A 14-year-old boy from Pollachi dreamt of becoming a heroine one day. He didn’t know why, but he felt different from other boys his age. In the end, he did achieve what he wanted. His journey, though, was not easy. Along the way, he became a transgender, an activist, a documentary film-maker, a U.N. consultant… today, seated at a coffee shop by the beach as Kalki Subramaniam, she smiles as she says, “I knew I would get what I wanted.” Kalki is now a writer as well. Her book of poems, titled Kuri Aruthean (Vikatan Publications), will be launched this month.
“When I wrote the poems, I never thought of publishing them,” says Kalki. Written over two years, they reflect Kalki’s views on society and herself. “I’ve expressed my happiness, pain, and anger through poems in my mother tongue, Tamil. For I feel it’s in our mother tongue that we can best express our emotions.” The last few years have been eventful for Kalki. As a freelance consultant with the United Nations Development Programme, she has been travelling a lot. These travels kept her busy; but they also urged her to write.
“Some of these poems were written on my plane journeys. I would also sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to scribble a few lines,” she says. The collection consists of 25 poems with line-drawings by Kalki. The book is broadly divided into three sections — identity, love, and the world as she sees it.
“My first poem was Vidhiyai Ezhudhinen — Destiny, I wrote. I put it up on Facebook and received tremendous feedback,” says Kalki. It was then that she realised she had a way with words. Her experiences as a transgender gave her an extra edge. After all, as “transgender women, our lives are extraordinary,” she feels.
“We go through extreme emotions — happiness and sorrow. A transgender wages an inner battle all her life. She is constantly in search of her identity,” says Kalki. Society only makes matters difficult for them. With a mind that never ceases to react to the outside world, Kalki found solace in words.
She has dedicated a sizeable portion of her book to transgender love, a less-discussed, but essential part of the life of the community. “We could talk about transgender love for an entire day,” she says. “We too have the very human need for love.”
In fact, transgenders love more intensely that anyone else, she observes.
“Because we love without any motives or expectations. But when it comes to marriage, men choose people who are accepted by society. I know hundreds of transgenders who love their man so much that even after his marriage to someone else, they continue to support him financially — to the extent of begging and being involved in sex work to earn for his family.”
Apart from a heavy dose of love poems, Kalki has also written on the injustices meted out to women in Sri Lanka during the war years, the environment, and birds.
An interesting poem, titled Mun kurippu traces an actual conversation she had with a male friend on Facebook. He goes on to ask her ‘if she didn’t mind’ talking about her body, which Kalki has reproduced tongue-in-cheek.
Kalki’s hands are full at the moment: she is organising a legal rights seminar for transgenders next month in the city; has a small-scale handicrafts business at Auroville and also represents her community at the U.N. Development Programme.
Despite the Supreme Court recognising transgenders as the third gender, she says that the State Governments are “very slow” in implementing development schemes for their community. Kalki hopes to speed up the progress of such schemes through her advocacy work.
But writing, she says, is going to be her priority this year. “I’m planning to write a romantic fiction, based on 10 years of my love story,” she says. “I also want to write my autobiography and something inspirational for youngsters,” she adds.
She aims to get back to films (she played the lead role in Narthagi ), this time as director. “I have the story and the producer ready,” she says. If things go as planned, Kalki’s movie could release by the end of the year.
Kalki wants more transgenders to write. Hence she plans to conduct several readings of her book for the community. She says, “If a 14-year-old boy’s dream debut as a heroine came true, anything is possible.”
