Three lives of a transwoman

‘D’you know why God made Hijras?’ she asked Aftab one afternoon...
‘No, why?’
‘It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.’
— Excerpt from Arundhathi Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

As we sit under a tree in the Sahitya Academy campus in Thrissur for this chat, an ant has a free run of

Vijayarajamallika

’s hair. She jokes that now that she has become a woman and prettier than before, the ant may have taken a liking for her, even as she sends it flying with a flick of her finger. This is her way of dealing with unhappiness, this way of joking, which sometimes takes on a ribald nature. Do women crack smutty jokes? “Jokes have no gender,” quips the first transgender poet of Malayalam.

She insists this is the happiest phase of her life, which she terms her third janmam (birth). Less than a month ago, she underwent a sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Coimbatore to become a woman in every respect and virgin too, she says. “I was no virgin during my second life as a transgender and had sex with so many, but it was never fulfilling,” she declares. The SRS procedure and recuperation is known to be an agonising affair but not for Mallika. “Perhaps because I had already suffered enough pain in life,” she says.

School life in Muthuvara of Thrissur was forgettable, to say the least. Manu J Krishnan — Mallika’s original name — was bullied and made fun of by classmates and teachers for his feminine ways which included giving love letters to other boys. “It did not take long for me — a black, Dalit boy with feminine tendencies — to be branded a problem child by the teachers in this conservative school,” Mallika remembers. Manu’s parents, mother a headmistress and dad a senior superintendent in electricity board, had longed for a boy and got him nine years after his elder sister, so could not understand or tolerate it when their son showed such behaviour.

Expectedly, the anguished parents took the boy of 16 first to a psychiatrist, who identified the ‘problem’ as homosexuality and then to an endocrinologist who began hormone therapy to suppress the female in her who was waiting to burst out of the man’s body. “Had they not done it, I would have been a full blown female long back,” she laments.

Compounding the problem, Manu was also hypersexual and ready to fall in love with any man. A mere touch by a male would send him to raptures.

“However, there was always an inner conflict, brought up as I was with highly moralistic values,” says Mallika. The only favourite spot for the distraught boy was the library and he started writing love poems, which invited admonition from his earliest readers for writing like a girl. It was later, after self-realisation set in about the dual existence, that the poems became more philosophical and a kind of lament about a body that becomes the biggest disqualification.

A sample: Kalame, nee mantravadiyakoo
Ee deham vediyan koode nilkooo
(Oh Time, turn into a magician
for me
In shedding this frame, stand by me)

Ask her about college life, and she jokes that a ‘girl’ could not possibly ask for anything more than being allowed to study in a men’s college. “Oblivious of my condition, boys used to roam around in shorts in the hostel and I was barely able to contain my excitement,” she says. The zoology teacher had great hopes about the boy till he got a love letter one day!

Problems did crop up though. The boys called Manu ‘Chandupottu’ — a reference to Dileep’s movie where he plays an effeminate man — and the roommate complained to the warden about his strange behaviour. The hormone pills were also wreaking havoc. One day, the boy was prevented from jumping down from the third floor by his classmates. All that the parents could do was to take their child to the doctors, who did not have a clue on how to handle the boy who, however, managed to pass with flying colours.

It was after enrolling for a post graduate course in social work that Manu started realising that there were others like him and began life as an activist for marginalised people like himself. At the same time, to suppress sexual feelings, he began to consume kadukka water. All these therapies, both modern and alternative, had dreadful side effects later on in the form of arthritis, diabetes and fatty liver.

After his post-graduation, Manu has been working in Kerala as well as other states for various agencies working for marginalised groups. But one of the stints he enjoyed the most was as a teacher in Ponnani for about four years. Children were fond of ‘Manu sir’ and he liked the place a lot, and not just because he had plenty of boyfriends.

Disaster struck in the form of marriage, which was forced upon Manu by his parents and colleagues. The wedding was in Guruvayur temple but Manu did not agree for it to be registered. The couple slept in separate rooms even though heavy pressure was brought upon them to beget a baby and the marriage came to a close after eleven months. Parents too got estranged after Manu came out of the closet as a transgender till recently when a Carmelite sister took the initiative to reintegrate Mallika with her family. “Even if the whole world accepts your achievements, it all becomes meaningless if your parents are not with you,” she says.

Mallika has worked in many cities including Mumbai and has also been jobless often. “Even after getting recognised as a poet, I have done menial jobs as a spinach seller, bread seller and shoe shine girl to survive. I have had many sexual encounters including being part of a free-sex centre but I have never done sex work,” she says.

In December 2016, she started an organisation called Sahaj International for school dropouts in Kochi but it was a short-lived experiment. But she continues to be involved in many other such initiatives. “There seems to be a mafia that works against transgenders in Kochi and tries to create divides among them,” she says.

By the end of this month, she is planning to join the Kochi Metro. “The salary is not much but I plan to pursue my literary career simultaneously,” she says. That’s not all. She wants to get married the conventional way, perhaps to a divorcee with children, whom she can raise.

A question that she often encounters is how she manages to be happy. “What is the point of crying?” she asks. “One has to be brave.”



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