Wednesday, January 28, 2015

My friend Vikram wrote this about my people...

...This is the Hyderabad police we are talking about, part of India's Silicon Valley that houses the likes of Microsoft and Google. But then a transgender death is not a sexy story. It is a lesser tragedy, one of those minor incidents that make up the rotting corpse of overlooked cases. The transgender, after all, does not have a voice. We may welcome her when a child is born or have her bless our marriages but God help her if she gets murdered. That kind of stuff happens to other people, right, and who can be more other than the transgender? Her life and death are mere blips on a perfect social order that wants to have no truck with her. Worse, since she is so disposable, it is all right to use her and her kind to indulge our base perversions, as cases of police brutality reveal.  I want to feel angry but I only feel numbed. Pravallika's death does not matter. 
I missed Vikram's story the other day, when he linked to it here.  He perfectly captures the pain and sadness of all too many,

but then,

wonderfully and joyfully,

he refutes his own position, that Pravallika's death did not matter, that she died in vain.  Vikram's story, about her and to her, and the others like her, will have a beautiful impact on all who read it, and so Pravallika, and her story, were not in vain.  She suffered much, but not in vain.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks Julie. What you say in the end is exactly what I was trying the reader to gauge. It was written in that spirit.

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