A Missing Sign is a Sign Too #DigitalAMAWithRoshan

A Missing Sign is a Sign Too

Years later when my mother would try and explain my genesis, she would talk about how she was first afraid, then confused. Fear, is always easier to pick up, it is lighter, and more striking. It is often the first thing we feel about most things, most people. But when it subsided, when she let it go, she fell into confusion. Didn't the doctor say it would be a girl? Where are the signs of it? The skin on my child's crotch is smooth, she wondered. The father, who did not understand much about the female anatomy, other than the bare obviousness of procreation, did not take note of it till mother spelled it out. 

The government hospital smelt like rusting steel with the crumpling, creaking noise the fan made. It was a hot summer night, mother was sweating, pungent with the aftertaste of garlic, and the ache of having just pushed a body out of her own, a body with no signs. They had just decided, after months of wrangling, an enchantingly feminine name. What of the name, mother thought.

The first thought father father had was "How will our daughter pee?"

That I was their daughter was established when the doctor pronounced it a few weeks ago. Everything else would develop from here. We don't look back and erase the opinions we came to believe as fact. 

The nurse couldn't care less. She wasn't trained enough to even grasp the possibility of biological anomalies. For her too, everything brewed from the fact that a baby was either born a male or a female. So she wasn't shocked. She just pronounced. "Don't worry, something will grow." 

Grow? I laughed years later. Mother too laughed as she told me. She somewhat reconciled to this over the years. I asked her why I wasn't menstruating like all the girls in my class were. I was 14, and I too wanted to know what it was to feel pain. It almost felt necessary to be considered a woman, and maybe a part of me did want to be considered a woman back then. Growing up, I was never hurt , never scratched my skin till it bled, never even bloomed and burst a pimple. My skin was smooth all over, throughout. No breasts, no facial hair either. For the former I would be made fun of by my friends- flatscreen, they would mumble- while the latter made it easier to be registered as a female in school, a bureaucratic silver lining.  These were the years where my desire to be considered a woman was foregrounded by my reality that I thought was somewhere between male and female. It took me years to unlearn this lie, born out of a belief I too considered as fact, of biological binaries. But the truth was a little more spiritual; I wasn't between, sandwiched awkwardly with smooth breastlessness, but I was beyond the two.