lot of houses, how much you are loved tracks how much you bring in.

Here desire and money are tangled together, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Plenty of hijras wanted men long before any of the rest of it — before the house, before the clothes, before anyone gave it a name. Plenty do dhandha because badhai does not cover rent, and what happens in a parked car has nothing to do with wanting anything.

Some say nirvaan took desire away and that was the entire point — a handing over of it to the goddess, not a loss. Some feel very little and always did. Some have had the same partner for fifteen years and are bored of being asked about it.

There is also snobbery about all this inside the community. Badhai hijras look down on dhandha hijras. Everyone knows. Everyone does both when the season is bad.

Nirvaan is the operation — removal of the penis and testicles. Traditionally done inside the community by a dai ma, without a hospital and without anaesthetic, followed by weeks of seclusion in which you are kept, fed and dressed like a bride, and come out belonging to the goddess. Increasingly it is a clinic, cash, a surgeon who asks nothing.

It is dangerous. People have bled to death. People live for thirty years with pain and complications nobody will treat.

Plenty never do it. Akwa is an ordinary way to live, though there will always be someone who reminds you.

Hormones come from a chemist who does not ask for a prescription. Nobody checks your liver. Breasts come slowly, or you pad, or you do neither and it changes nothing about who you are in the house.

Then hospitals. A male ward and a female ward and neither will take you. A doctor who calls other doctors in to look. HIV runs many times higher in this community than in the general population, and the people who reliably turn up with tests and medicine work for NGOs whose funding keeps running out.

Three traditional incomes: badhai, mangti, dhandha.

Badhai is the blessing work — births, weddings, a new shop. A toli of four or five, the dhol, the songs, the doorstep negotiation. Territory is real and taking another house's ground is a serious offence, settled by gurus, not by police.

Mangti is asking: trains, traffic lights, markets. The hand on the shoulder, the fast money to make you move along.

Dhandha is sex work, and it pays when the other two do not.

Alongside all of it now: NGO outreach posts, salon chairs, reels and film work, and a handful in politics — Shabnam Mausi elected to a state assembly in 1998, Madhu Bai Kinnar made mayor of Raigarh in 2015.

None of that changes the interview where the man reads your certificate, goes quiet, and says they will call.

You get two families and both of them cost you.

The one you were born into may put you out at fourteen. Or keep taking your money while telling the neighbours you work in Dubai. Some mothers leave the door open. Some brothers appear only when there is land to argue about.

The house is the other one. A guru who is mother, employer and creditor at once. A nani-guru above her. Gurubhais beside you, chelas below you if you last. In much of north India the houses sit inside older lineages called gharanas, and that is the map everyone navigates by. You pay reet to enter and you owe a share of everything afterwards.

When you die the house does the funeral, with rites performed at night, away from onlookers. Outsiders underestimate how much that certainty is worth to someone whose family will not claim the body.

And the ugly part, which hijras say out loud: some gurus take everything. Some houses beat people. Leaving one is expensive and another may not take you. Younger trans women look at this and call it a racket. Older hijras point at the alternative — the street, alone, at sixteen — and ask what exactly the racket replaced.

There is usually no announcement. There is a leaving.

For many it happens at twelve, fourteen, seventeen. After a beating. After a cousin's wedding. After a teacher. You go to a house you already half know, because you have been turning up at functions for a year. Or you are thrown out and you find one because there is nowhere else to be.

Some never leave. They live as a son on weekdays, go out with the toli at weekends, and everyone in the lane knows and nobody says it at dinner.

Then paperwork, if you want it. The third-gender option on Indian documents after the 2014 judgment. X on the Pakistani CNIC. Bangladesh since 2013. The certificate exists. The clerk still sends you back for a paper nobody can name, and the queue is full of people who took a day's lost earnings to stand in it.

One flat thing worth saying. Telling people you are hijra without a house behind you protects nothing. In South Asia the word carries a community with it, and if you have no community the word does not carry you.