Heaven Beneath Her Feet
And then there are times when a blahaj pops out of nowhere and chases you across the world with the persistence of a leopard on prowl. A musing on how persistent gender dysphoria is, and how difficult gender euphoria can be.
The Saturday started off innocently enough. The lazy absence of warm, orange sunlight even after sunrise, and the gentle whiff of petrichor would have suggested to you that the Monsoons would have well and truly arrived in the Straits of Malacca.
Normally, your agenda as it were would involve something along these lines:
Wake up with a start
Muse on life, perhaps catch up on social media while on bed
Decide to really wake up
Realize daughter and spouse are already up
Grab coffee, grab breakfast, gush at wife’s cooking
Loudly proclaim you’ll spend the day lazily
Wife gently reminds you that you’re travelling tonight for that work conference and you still need to pack
You jump, scramble, realize you need to grab suit from the tailor’s, winter wear from Decathlon’s, gifts for friends from the mall
Optimize the shit out of routes in Google Maps.
Realize you’ve spent far too long doing the planning, and rush out of the house, go go go until the two bags are packed, apologize profusely to wife and kid for spending the week away, promise to call every day, grab passport and bags, rush to the airport, and hope the travel and weather gods will be lenient towards you and brace yourself for jetlag.
But with a blahaj, your agenda becomes the following:
Wake up with a start
Muse on life, perhaps catch up on social media while on bed
Decide to really wake up.
Look at your plain hands and fingers. Pine for some bright nail polish on them. Ideally dark blue because you like blue so much.
Realize daughter and spouse are already up
Grab coffee, grab breakfast, gush at wife’s cooking
Loudly proclaim you’ll spend the day lazily
Actively search on Duckduckgo for nail polish. Decide the choices were bewildering, so limit it to male nail polish.
Wife reminds you that you’re travelling tonight for that work conference and you still need to pack
You find 'helpful' blogs suggesting men too can wear nail-polish, but aren't sure as yet.
You jump, scramble, realize you need to grab suit from the tailor’s, winter wear from Decathlon’s, gifts for friends from the mall
A little more search gets to a Reddit group called malepolish, and you decide this was a thing. In fact, you make mental notes for some 'non-flashy' colours.
Optimize the shit out of routes in Google Maps.
Plan to slip away to the nail polish aisle at the local Watson's right after you pick up the suit. Or should it be before?
Realize you’ve spent far too long doing the planning, and rush out of the house, go go go....
You reach the nail-polish aisle with the suit and are completely bewildered by the choice. None of the brands or colours you listed in your research show up here. The suit is heavy, time is running out. May be at the airport? Yup, that's it.
...until the two bags are packed, apologize profusely to wife and kid for spending the week away, promise to call every day, grab passport and bags, rush to the airport, and hope the travel and weather gods will be lenient towards you and brace yourself for jetlag.
And that, folks, is how an agenda becomes a trans agenda.
Additional side-quests over and above your regular headaches to somehow chase that niggling brain-worm that doing a little bit of what women do or wear may make you feel happy. But you don’t know for sure because it is just this idea in your mind; it something that crossed your mind before countless times, but something you’ve ruthlessly suppressed, when finally, the drumbeat builds up to a crescendo and gets too much for you. The blahaj has awoken with you, and now begins to bug you with the persistence of an ear-worm.
So you decide: let’s fight this nagging voice with an actual ear-worm from your childhood. You put on your headphones and hit play. Imtaťi alaké kinnarasāni, screams Sapna Awasthi, to AR Rahman’s composition. Oh kinnera, why are you so agitated?
Language has changed in the last 20 years or so. Kinnera traditionally meant those alluring, mythical celestial beings that fly in from somewhere in the Himalayas to help humans in times of danger with excellent music and dance. Hijras in India have recently claimed the term for themselves; after all, they are dance and sing well, while the term “kinnera” is a lot less prejudiced than “hijra”.
The 20-year-old belter npw turns personal. My dear kinnera , it screams in your ear now, why are you so agitated?
