My mother never called herself a feminist, but she was a staunch feminist. She never used words like “gender nonconforming” or “patriarchy.” In Najafgarh, where we lived, such words belonged to English speakers on TV shows, not to Tamil-Malay women raising children in narrow, judgment-filled streets. But even without the language, my mother refused throughout her life to become the kind of woman society wanted her to be.
She had short hair. Not the carefully styled short hairstyles that urban women wear to signal elegance, but practical, almost masculine hair. After an accident at Chatrapati Shivaji railway station, where she worked to fund her education, a rod was inserted into her right arm and left leg.
She wore my father’s shirts, faded pants, and sandals that couldn’t hide her cracked heels. Due to surgery, her voice was hoarse and quiet. She was once a Carnatic singer and couldn’t even speak louder without her voice breaking. She insulted her like the men in our house who often called her a man. Local rickshawahs would mistake her for a drunk, loose woman. Relatives whispered and mocked her at the same time. The women in the neighborhood looked at her, laughing and confused, and made comments that I, as a child, found disgraceful. I always wondered why my mother wasn’t like other women. Women who would cook, clean and have long hair. For me and many others, she had failed to portray femininity correctly. My brother, my father, my grandparents and especially me would try not to notice.
Najafgarh notices these things.
It notices when women come home late. It notices when daughters laugh too loudly. It notices how much skin a woman shows, how softly she speaks, how obediently she lowers her gaze. What is particularly noticeable is women who seem to have no interest at all in conforming to gender roles. My mother was one of these women.
She didn’t know how to temper herself in front of society. She was never careful about male egos. She argued openly, laughed loudly, and occupied the room with a kind of unconscious rebellion. There was no display of tenderness in her. No effort to reassure people that she was still “decent” despite the shirts and short hair. She simply existed as herself, unapologetically, even if the world around her punished her for it. One of the first punishments came from us, their children, by keeping them away from our MCD schools so that others would not make fun of them. She always wanted to attend school events and become more involved, but we never let her. Second, it came from her lover. Who would ask her for money but not stand up for her when she was in need? I remember us packing our bags and moving into a rented room. We always rented rooms, never a house. I saw that my father wasn’t there for us, but my mother was. She couldn’t cook, but she bought bread for us to eat. We ate this bread with contempt and discomfort.
As a child, I didn’t fully understand what I was seeing. All I knew was that my mother was different from other mothers.
The other women in the neighborhood wore saris or salwar suits with bright floral patterns. In the evenings they gathered on terraces and discussed husbands, children, sex, desires, recipes and gossip. My mother was rarely there. Even if she did, she would make them uncomfortable. She felt more comfortable with men because they saw her as an equal. She became friends with Malyalai migrant workers and spent time with them. Our family protested this with utmost anger. They hated that she didn’t know Punjabi but tweeted like a bird to these strange men in her own native language. For this she was punished with insults and humiliation. As a queer child, it made me sad and scared. Slowly I started to understand her and developed a better relationship with her.
Things changed when we moved out of Najafgargh and settled back here after 17 years. She now lived in government housing where people recognized her for her work. My queerness was often protected by their government position. I remember being harassed by the police once, and only once was I the child of a Home Office director; they let me go.
Being queer does not exempt you from being a misogynist. I often agreed with my brother and father when it came to their finances. Both unemployed men wanted to know the balance sheet of the family breadwinner. I found it strange. During one of these fights, I finally spoke up and yelled at her. I told my mother to do whatever she wanted with her money. Even if she wants to burn it, she can. This was the first step towards my feminist practice.
Years later, as I began to understand myself as non-binary, I realized how much of my resilience came from her.
Queer people often talk about “selected family“It’s about finding safety outside of blood. But I think less is said about the silent inheritances that make queerness viable long before we have the language for ourselves. Sometimes survival begins with simply watching someone reject the world’s script. Sometimes liberation is inherited through gestures as small as a woman’s decision to buy clothes.
In 2012, my mother and I traveled to Kerala, visiting her home state for the first time since her marriage. She had no relatives there, but the language made it easy for her to find comfort. It was such a close moment for us that I was relieved that my brother and father were not accompanying us on this trip. I had saved some money and bought her a Kerala saree. Which ironically was ruined by the rain.
When I came out to her in 2014, she didn’t tell me it was okay to be different. She just hugged me with teary eyes as she saw my journey coincide with hers. We never spoke about it again. She had her own faults, but she never apologized.
And because she never apologized, I learned deep down not to apologize either.
As I grew older, I began to understand how lonely she must have been. Najafgarh is not friendly to women who live outside the norm. Gender roles are not just cultural expectations there; They are survival mechanisms enforced through gossip, exclusion and humiliation. Anyone who rejects femininity in such a place risks becoming socially illegible.
I wonder now if she knew that.
I wonder if she felt isolated every time another woman looked at her suspiciously. I wonder if she knew people were laughing at her after she left the room. I wonder if she cared. I wonder if she wanted a big send-off when she retired in 2020.
We became good friends during the lockdown. I would hug her whenever I had the chance, but I could never thank her for the things she did for me. When we all tested positive for COVID and I called a friend to ask her IAS father for help in finding a room in a hospital, she applied lipstick and straightened her hair. As if she didn’t want humiliation for being herself. She was hospitalized and kept asking us to take her home. There was nothing we could do other than abandon them to the system that ultimately failed us.
She died of COVID on May 30, 2021.
Grief rearranges memory in strange ways. After her death, I obsessively remembered ordinary moments: her sitting cross-legged, her loud footsteps on the way back from the office, her hoarse voice calling my name from another room, her screaming at my father for abusing her, her courage to face the police, her steadfast stance towards us, her helplessness and her power. The things people once made fun of became sacred to me. When I tried to find some of her saris after her funeral, I couldn’t find any. Everything was thrown away, just as in our family the belongings of a deceased person are thrown away. Even in death she was ostracized. I felt this so deeply.
That’s when I realized that my mother had spent her entire life teaching me how to survive without ever wanting to. I didn’t get a saree from her but her courage.
Not through talk or ideology, but through embodiment, through refusing to perform, through refusing shame, and through existing in a body and an identity that made other people uncomfortable and still carrying on.
As a queer person, especially in India, you are constantly asked to shrink yourself for social reasons. Lower your voice. Dress more “normally.” Don’t make your identity so visible. Don’t embarrass the family. Don’t invite trouble.
My mother ignored all of these rules long before I did.
And maybe that’s why I survived my own strangeness with less fear than I might have. Because when I began to grapple with society’s gender expectations, I had already observed someone being silently disobedient every day as a child.
She has never identified as queer. But I think queerness isn’t just about identity. Sometimes it’s about denial. Refusal to perform. Refusal to submit. Refusal to shrink for the sake of others.
My mother carried this rejection in her body long before I learned to carry it in mine.
And even now, after death, she continues to make room for me.
Jitender (they/them) is a social justice researcher, youth advocate and gender expert with over a decade of experience working with human rights organizations in India. As an aspiring anthropologist, Jitender is deeply interested in understanding how trauma shapes identities in the present. Her work deals epistemologically with affects and explores the temporality of witnessing, memory and becoming. They are also passionate about writing and documenting lived experiences.
