A man sits on a chair. He is curiously dressed. He’s wearing a golden coloured dhoti. His chest is bare, pale in a way like it doesn’t see much sunlight. His arms are dark, as dark as the earth after rain. His left hand is raised. It’s clutching a sponge with white paint on it. A look at his face reveals he has been using it to paint his face.
There is a moustache on his upper lip that looks real, too real to be fake, even though it has been stuck with special stage glue. His eyebrows are thick and black as if they have been painted on to make him look menacing. His lips are red, painted as if with red roses. His hair has been artfully tousled by the theatre’s hair expert.
His eyes, that stare into the mirror in front of him, are blank. Though he is a man of thirty-five, when he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a thirteen-year-old boy, cutting up newspapers to make himself a crown.
He hears a loud thud on the closed door and knows that is his signal to finish up. He needs to go up on the stage to play his role. He puts the sponge on the container with the white paint, checks his lips show no cracks, pulls his moustache to make sure it won’t fly off his face as he dances on the stage and gets up.
He raises his right hand, palm outwards and moves it from his forehead to his chin. Now, when he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see the boy. He sees Brakshi and for the next one hour, he is the seven-headed demon god.
It is midnight. The town their troupe is performing in has been generous and despite a strict one-week policy of staying before moving on, they have decided to stay one last night.
Pashumati has a clipboard in hand. She’s one of the few among the troupe who can read and write, so she is in-charge of creating the performance roster.
She says, looking at the man who played a demon god, “You were good tonight. You can take a break tomorrow.”
Roshni smiles as the troupe around her murmurs their approval. She blushes prettily, using the end of the dupatta to hide her face. It has taken a long time to scrub off the glue of the moustache, the black of the eyebrows and the red of the lip stain. Her face now looks bare, but her eyes dance with mischief.
Since she is no longer needed for the rest of the discussion, she takes her leave and goes back to her caravan. This isn’t the caravan where she gets dressed. Her costumes are in a separate one. Since she’s the only one who can change her gender and body language by will and the help of artistry, she gets special privileges having two caravans.
Inside her home, she sheds her clothes and looks at the mirror in the front. She doesn’t have Pashumati’s breasts or other equipment but no one can deny that right here, right now, she’s a woman.
This is how God has made her, Ulmat had told her the first time they had met when she had run from home, in search of another. She had been fifteen, bruised because her parents couldn’t understand why their son had to dress up as a girl, dance, act, perform, when he could do and be anyone else.
It is a gift, Ulmat had said when he had allowed her free reign over costumes and face paints, a gift your parents have given by letting you go to find your place in the world.
It hadn’t felt like it to Roshni at the time, smarting as she was from her own blood raising their hand to turn her into something she wasn’t.
But now, seeing herself in the mirror and into the eyes of that thirteen-year-old boy who couldn’t explain to anyone how yes most of the time he was a boy named Prakash but there was Roshni inside him as well who liked to come out to play from time to time, Roshni can see why Ulmat had said it was a gift.
Roshni removes the bangles from her hands, the same dark brown hands that on her body, look feminine and beautiful. She touches herself gently, trailing her hand from her collar bone to the middle of her chest to her hips.
When she looks at her eyes in the mirror this time, they don’t look blank. They look alive, so full of life.
Even though Prakash is as much a part of her as Roshni, she doesn’t feel as alive when her body demands to be Prakash.
It’s because of all the bad memories attached to that boy, Ulmat had explained to her, when she had tried to run away from the troupe seventeen years ago.
She came back, of course. She remembers the panic still, stale and bitter on the back of her tongue. She weeps in relief when she remembers coming back and finding the troupe waiting for her, anxious that she had left without word.
She had fallen into Ulmat’s arms and he had embraced her in a way her mother never had. Hush, he had said, you’re home now. And those words had been precious.
She repeats them to herself when the fight between Prakash and Roshni exhausts her. On days when she feels like neither of them but somewhere in between, she likes to remind herself that she is home. She is safe.
She goes to bed. Her dreams are quiet. She doesn’t need them to hide tonight.
For Letter G, written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z
tales of Suchita 
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