The Invisibility Cloak

"My eyes are always hungry. They look at your face and move down and we long for that complete body. It is a strong urge to be a woman and to look better than any woman. We want to be mothers, too. That is an inherent part of being a woman"- Gauri Sawant to me in an interview in 2012 for 'The Eunuch Mothers' that appeared in Open magazine

- Chinki Sinha

WE were in that typical Mumbai taxi with the inside of the roof lined with artificial leather with a lot of flowers in yellow, orange and pink printed on it. In this city, there are a lot of skies depending on the degree of escape one wants. From where she lived, the sky came to her in bits and pieces. The high-rises around had more sky. The taxi was an in-between space.

Gauri Sawant was narrating her story under the false sky. She looked out of the window of the taxi and said that becoming a woman was impossible for her and others like her. Even with the exaggerated, accentuated projected selves, the truth, as she explained, was that they'd be half-women, always. It was raining that evening, again. The blue tarpaulin sheets everywhere, the raindrops that broke themselves as they hit the ground, an old Bollywood song about a rainy evening and lovers' desires in the taxi, and two people who were not in a hurry to get anywhere. A story like that takes time. To listen and to narrate. There are many pauses in such stories. The ride was long. The notebook had many blank pages.

It was in July 2012. I had first met her in Malvani Agar-Gaikwad Nagar in Mumbai where in a part of the neighbourhood lined with shanties and one-room tenements, lived a group of eunuchs. I had gone there to meet Shahnaz Nani, a eunuch, who had married off her adopted daughter that year. She took us to meet Gauri and others that afternoon and Gauri then offered to take me to Kamathipura to meet Zeenath Pasha in Gulli No 1.

Gauri was 30 then and was the director of Sakhi Char Chowghi Trust-which works with transgenders and helps AIDS victims. She had an adopted daughter, Gayatri, who was 10 then and studied in a boarding school. She had adopted Gayatri when the girl's mother had died of HIV/ AIDS in 2008. Gauri had known the mother.