You hit pause, and take a deep breath. This is inescapable isn’t it.
So you devise a plan: drop the bags at the airport, get the boarding pass, check out nail polish kerbside, and then waltz in to the gate, apply some on board, and sleep for 26 hours till you reach the final destination. International travel for work is always lonely and deeply un-personal; you’re just a cog in the wheel, a drop in the ocean of the many millions of people who travel internationally for holidays. And once you’re away from the clutches and expectations of your community, anything was possible. Would Lufthansa really care if one of their many passengers was wearing nail polish while transiting through Frankfurt?
Best laid plans and all that. The moment I checked in, a familiar voice greeted me. “What are you doing here?”, said a long-lost friend greeting genially, and ushering me to a special bar with special drinks for those with the right kind of cards. “People like you are special, my friend. We need to change the world”, he started to slur conspiratorially, sharing his deepest beliefs with the conviction that can only come with liquid nourishment. As for me, difficult to say no to Laphroaig, especially if it comes with friendly banter.
An hour of drinking gives both the friend and you a clarity of thought and a sense of purpose. You are the best buddy, says friend, having ranted about work and wife. I am getting it, you tell yourself. Your friend totters over to his gate. And so you barge in to the duty free shop and firmly proclaiming to the elderly saleslady there that you’re looking for nail polish.
“Which colour?”, she asks, as you stare back at her blankly.
“Which colour sir?”, she repeats.
“Something nude or brown”, you mumble, clearly rattled by it all.
She nods sternly, professional without betraying what she really is thinking. She takes you to this large drawer with a huge selection of polish laid out in a nice grid. The blogs warned about this; if this was that European brand they suggested, I should be asking for a specific colour code. That would be brown, and completely unnoticeable to most, whilst giving you the satisfaction of having polish on your nails.
You look up Reddit again and mumble the colour code. The lady sizes you up; you’re being too specific and too off red or pink for this to be for your wife or girlfriend. “We don’t have that here, but we do have another swatch that’s close to it. Do you want that?”, she says.
You aren’t sure if it was a good or a bad thing that she didn’t say sir. You look at the colour being offered, and your own skin. It’s too light for your dark south Indian husk. Then you see the cost.
You make up your mind. Not before you take off, but in Frankfurt, you tell yourself, and politely extract yourself from the shop.
The song you played before wasn’t the version that everyone knows. So you play it again, this time with Gulzar saab’s Urdu lyrics. Jinke sar ho ishq ki chaaon, starts off Sukhwinder Singh again. Those who walk in the shadow of love...
12 hours and a nap later, you are in Frankfurt. You navigate your way quickly to the duty free shops, or at least the ones open that early in the morning. Different continent, and a totally different outlook for yourself, with the harsh German coffee and stale baguette at the coffee shop somehow invigorating you all over. “I would like to buy some nail polish, please”, you announce in your now clipped international accent.
Different airport, different continent. But duty-free shops the world over are exactly alike. The brands are the same, the shelves are the same, the colour shades are the same, what is available and what isn’t are more or less the same. Heck, the demeanour of the sales-lady here is exactly like what it was back in Asia, stoic and professional, pigeon-holing customers into serious and non-serious ones. Except that the price here is in Euros, which would mean it would now cost 1.4 times more to buy nail polish that would look like turd on your nails.
You extract yourself out politely again.
Gulposh kabhi itraaye kahin, croons Sukhwinder Singh, Mehke to nazar aa jaaye kahin. She who conceals herself in the flowers will reveal herself in a perfume. Taaveez banaake pehnoon usay, aayat ki tarah mil jaaye kahin. I would wear her like a charm if I ever find her miraculously.
With your adrenalin drained, you just want to collapse in a good book. So you explore the bookshop next door, hoping for something nice and something in English. Instead, you have a brainwave: this was, after all, the land of Lamy fountain pens.
