Do lesbians in India have it tougher than gays?

In April this year, actress Disha Ganguly, 23, was found hanging from a ceiling fan of her home in Kolkata. No suicide note was found. The police did, however, recover her phone and diary.

"A few months back, this actress friend of Ganguly, started staying at her apartment," an officer told the local press. "Soon Ganguly's mother arrived from Nairobi and objected to their relationship. Her mother even got her friend to move out of the apartment."

When Ganguly's girlfriend, Suchandra Banerjee, 27, got to know about her suicide, she threw herself in front of a train. But she was saved.

A couple of years ago, in the same state, the police found the bodies of 19-year-old Bobby Saha and 17-year-old Puja Mondal at Bobby's house in Tripura Sundari area of Boral. The post-mortem report revealed that they had consumed poison and died in each other's arms.

"It appears that the two girls were in a relationship but they were depressed about the uncertainty of their future, which is why they committed suicide," police superintendent LN Meena said. Bobby would dress and behave like a man, whereas Puja would behave like any other girl.

Years ago, when I studied at Loreto House, Kolkata, I distinctly remember two girls in our class who always stuck together. We'd often tease them, how they would even enter the toilet together, hold each other's hands at tiffin breaks, and never want to share their food with anyone else.

At the convent, where boys were treated like a disease and girls nursed fleeting adolescent crushes on school captains and sent them flowery fan mail, we never really had a term for a woman's alternate sexual identity - fir choices that weren't hetro-normative. We assumed there was something "queer" about these two girls, and even now express shock that they got married and had kids - the way we labelled them as different. Did their camaraderie extend beyond being "besties"? Did they ever touch each other or go out on a real date? Speculation meant everything.

Attraction had to fit in.

In a few days, on December 11, we will mark the second anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment on Section 377. While it's true that the homosexual community enjoys a greater degree of personal freedom now than they did a decade ago, with gay pride marches being celebrated in full public bloom since 2008 and nightclubs hosting "pink" nights in many metros, and India's first gay-themed bookshop QueerInk staging a gay and lesbian festival in Mumbai, with erotica books aimed at the community and a perceived environment of openness. Even so, lesbians in India - who remain bound to a patriarchal clout and misogynistic popular culture that sees a kiss as a taboo and honour killings as a slap on our so-called secular faces - face greater challenges than their gay counterparts, with many of them bearing the brunt of financial disempowerment and inequality, and risking familial disinheritance. A woman's fate is relegated to marriage and motherhood; coming out bearing the fear of public prosecution.

With homophobia an underlying current - lesbians are narrowly stereotyped, be it in the recent MTV mini series where two girls raunchily kiss during an episodic sexual discovery or the Myntra ad that went viral, only to place same-sex couples under suspicious parental scrutiny. Female desire, in dire need of validation, always.

Ancient accounts of lesbian love have existed, but are lost today in discriminatory attitudes that have led to women being forced out of their families into a community of "social lepers" - people regarded as "alien", "normatively deviant" or packed of to mental asylums. A lot of lesbian women who are pressured to enter heterosexual marriages have no alternative but to turn to anonymous helplines for lesbian women, struggling to conform to a societal ideal of the quintessential bharatiyanari: her Sitahood, her Satihood.

In February 2015, the Daily Mail reported that a lesbian helpline in Tamil Nadu, based in Chennai, that offers support and services for a minority group, is taking four out of five calls by men who are apparently looking for cheap thrills or, for an opportunity to meet the kind of women they have only encountered in the seedier corners of the internet.

Others ask if they can join the helpline's staff, says the report. The helpline was set up in 2009 after the deaths of two married women from Chennai who set themselves on fire in a suicide pact due to their forbidden relationship. The piece adds that Indian Community Welfare Organisation (ICWO) reports that many women are still frightened to come out as gay because of the patriarchal systems and moralistic attitudes deeply ingrained in the Indian society. "Despite the helpline being in place, [these] lesbian[s] remain somewhat invisible within the city. The organisation estimates that there are many women within the city who are in a dilemma about accepting their sexual orientation, are fearful of others finding out about it, may be experiencing isolation or are facing harassment or discrimination for having spoken out about it," the ICWO claims on its website.

Public outcry at marriages between women, such as that of two police women Leela and Urmila in 1987 who were chastised, have also acted as deterrents for many women to stay in the shadows. Even lesbian and bisexual women's organisations happen to be much less publicly known than their male counterparts. The Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association (GALVA) seeks to embed LGBT individuals within (Hindu) Vaishnava tradition, lending excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita that are synonymous to a modern understanding of homosexuality. The Sanginii Trust is an LB organisation that looks at counselling and community support for lesbians. One of their primary aims is to dispel existing "myths" about lesbianism, to confirm that these women are, in fact, completely normal.

But nothing changes really, minus Section 377 being struck down, concludes brand consultant Noor Enayat. "Patriarchy slots women - so when a gay man comes out - by nature he's assigned his gender - vansh ki umeed… he can still father a child if he wants to - whereas a woman not ready to procreate is not her own choice. Along with the concept second gender being physically and hence emotionally weaker, and therefore can be pushed into doing things. The battle will begin with the law on our side, with us as a community feeling more empowered and protected."