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What went behind the making of this India Today Spice cover

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Chinki Sinha
Chinki SinhaMar 03, 2017 | 21:46

What went behind the making of this India Today Spice cover

Why chop ourselves to fit anywhere? Why not chop the world instead, stitch it, sew it and leave the hem unattended so it can give us the length and hope for freedom. Isn’t that the ultimate salvation? Aren't we all fighting to be free? Aren't we all afraid of freedom, which is absolute and means not to be restricted by ideas of love or misplaced context of security via marriage and by defined limits of sexuality?

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Former Harper's editor, the fashionably quirky Vreeland asked in 1936 for her Harper’s Bazaar column, “Why don’t you paint a map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery so they won’t grow up with a provincial point of view?”

Instead we painted the rooms pink and blue and stacked the shelves with pretty fragile looking dolls with porcelain complexion and flaxen fair or fighter jets and tankers. We only expressed ourselves in binaries of gender and never questioned why we played with a grown up Barbie and Ken as young girls. We never dared to ask ourselves what all of this meant and where it would lead us. We aspired to be Barbie.

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We decided to feature her in our fashion special - The Song of Fire and Ice. Not as a charity case but nobody would have fit the bill better than her. Photo: India Today

We f*cked ourselves in the process, restricted ourselves and chained ourselves to stupid notions of beauty. Growing up, I didn’t have a pink room. I never liked pink. It was too soft a shade for me. But then, we couldn’t have afforded a pink room for a child then. And thank god for that.

In 2014, an Argentinian woman discovered that her toy doll had a little plastic penis, which could be moved up and down and even hidden depending on whether one wanted her to “she” or “he” or “both” and such gender situations cause disturbances in adults rather than children.

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In any case, a transgender doll existing would help us a great deal in dispelling our biases and make lives easier for thousands of transgender people across the world.

I wish I had a trans doll. Many years later there appeared a drag Barbie called The Blonds Blond Diamond Barbie Doll modelled after drag artist Phillipe Blond.

In 2006, the CWA, a Christian conservative group, got after Barbie’s makers Mattel for offering a third gender option "I Don’t Know" for barbie.com. Mattel later said the option should have been "I Don’t Want to Say" and that’s where the problem lies – in taking up a stand. I wish Mattel had the guts.

On Facebook, "Transgender Barbie Acasia" exists but isn’t avialble in shops. In any case, I don’t play with dolls anymore. And if I had a girl, I’d make her a customized trans doll so she doesn’t grow up in a restrictive world of binaries of gender.

It took me many years to understand that there was some truth to what Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One’s Own that “it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly...” and after my first assignment in New York where I was almost embedded with a transgender woman trying to understand why she would buy so many red lace bras, I knew what she meant when she said to me that freedom is painful and it leads to estrangement and hence, very few of us remain slaves to notions. But then, she said, try wearing the right shoe in the wrong foot.

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I couldn’t walk. I chose freedom. So did Frances and so did Anjali Lama, the first transgender model to walk the ramp at the recently concluded Lakme Fashion Week.

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But that's just part of the problem. We don't have fashion editors like Diane Vreeland say important things that could mean a total dismantling of the status quo but we need people like her. We don't need sensationalism. We need stories that could empower people like me and Lama and anyone who seeks to break the label tags. We need hope.

I am extremely amused to see my own friends yearn for love and men as if it were the only natural corollary of being a woman. It makes me angry. They make the battle even more difficult.

And now, moving on to Lama, a beautiful transgender woman from Nepal, who is 32 and wants to make that one dream of hers come true. And in her dream, lies my ambition of breaking free from gender shackles. I am a single woman. Often I have wondered about what it means to be a woman. Is it to be oppressed by the ideas of beauty?

To be a woman is to be able to find an uninterrupted sky, a patch of grass and to walk without prejudices, without fear. It is to walk to nowhere and leave the pretensions of getting somewhere because it doesn't matter. And any of us could be a man or a woman or anybody else. Why must gender be the primary identity? Aren't we and what we hold enough for us to mark our place under the sun?

What does it mean to be me? Or is? It is to embrace the sudden glint of mercurial desire, to stare at one’s body as if you could paint landscapes or write poetry on it, to see it as an artist would with a million possibilities and a million narratives. A person contains multitudes of worlds. We are the tesseracts. We are the light and the black hole, presence and absence, future and present and a reminder of the past. Sail on, sail on, we must tell ourselves.