12 euros down and with notebook and a water bottle, you settle yourself in one of those comfy chairs that Frankfurt airport revels in. This is a Minimum Viable Product, a test before the real thing, you tell yourself, before carefully rubbing the nib of your newly bought fountain pen on your nails. You’re quite careful doing so, almost like your nails were an adult colouring book, and the ink pen a brush of sorts. You apply ink without smudges, carefully in equal proportions all throughout each nail. And then you hold your hands up in admiration, the soft light blue glistening on your previously dirty nails. Heck, with the right angle for the light and if you squint your eyes, you could even pretend there was no hair on your fingers, and that they look very dainty indeed. You finally allow yourself a satisfied smile.
It is only well after you’ve dropped your hands and stopped staring at them that you realize the elderly Iranian grandmom in front of you had been discreetly staring at you all along. Shocked, you jerk your hands down, smudging the still wet ink on the seat and on your pants.
Voh yaar hai jo khushboo ki tarah, continues Sukhwinder Singh, Voh jiski zubaan urdu ki tarah. My companion who follows me like fragrance, who’s tongue is as mellifluous as Urdu.
This won’t do, you decide. Real problems need real solutions. You’re often hired to solve problems. Let’s solve ours!, you tell yourself. And so, after another 8 hour flight ride, and this time in a whole new continent after you’ve collected your bags at the airport, plonked your bags down at the hotel and before your colleagues meet you for drinks, armed with data-roaming, you decide to venture out in the biting snow in search of nail polish.
Google Maps won’t tell you everything. It won’t tell you how biting the cold is, it won’t tell you which stores are open on this wintry New Year’s Day. But you are determined; the adrenalin is flowing through, the Decathlon overcoat and the Uniqlo inner wear holding forth in the icy cold, so you walk.
Sar ishq ki chhaaon chal chaiyya chaiyya, chant both Sukhwinder Singh and Swapna Awasthi, Pau janat chale chal chaiyya chaiyya. In the shade of love, keep walking. There will be paradise under your feet, keep walking, walking.
You walk till you find an open store. Through the empty corridors at the interconnected malls. Through the smooth icy sidewalks. Past the first, second and third hits on Google Maps. Past Tim Horton’s and its French vanilla latte’s. The cold stops bothering you after a bit; there’s too much adrenalin, too much sweat. Chal chaiyya chaiyya chaiyya. Keep walking walking walking. Voh yaar hai jo imaam ki tarah, croons Sukhwinder Singh, Mera nagma vohi mera qalma vohi. She is like a preacher to me; she’s my song, my declaration of faith.
It doesn’t take much longer to find an open drugstore. You realize you should have just silently followed a bunch of girls clearly from university as they made way to the shop, but then realize that would have been creepy as fuck. Anyway, you’re in. The drugstore is right here. There’s a huge aisle to one side. This is North America; everything is super-sized, including drugstores. The nail polish aisle is easily 20 metres long. Rows and rows of colours clustered by brand, type and something more fancy.
The university girls are excited to be at the store, but aren’t too entranced by the polish; they’re more interested in other elements of feminine fashion care that you are only beginning to notice. Tweezers? Skin cream? There will be time to learn those too. For now, rows and rows of colours. You are lost for choice.
Main uske roop ka shehdaai, admits Sukhwinder Singh, Vo dhoop chhanv se harjaai. Vo shokh hai rang badalta hai, Main rangroop ka saudaai. She is mischievous; she flirts with light and shadow, changing colour all the time. But I am a merchant of colour myself, I am a lover of all her forms.
You lose count of time here. There is so much to explore. Who knew “blue” nail polish could mean so many different bottles in slightly varying shades. There was selecting the colour, then – as an infographic helpfully points out – you choose the top layer (“primer”?) And then there was something else.
It is impossible to choose. You grab a few, hold them up against your skin, and then against the lights on the wall, and then once again against your nails. You tell yourself to stop shaking. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It is just a start. There will be more. And oh, let’s not spend too much time in this aisle, shall we, let’s not draw too much attention.
