When The Soul Finds The Body!

 It is the right body and the right feeling. Not something he felt in a long, long time.

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     Till she was ten, things were ok. The teenage and the new school bought new problems. More comfortable being boyish and being with boys, she was called names, tomboy to some unprintable ones. On her first menstruation and also when she learned about what it entails for the rest of her life, she hated herself and the whole universe.

     When she perceived that she started to get “looks” at her breasts and her back, she felt teary and rebellious. Her mother, single mother, thought it was natural; hormone pushed changes in her only daughter. As a mother she feared society and as a woman she hated it. She had conversations, long ones, with her daughter and always thought it was working. She always gifted some cosmetics to her daughter after such long talks though she was never sure why her daughter received them with such sullenness. All college going girls jumped at such gifts.

     She was active in the theater and was famously nicknamed as a princess because of her tallness, gait and posture. She always played such roles with ease. Then they planned a scene from maha bharata in the intercollegiate cultural festival coming in a few months. She was the natural choice for Draupadi. Lines were being written and learnt.

      It was her confession to her counselor in the college that broke the spell. Her counselor, for a change, referred her to a psychologist first and then to her mother. By the time her hysterical mother reached the clinic, the long chat with the psychologist changed the lives of both, daughter and the mother.

      Her “treatment’ started meanwhile and lasted several weeks. Surgeries followed by counseling sessions followed by sleepless nights of reconciliation and progress was made. The neighbors tried prying in. Relatives gossiped but were never minded. It was not an easy journey but it was never supposed to be so.

      At last she became’ he’ and it was not a joyous moment but a relieved one. There was a legal wrangle to unfurl and societal norms to keep up to. People, as usual, kept a respectable distance but not so much in their discussions.

      The mother proved, now, to be his best friend. She never thought she had such reserves of resilience in her. She stood up to sarcastic friends, shouting relatives and well-wishing but suppressing ambiance a well-meaning society provides. She even started joking with her ‘son’ that she has had a child but now have both, a daughter first and then a son. Apart from problems like changing her wardrobe to his, things went on, never smooth, but in a known direction.

      The date of the drama was on them, almost. He solved the problems of his friends by agreeing to play Draupadi even now. Reason was simple enough. His gait and posture were still the same. 

      His mother walked into the room just as he was about to apply her new lipstick. She was startled. He was startled. "What are you doing with my lipstick? It's new...I haven't used it so far. Couldn't you have waited?" He smiled and handed it back to her. "I forgot to tell you...I am playing Draupadi in our college production... rehearsals start this evening."

      His mother stared at him and then a smile spread across her lips. Graying prematurely with dark circles given by the circumstances, she aged a decade in a few months.

      “All the best, dear! Who better than you?”

      The journey has just begun.