As I returned home from work one day in June 2025, even Delhi’s blazing heat couldn’t dent my mood. I had just argued my first case before the Supreme Court, challenging a state government’s exclusion of people with certain disabilities. Only two blind women lawyers were known to have reached India’s highest court until then. That afternoon, at 25, I became the third.
My father called from our hometown in Punjab, his voice thick with warmth and pride. “Tere kaamyabi ne meri zindagi nu maqsad de ditta hai,” (Your achievement has given my life meaning), he said. I sensed an opening. “Papa, I need to tell you something,” I began. “Don’t get angry; listen to me before you form any judgments.”
I told my father I liked a girl. I did not frame it as a declaration of identity or as a political statement. I shared it as something ordinary, a simple fact about my life. I hoped that his joy at my professional milestone would soften his reaction to an aspect of my life he might otherwise have considered transgressive.
The disclosure stirred a confusion I hadn’t foreseen. My father assumed I was affirming my preference for female friendship. The notion hardly surprised him since he often joked about how I had become a “man-hater” after finding feminism. “No, Papa, I like her as a companion,” I spelt out. “I like her as you liked Mama.”
The call didn’t go on for long after, and I didn’t hear from my father for a few days. This wasn’t unexpected. I knew that my revelation carried a certain weight—one my achievements alone could not dissolve. My mother, who might have once helped my father sort through his feelings even as she toggled between care and anger herself, passed away in 2015. In her absence, my truth stood unbuffered, held only between my father’s instincts and my vulnerability.
A few days later, Papa called again. His response surprised me. He asked for my partner’s name, and then, almost immediately, her salary. The questions were neither moralising nor hostile. They were logistical. I understood then that my father was processing my queerness through questions of safety, sustainability, and protection rather than as right or wrong. He intuited that desire alone was not enough for someone like me, who moves through the world with a visual disability. He needed reassurance that it would be accompanied by material stability, rationality, and long-term security.
My father was assessing my romantic choices as he had every other decision in my life: through the grammar of risk management.
When desire needs an explanation
Some of my father’s queries went beyond logistics. During that same conversation, he asked me why my partner would “choose this.” He framed the question tentatively, but it carried a familiar weight—the assumption that love involving disability is, by definition, a compromise. At that moment, my queerness felt almost incidental. My blindness had disrupted the idea of a “normal” relationship long before sexuality entered the picture.
I turned to academic theories around disability to make sense of what I was hearing. Mia Mingus, a queer disabled writer and educator, uses the term access intimacy to describe the rare and transformative experience of being with someone who understands your access needs without explanation, negotiation, or apology. The concept, which captures how elusive this feeling is, reflects the widespread notion among able-bodied folks that being close to a disabled person is a sacrifice that inevitably demands extra labour. My father’s question seemed to be shaped by this belief, too.
This belief did not come from cruelty. It was moulded by experience. I was born with weak vision because of retinopathy of prematurity, an eye condition that affects premature infants. By the time I was 16, I had completely lost my eyesight. My relatives were unkind after—awkward around my needs and quick to caution my father against wasting too much money on the education of a blind woman.
My mother had passed away by then. Papa shielded me from our relatives’ hostility, absorbing their doubts and pity. He became my sole caregiver, resisting a society that teaches families to think of disability as a private tragedy, ideally managed behind closed doors. He ensured that I was safe, mobile, educated, and protected.
Through the years that I spent at home in Bathinda—a town immortalised in Bollywood’s memory by Jab We Met—I thrived with his support. I topped my district in the class 12 board examinations and later secured admission to the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru. Leaving Bathinda was not a cinematic escape; it was a carefully planned departure. It required courage, orchestration, and a willingness to inhabit spaces that rarely accounted for blind women.
In college, I began living independently—navigating a new institution, a new city, and new relationships. I forged systems for everything, from getting chai at odd hours to locating a needle when my clothes required mending. I built networks I could rely on, asserting my needs to the people I cared about and who cared for me. The able-bodied imagination tends to fixate on a particular trope about helping blind people: guiding them across the road. But I didn’t just want to cross the road. I wanted to shop at a street market, attend a college festival, and feel wanted in spaces of joy. Moving from Bengaluru to Delhi for work deepened my sense of autonomy. I learnt to live in a city where safety was a constant negotiation—across streets, transport systems, and workspaces.
This expanding sense of self made matters more confusing for my father as he navigated my queerness. He had not seen me depend on anyone in a long time. He rarely witnessed my reliance on others or my vulnerability around them. For him, my life had stabilised into a narrative of self-sufficiency. Love, then, reintroduced uncertainty. It raised the possibility that I might once again become dependent, exposed, at risk.
Papa’s question about my partner’s choice to be with me seemed to hold two emotions at once: disbelief that someone could desire me, and fear for the life I might have if I pursued love, with all its trials. In the social logic that he inhabited, disability had to be balanced by sacrifice elsewhere. A disabled person was presumed to be a recipient of care, not a participant in love.
Safety over societal approval
For most of my formative years, my father expressed his love through vigilance. This meant anticipating danger in a world not built for blind people. It meant thinking several steps ahead—about streets and staircases, institutions and hostels, documents and travel. Over the years, he set my life up carefully: arranging my residential stay when I went to college, planning my first flights, accounting for routes, risks, and contingencies. My independence was, in truth, the result of careful construction. Safety was never incidental; it was engineered.