But really, nobody cares. It is New Year’s Day; they are short-staffed, and already has a lot of customers. You could spend hours there and nobody would give a fuck. But you don’t know that, and besides, there were the pre-conference drinks later that evening, so it’s best if we grab something and head back. You do exactly that; grab a blue polish, one “primer” and another bottle to wipe everything off.
The hotel room couldn’t come sooner. The shoes couldn’t come off sooner. It’s just like adult colouring books, you tell yourself, and aim to do an outline first on your toes and then fill everything up next.
You know you should do toes from this newspaper column you read back when you were 13; you know that salacious, gossipy column that the local English rag back in India used to carry word for word from Daily Mail or somewhere equally seedy. It was just a filler for the paper, safely sandwiched between pages 22 and 24 of the pull-out supplement, next to the movie advertisements on one side, and Doonesbury and Garfield on the other. They ran it every Thursday, and as a sort of aunt-agony column, but with gossipy Phil Donahue overtones.
You still remember the day they ran that column about crossdressing, on how some men wore panties underneath their formal pants to work, and how others wore blue nail polish on their toes safely covered by socks and formal shoes. Which is when you realize with some amusement and some disgust that, finally in the 40th year of your existence, in a North American town far far removed from your usual haunts, you have become the one person they’ve been warning everyone about: a creepy middle-aged man who does weird things in hotel rooms.
Mera nagma, mera qalma. My song, my declaration of faith. Sar ishq ki chhaaon chal chaiyya, Pau janat chale chal chaiyya. Keep walking in the shadow of love, for there will be paradise under their feet.
I decide to leave the polish on my toes, but not on my hands. There was an international conference to attend to, after all. But before I left this continent…
I wear cologne, aftershave, a white formal shirt, that practised Windsor knot on my neck, my new suit and gel in my hair. Formal as formal goes. “You look sauve!”, says a colleague whom I haven’t met in a year. “Like a mafia boss”, says another, checking out my curly hair. “Not wearing the standard issue red tie?”, says another with a laugh. No, you want to say, this is a silk tie designed by a Gadigal designer from the traditional Eora Nation that depicts their traditional belief that… but you stop. What’s the point?
“No”, I say with a smile. “It’s from Australia”. And I pause. “It’s a gift, you see”. Why would someone presenting as a man know anything about colour or fashion? You can have pretty things only if they are gifted to you by women in your life.
The conference goes on in similar tones for the next five days. Mafia-like suit outside. Ties with strong, vibrant colours in the middle. Blue nails on my toes inside. A habitual manly man crust. An increasingly soft core inside thanks to my pet blahaj.
She conceals herself in flowers. But will reveal herself in a perfume. Kabhi daal daal, kabhi paat paat, Main hawa pe dhoondhoon uske nishaan. She’s sometimes on the branches, sometimes on the leaves. I search for her trail in the breeze.
Some colleagues may have come over to my room one evening. And I may have thrown my socks away whilst discussing with them animatedly. They may have seen the nail polish. Or not, I really don’t know. They didn’t mention it, I didn’t ask.
But I do know that on the very last day, after I settle the bills with the hotel, check out and ask for an hour before I return the keys, I am determined to finish the task. Bags all packed, I fling open the nail polish and start to meticulously apply it on my nails. Contours first, and then inside. My hands shake, particularly so when I use my left hand to apply paint on my right. Was it jetlag? Was it adrenalin? Excitement may be? Months later, a trans friend online suggested I may have been doing it wrong; you dont do outlines, you paint a whole swathe on your dominant hand first, and then with your dominant hand. There are other techniques too, too numerous to describe here. But at that instant many months ago, in the hotel room just before I returned the keys, none of that mattered. I was done after 10 meticulous minutes. And I stared at my hands. It felt like my kid had painted her crayons on my nails.
What else is there to do? You sigh. You fill some gaps, make it slightly passable. And then you step out, first to buy gifts for the family, then some lunch, and then, onward to the airport and back to Asia.
My companion glides away like sweet perfume. Sometimes on branches, sometimes on leaves, I search for her in the breeze. Keep walking in the shade of love.
