Geetanjali Krishna: Compartmentalising the sexes
Last week, while on the metro, I witnessed something that made me think. Two eunuchs got into the ladies compartment, clutching their bags of shopping. Sari-clad and deceptively demure, they were talking to each other in an exaggeratedly feminine fashion. Suddenly, all hell broke loose in the peaceful compartment. As one of them accidentally rubbed shoulders with the woman seated next to them, she shrieked and cringed, trying to shrink away from the eunuchs. In turn, the eunuchs were angered by her response. “What is your problem?” they shouted with their trademark aggression. “Why are you behaving as if we are untouchables?”
At first, the woman refused to engage in conversation with them. Terror and revulsion were writ large upon her face. But the two eunuchs just wouldn’t stay silent. “We know we aren’t men. In our hearts we think of ourselves as women. Then why should we not be entitled to all the privileges that your sex gets? Why can’t we sit in the ladies compartment?” The other female passengers began muttering uncomfortably among themselves, though not directly to the eunuchs. “They are neither men nor women...maybe they should stand in the corridors that connect men’s and women’s compartments on the train!” said someone amid subdued merriment. “I stopped going to my neighbourhood salon since the day I found myself next to a eunuch getting her eyebrows threaded!” said another. “If eunuchs start sitting in the ladies compartment, I’d prefer to move to the men’s!” said a third. The general consensus was that the eunuchs weren’t welcome in the women’s domain.
Sure enough, when the eunuchs found that none of the women were willing to talk to them, they began threatening to expose their nether parts to prove they weren’t men. Emboldened by her acute embarrassment, the woman next to them finally opened her mouth. “You may not be men, but you aren’t women either. Why don’t you go to the general compartment where nobody will care who or what you are?” she said amid subdued consensus from her co-passengers.
Sensing somehow that mine was perhaps the only sympathetic ear in the compartment, the two started talking to me. “They want us to sit with the men… do you know how tough that is for us? The men look at us with fear mingled with desire. Would you like to be at the receiving end of such stares?” they asked me. I replied in the negative. They went on. “Today, eunuchs have no status in our society. We get assaulted, molested and beaten by men while even educated women look upon us with repugnance,” said one. Was it, she asked me loudly, a wonder that most eunuchs in India ended up so aggressive? The other one was more objective: “These women are only following a general trend. Even in the Olympics, if women athletes flunk the mandatory gender test, they have to compete in the men’s category and are barred from women’s events…”
As modern Delhi whizzed past our windows, the eunuchs gloomily pondered their age-old problem. “None of these things will get resolved in your lifetime or mine,” one said, “but I wish people at least learn to refer to me as a ‘she’ and not ‘he’ — or even worse, the humiliating ‘it’! Their destination finally arrived and the duo got off. Then it dawned upon me that I hadn’t even asked them their names. Till date, they stay in my memory, but not as two individuals with distinct identities, but as just two faceless, nameless eunuchs.