A woman must be able to cup her breasts, feel her thighs and say to the world - Here I am and here is now and take me or leave me. I am contained within myself. A transgender should be able to cup her face and say to the world – Look at me. I am beauty. I am freedom.

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I stumbled upon Anjali Lama on social network first. Hailed by everyone as the first transgender model to walk the ramp for Lakme Fashion Week, she was media's darling androgynous and transgender model but having been around for a decade, I knew this was just a story, an initial fascination, a crash course journalists are prone to indulge in.

I looked for her, found her and spoke to her and of course like everyone else, we wrote her story. A limited edition kind of story. A cool kind of story for us, the reporters, who want to add offbeat stuff to their repertoire of stories of the usual kind. But Lama isn’t breaking news. She needs work.

She is here to make it in the modeling world and beyond the initial infatuation of the media with her story and beyond the lines of activism, the larger narrative is about the biases all of us carry toward those who are born different or choose to step outside the norms.

We decided to feature her in our fashion special - The Song of Fire and Ice. Not as a charity case but nobody would have fit the bill better than her.

I thought gold is priceless because it is untarnished and resistant to oxidation and silver is resilient as it lets the maximum heat pass through it and who else but Lama could sing that song for us. We weren't trying to prove a point. We just thought gender roles and constructs like those are overrated. It doesn't matter in the spectrum of gender if you are a pure woman or man or others.

I dismissed notions of heteronormative constructs long ago. Sexuality is a personal choice. I am happy to see designers in the west take up causes and try and be more political.

It is disappointing that Indian designers, at least many of them, including stylists, are often led by the imposed notions of beauty and one of them had once said to me how he was good at making people beautiful and that's what he would do. It wasn't feasible for him to delve into political and social contexts. It was quite disappointing for a young gay man to talk in these safe ways.

We call our story Nemesis because Lama made it to the cover. Not because she is transgender and we were trying to be cool. But because she represents the amalgamation of the metals. Her song is rugged and pure.

She is innocent. She and I can both understand the pain of being a minority. Women is a caste. Transgender is another caste. We are on the margins still and if Lama can be courageous and walk the ramp with her head held high, we should see it as “hope”. We need all the allies that we can gather. She is one of us. She represents our dreams and failures. She is the Nemesis.

It is easy to dismiss any attempts by fashion at being earnest by saying it is all tokenism but we must never undermine the impact of aesthetics. Art reflects our era, our evolution and exposes us in our denials. I am no advocate for fashion. I'd rather look at fashion as a story of our collective expressions.

I am neither a stylist nor a fashion writer. What we worked with was a concept that let us work with metals and human spirit. Lama comes from a small village in Nepal where she had not known what it means to be a transgender. But at the end of it all, it is a story of courage against all odds, of betrayals and abandonment, of dreams and failures and of constantly reminding oneself that perhaps the world isn't ruthless enough to break the human spirit and that it can't. Some models and agencies refused to be shot with her calling her a “nobody” and a “transgender” and I wish they had been more dignified.

***

I was a stranger on the other end. But I guess it is easier to confide in strangers about loss and other such things. At the end of the day, women and those choosing to be are gutsy. We strive to be “us” and the first battle pitch should be against the impositions of beauty standards and gender roles and perhaps fashion needs to be more political and fight with us because body is memory and our memories define us. Clothes are our projections. Fashion is personal and personal is political. Why make it so frivolous and pretty? Can we be anti-pretty? Can we dare? Can we break free?

Lama told me all this one night.

"I remember my village. There were mountains and a mother and a father and brothers and sisters. I remember the last time I went to my village. That was when my mother passed away. I cried all the way. She had told me once that it didn't matter whether I was a son or a daughter. I was her child like the rest. She had known all along that I wanted to be a girl. She would come to meet me. My mother told me this world is a tough place and I should keep on trying in the face of failures. It was a terrible loss. She was the only one I had. My mother knew my heart.

I used to keep reminding myself "I am a boy" and try and behave like men.

But it made me sad. I suffered throughout my childhood. There was a deep anguish. I didn't know what ailed me. I wanted to be a girl but I was afraid. In that remote hamlet nestled in the mountains with four or five houses and about 150 kilometres away from Kathmandu, I knew I hadn't belonged. They made fun of me at school. I never said anything. In my village in those days, we knew you had to be what were born as.

They were innocent. There was no television. There was no window to the outside world. After my high school, I came to Kathmandu and started to work in a restaurant to fund my college. We were poor and I struggled with keeping jobs. The employers would taunt me. They would say that because of my ways they were losing customers. I went through so much rejection but that was only the beginning.