They find me deep inside the biggest bookstore in that quaint North American metropolis at the science-fiction section. After the initial surprised pleasantries, all of them stare at my fingers and then at me. But nobody says anything. “Shopping for books?”, they ask politely. “Gifts for wife and kid”, I say nodding. “Mind if we join you? We too are looking for something to shop”, they say. “Sure”, I reply, “lunch too after this?”
More banter. More chit-chat. You wear gloves in the North American winter while on the street, but remove them at lunch to have fries. They stare again. “My professor was suggesting we have one element that’s unique to us”, ventures one of them. “In life, you mean?”, I say, knowing where this was going. “No, for personal fashion”, says another jutting in. “Is that so?”, I say. “Yeah, he wears a yellow napkin folded like a triangle on his pocket”, they reply, “Says that’s the one thing you’ll remember about him when you meet him”. “Good for him”, I say, smiling. Kids, I can do this all night, I silently tell them. I have a lifetime’s worth of experience in avoiding the topic.
My companion glides like dew drops off a leaf, kid. I keep walking in the shade of love.
I leave soon. My flight is earlier than theirs. I grab everything from the hotel, hail a cab and off I go to the airport. It’s cold, but I no longer bother wearing gloves. I handle everything with my hands; the receipts, the cash, passports, boarding passes, everything. I no longer know if anyone is staring at my fingers. They don’t make a fuss at immigration. I don’t know if anyone was observing me closely as I gingerly held french fries between my fingers, trying to avoid grease on my beautiful, oh so beautiful, nails.
I board the first of my many flights home. I’ll be flying to Frankfurt first. I look at my boarding pass, and am pleasantly surprised: they assign me one of those seats with a lot of legroom.
Know what, I begin to think, I am privileged. Look at me, this kid from a middle-class Indian family, travelling across two continents like it’s just a bus-ride to the local farmer’s market. I have friends from all over the world now; they genuinely are fond of me. I got feted, interviewed for a podcast, and complimented for my skills. I’ve gained respect from peers and bosses through ten-odd years of excellence. And in my own little way, I get to represent my flag in the pantheon of world’s countries. And I just got upgraded as well!, I think, as I sip into the wine they just offered me.
That’s when the German contingent at the conference appears, and walks past me. They’re on the same flight; they too are flying to Frankfurt. And the luckiest of my luck, after all these years of travelling alone and anonymously for work, I finally have companions. Everyone of them sees me, greets me, stares at my nails, and then finds their seat. All of them are seated together, behind me.
I don’t blink anymore. I’m not afraid. I don’t have anything to hide. I raise my phone, and take a wefie with them. If they hadn’t seen my nails by then, they would now.
Revealed in the fragrance, and found through a miracle, I would wear her like a charm. She’s my priest, my song, my declaration of faith. She’s the shadow that follows me like a perfume, whispers sweet nothings in my ear in sonorous Urdu. She glides like dew drops, sometimes on branches, sometimes on leaves. She flirts with light and shadow, she’s mischievous and changes colour. I am a lover of all her forms, I seek all her colours and forms.
Blahaj is me. I am blahaj.
“Your favourite colour is really blue isn’t it?”, says my daughter observing my nails when I finally reach home. I can’t help it. “I suppose you can say that”, I say shyly. “I like green”, she announces, after thinking about it for a bit, and then goes off to play with her toys.
“Nail polish? You?”, says my wife incredulously at first. She then takes my palms into hers and looks at my fingers closely.
“So this is what made you finally trim your nails?”, she finally says. “It’s very pretty. Love what you’ve done with them”, she says gushing.
I try to act cool. But you know I was anything but that. My toes start fidgeting in excitement under the table as my wife holds my arms gingerly, as if I’m finally walking in air.
Jinke sar ho ishq ki chaaon, is how AR Rahman’s most famous song starts. Paaon ke neeche jannat hogi.
She who walks in the shade of love, the lyrics declare, must indeed have Heaven beneath her feet.