At my home, for instance, you’ll find a kettle that my father designed for me and commissioned an ironsmith to craft. Its body is deliberately oversized, ensuring that the water doesn’t boil over and spill even if I am unable to register that it is ready. On my dresser lie the combs he has arranged such that I can pick them up easily. My father has also baby-proofed the edges of the furniture so that I don’t bump into sharp corners when I am rushing to court. Despite my initial protests, he got me an open wardrobe, which makes finding clothes much simpler than fumbling through a closed cupboard.
I have often felt that Papa understands my disability better than I do, anticipates my challenges faster than I can, and innovates accommodations more tactfully than I can fathom. Yet, he takes no credit for my success. “Whatever you have done, you have done on your own,” is his refrain.
Because of this history, my father tends to approach my choices through the prism of protection rather than societal approval. Over our call, I asked him how he would explain my relationship to our relatives. “I can only oppose something if I see a problem with your choice, or I can offer a better alternative,” he said. Social consequences, he added, did not matter. What mattered was whether I would be safe, whether I would be cared for, and whether the person I loved would share the weight I carried. My disability had long marked me as vulnerable; queerness, in his mind, did not fundamentally alter that reality.
This is where care becomes complicated. Disability scholars, such as the late activist and educator Anita Ghai, remind us that care is never neutral. It can enable and constrain autonomy at the same time. For disabled women especially, care often slides into surveillance. Private desires such as love and intimacy are subject to collective anxieties about safety, dependency, and respectability. Choices are weighed not on the basis of joy or connection, but for their ability to preserve equilibrium.
My father’s acceptance of my queer relationship is sincere, but it is also conditional. Love is allowed as long as it aligns with stability. Desire must come bundled with logistical availability, a commitment to my support, and financial wherewithal.
Within this framework, my father’s acceptance of my queerness began to make sense. “I want an able-bodied partner for you,” he used to say often. There was no malice in this remark. It sprang from his own ableism and the world he knew, which insisted that disability must never compound itself. (On the other end of this spectrum are those who seem to think disabled persons should only be paired off with one another, as though disability were a magnetic force pulling like towards like.) My father imagined love as something that removed burdens instead of adding new forms of vulnerability. And so, if an able-bodied person chose me willingly, if she was equally educated and financially stable, if she did not require care but offered it—then, in his mind, why not?
That logic both enabled my father’s acceptance and revealed its limits. It framed my desirability as being contingent on the balance sheets of effort, risk, and dependencies. It asked not whether I was loved, but whether I would be safe and sufficiently protected.
Earning the right to be queer
My life has travelled a distance that feels improbable. If I found support in Bathinda and independence in Bengaluru, then in Delhi—where I have lived for the past three years—I found my professional footing. I have worked at law firms and think tanks, marking milestones such as appearing before the Supreme Court.
For my father, this trajectory stood as evidence that I could chart a life of my own. His conviction that I have earned the right to make unconventional choices—including in whom I love—has grown from this journey. It is anchored in his pride in me, and in the faith that I can move through the world safely, even if I do so differently from what is expected.
But this belief exposes another conditionality. For disabled people, autonomy is rarely presumed; it must be demonstrated. Rights are contingent on competence, productivity, and exceptional resilience. Disability theorists describe this framework as an ableist meritocracy, where dignity and freedom are tied to performance, and autonomy must be justified by success.
Even as I felt shielded by my father’s pride, I recognised the cost of that protection. My ability to love freely was tethered to my ability to excel. The farther I travelled, from dependence to independence, the more acceptable my desire became.
But this openness also surfaced from spaces I hadn’t anticipated. Grappling with my queer identity, my father turned to texts he held sacred. In them, he found the reassurance that a love that sustained was a love that stood with what was right.
Late February this year, my father came to Delhi to spend time with my partner and me. The three of us went to the National Zoological Park, a place I chose to escape mundane cafes and the prying public gaze. My partner and father spoke about the animals we saw there. He told her about his village, the music he listens to, the food he enjoys, and how much he detests expensive restaurants. At one point, my partner held my hand as we crossed the road. My father later said that he was watching both of us, noticing the care with which she guided me. “Tell her to always stay on the side of the road,” he added, not one to let sentiment trump practical instruction.
“I was worried initially,” my father told my partner, describing his early apprehensions about our relationship. “But now I see you both together, I see a spiritual bond; it is some spiritual power that has brought you together.” When my father first arrived, my partner had touched his feet in a gesture of respect. As he readied to depart, she bent down to do so again. He moved away. “You are my daughter, you don’t need to do this,” he told her. (In our family, daughters-in-law are not typically exempt from the practice, so I wondered whether his approach signalled a step towards gender equity or lingering confusion over our relationship.) My father handed my partner 1,100 rupees as shagun—a monetary gift elders give to mark celebrations, rituals, or special occasions.
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I remain deeply grateful for my father’s care. I do not mistake his caveated acceptance for rejection. But I also recognise the ableist assumptions embedded within this acceptance. His openness towards my queer identity does not emerge solely from a progressive ideology or rights-based reasoning; it comes from his trust in my resilience.
Mia Mingus reminds us that access intimacy is about being known without explanation. What I long for is something beyond acceptance too. A world where my desire does not need translation, justification, or proof of competence. Where love is not evaluated as risk, and intimacy is not rationed based on ability.
Until then, I live in the tension between gratitude and critique—holding my father’s care with tenderness, while refusing the idea that love must ever be earned.