In 2005, I was watching a television show called Sangarsh with my neighbours and the particular episode was about transgender and I thought these were my people and I wasn't alone anymore. I had been suffering with low self-esteem. The men around me started taunting looking at the transponders in the show and suddenly I felt less lonely. I set out to look for them.

I always remembered my mother told me that courage is the only way out. One night when I was returning from work, I saw two transgendered women walking to a night club and I followed them and accosted them. I told them I wanted to be a woman all my life. I told them I wanted to be with them. I told them I wanted to put makeup.

They looked at me and said it was brave of me to say all of this and gave them a number. I called the next morning and went to meet them at the Blue Diamond Society, an LGBTS rights organisation working for sexual minorities in a conservative country like Nepal. They counselled me and I started to work with them as an activist and moved in with a friend. My adoptive mother rechristened me as Anjali Lama.

I had wanted to be called Sonali because I really liked Sonali Bendre, the Bollywood actress, but Mamta Khan, my other mother in the transgender community, said Anjali would be the perfect name for me and we laughed. I had left my lodgings.

My brothers found me and asked me if I was transgender and I said I was and they asked me never to come home. I was the fifth child among seven that my mother birthed. My sisters would keep in touch and my mother would talk over the phone and visit me sometimes when she came to the city. But my father never spoke to me after I came out. We still don't talk.

That's a loss I don't want to talk about. But I had to be brave. I had to live my life despite everything. I was a pretty boy. My friends often said I should be a model. But it was enough struggle to survive in a society that treated us like outcastes. Modelling was never on my mind.

But in 2009, a national magazine in Nepal called Voice of Women decided to do a feature on the transgender community of Kathmandu and put Anjali Lama on the cover and that's when I thought I could be a model. But nobody approached me. Nobody gave me any work. So I decided to join a school for modelling and did a one month course but when they came to audition models, I was never selected. I asked the owner of the school and she said it was because I was transgendered.

To come this far and get rejected made me sad. I used to go to this boutique called Crossroad where Subexya Bhadel, a designer, became a friend. and she was going to have a show and I asked her if I could model for her. She said I could. That was my first break but then I auditioned for Nepal Fashion Week thrice and got rejected. I had decided to be brave about my gender identity and I had told the press I was transgender and that's when I became Nepal's first transgender model.

The press wrote about me but a section of fashion designers were against me. In 2010 I went for breast augmentation in Bangkok with my savings. I felt very happy. At least I could have part of what I always wanted - to be a woman. I was lucky to have no facial hair. I had started growing my hair since 2006.

I always dreamed of becoming an international model. Nepal gave me a break but it was touch so I came to India after researching online about Lakme Fashion Week. I first came in February 2016 and was not selected.

I was broken and bent and returned to Nepal to my job as an activist and tried to forget about modelling as a career or a dream. I was past 30 years of age. But then I wanted it so badly that I was almost obsessed with becoming an international model. So, I saved up money and returned to Mumbai in June for the audition for the Autumn/Winter season at Lakme Fashion Week. I was rejected again.

I came back. Then I remembered what my mother had told me - never give up. My friend was going to Mumbai and I asked him if I could stay with him in Mumbai and figure out. He said yes. This was my final flight. I had heard that one must always take risks and I left my job and came to Mumbai in November last year. I wrote to modelling agencies.

I didn't have a portfolio shot by big photographers. I had very little money and it was running out. Nobody wrote back to me. I spent countless hours in dark room thinking about my life. And then, I saw that Lakme Fashion Week was again having its auditions in December. I had about two weeks. I started exercising.

I decided to understand why I had failed. I had been nervous to see the girls. My gender was hidden between my legs. I was honest. I had written to Lakme asking if a transgender could audition and they said I could. I downloaded the videos of audition, I practised my walk, I learned to hold my gaze.

This was the final frontier for me. For 10 days, I trained myself. I taught myself not to be daunted by anything. This time around I was going to make mistake. This time I wasn't going to care.

I wasn't rejected.

I have come a long way from being born as Nabin Wabia from Nuwakot in Nepal, a lost child who wept during the nights because he didn't know what was wrong with him.

Now, I am happy. I am happy with my body, my dreams and my journey. You know it has been a struggle. I came from nowhere and maybe I will go everywhere.”

Last updated: March 03, 2017 | 21:46
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