• By Harshini Sandesara, Kunal Walia, Sharat Pillai & Rahul Kayarat

He looked into the mirror as he placed the bindi right between his perfectly drawn eyebrows. Bindi. The sign to ward off evil, or to identify a married woman. He smiled, rubbed the lipstick smudge off his teeth and got up. Time was ticking and he still had a lot to do. After all, sarees aren’t easy to wear. The drapes fluidly lay on his left shoulder, along with the burden of facing the world. Sarees aren’t trending these days, you see. But the mirror still returned a smile, welcoming him into the first day of his reality.

His heels click-clacked on the hardwood stairs as he climbed up to his workplace. The chatter of excited little kids, flying paper planes, little palms tapping on the wooden desks, the innocence of it all reminded him of why he had chosen to be a teacher, of all things. But the click-clack of his heels was soon veiled by laughter, smirks and teasing eyes from kids and colleagues alike. And by the end of the hour, all he had with him was embarrassment, abandonment and a call to the principal’s office. After all that had happened, the mirror in the school’s washroom couldn’t share the smile with him, as his left hand took off his bindi while the right one clutched his letter of termination in angst.

What was meant to be a walk of pride ended up being a walk of shame, as he walked home, disheartened. The eyes that ravaged his body violated him and his choices, and felt like a knife to the heart, twisting. The palms that clutched his head felt someone slip a few coins into them, the weight of which made his shoulders sag. The glass outside the store on the sidewalk mirrored his mascara stained cheeks, watermarked by sarees on display. Smiles were long gone, by then.

Gossip piped down, but seemed to drum all the more in his ears, as he entered his mohalla. Eyes and eyes everywhere. Women in sarees and men in safaris. Accepted but not accepting. Normal. Just when he thought his home would be a safe haven, he saw his wife and child at the doorstep, with packed bags and aimless eyes. His wife couldn’t bear to meet his teary eyes, while his child held the pallu of her saree in his small fist, looking for answers from the only parent he could understand. His home was just a house now. With only the mirrors for company. 

Sarees symbolise elegance and grace. Dignity too. But they don’t always deliver what they promise now, do they? Only the mirror can tell, as it stood witness to a pair of feet, blue, dangling, soulless. The saree didn’t cover his body anymore. It just wrapped around his neck, with a lethal hold.

The mirror mirrored a society where her reality was a myth.

Contrary to popular belief, crossdressing does not necessarily imply homosexuality. Crossdressers may be men dressing as women, or women dressing as men. An element of sexual arousal (“transvestic fetishism”) may be involved in dressing, but not necessarily. And sometimes the primary purpose for crossdressing is simply disguise. Also not to be confused with transgender, which describes people who identify as a different gender from that which they were assigned at birth. Dressing beyond your assigned gender is meant to be both an intensely personal and a political act—both a means of self-expression, as well as a significant way of challenging the rigid social impositions of gender norms. But in India, it often leads to discrimination and violence.

Disclaimer: Cross-dressing is subject to societal risk. Fatal risk, mind you. And reading all cross-dressing related articles or documents won’t help either. So don’t. Cross-dress, I mean.

References-
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2016/08/what-is-crossdressing/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Crossdresser

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