Pens and Pages

I just had a beautiful body massage in my Bangalore home booked via Urban Clap and it brought back memories of a dirty yet thoughtful experience I had in 2019. I should have written this in 2019 but I was only a girl then, afraid what would people say when they read it. These days, I guess I have stopped giving a damn (well, almost).  I did talk about it with a few acquaintances (because I have no friends) and kind of worried I'd come across as naïve (read: stupid). But it is what it is. So it was a cold December of 2019 and I had just arrived in Delhi then for some work-related meeting. Our travel desk booked me a hotel near the airport because the preferred hotels near Gurgaon (where my office was) were unavailable. I was supposed to go attend a friend's wedding near Ghaziabad that night but a recent news of rape in the outskirts of NCR ticked me off. I decided to spend the rest of the evening in the hotel itself.  In the evening I decided to just walk around, exploring the ...

It was when I was returning home today from office that an abrupt desire to protest erupted in me and I ended up shedding a tiny teardrop. I wasn’t in a difficult situation; I was just alone and thinking. I have often found myself uttering words of protest ceaselessly when people have mocked homosexuals in front of me. I have often found myself talking over phone or discussing about the miseries of being a woman (or man, at times), of ill-treatment towards women/men/children, etc. What disturbed me today was my realization that my concept of an “egalitarian” society didn’t have the third gender in it? Even when I wrote the article Are you a lesbian? (Published in the Good Times of the North-East), transsexualism didn’t even cross my mind. I was a little ashamed, a little broken and a little angry when I realized this fact while reading a recent article on the e-magazine Fried Eye about the third gender and their ways of life. Thinking “Probably, writing this blogpost wou...

It was either for the scorching sunrise that hurt her eyes or the cold breeze that blew scratching the fresh wounds on her arms, but Disha could tell that her friend had tears in her eyes for some reason or the other. “Nothing,” Razia said, when confronted by Disha, hiding her eyes as she wiped her tears with her hands. “Got paid?” Disha enquired. “Yes.” Lied Razia while walking towards the place she has been calling home from the past couple of years. She headed for the bathroom as she entered her room where two girls were sitting, one smoking a cigarette while the other wearing make-up in front of the broken mirror in the room. Razia cleaned her skirt that was smeared with her blood. She wasn’t prepared for it. After all it was that 14- year old’s first time. Not the first time that she had been “ridden” by men, nor the first time that she bled while bearing the intolerable pain the men gave her, but for the first time that she painlessly bled indicating a cycle o...