Well played, darling.
My coach clapped my back, laughing heartily, as we walked off the field. The game secured, it was time for him to bring out his favourite nickname for me.
Before you get too concerned, let me make it clear: He was more of a joker than a creep. Darling, his moniker of choice for me, always delivered dripping with sarcasm, reflected what he must have thought was a good-natured dig, aimed at a talent he found promising but too soft to survive India’s intensely competitive cricket rat-race.
For my coaches, toughening me up was something of a mission. My cheeks were too plump and chubby, my hips too curvy. My hands were soft and tender—like a girl’s, I was told. To survive, people around me said, one could not merely tolerate the blows of the rough, hard leather ball. One had to embrace its rough edges and become one with them.
With time and practice, my hands grew calloused and leathery. My fingers became rugged and irreversibly crooked, bent out of shape by a decade of spinning the ball. Even today, they’re never still. If you look closely enough, you might catch them spinning an imaginary ball, or, increasingly, spelling out a word or two that’s stuck in my mind, moving ponderously in sync with my own gradual drift of thoughts.
My coach might have successfully brought me closer to the physical specimen he felt a male athlete had to become, but it was my inner softness that truly stumped him. Hardened hands or muscled limbs offered merely a layer, a facade. They told only partial truths. The word ‘darling’, the adjective ‘soft’, or any of the other nicknames he and others around him invoked were intended to provoke me into action. They were meant to release a righteous anger that would drive me to prove to them that I was not too soft, too effeminate or too fragile to survive the brutal culling that is a necessary part of selecting a fifteen-member cricket team out of millions of aspirants.
To their chagrin, their goading found limited success. Sure, I wanted to prove my ability in the game, and I didn’t quite like being called a darling, but it was more about who used that word and how it was used, rather than the word itself, that troubled me. A taunt like darling reflected the one fundamental idea that defined how we were meant to play cricket: in pursuit of success in the game, all other emotions, desires and ways of being had to be stripped aside.
And so I remained incorrigible, maddeningly ambivalent about the qualities my coach felt were necessities for any successful cricketer. But in hindsight, I wasn’t becoming less of a cricketer. I was simply becoming a full person.
At a purely competitive level, my coach was probably right. I didn’t make the cut. Tens of millions of young children learn this news every year and must find ways to pick up the debris of their once all-consuming dreams and keep going.
But for me, the task seemed easier. Cricket had helped me find comfort in being in my body as a child—until, as I became a young adult, it suddenly didn’t. In its place, I began to find a vocabulary to understand myself that has served me far better than the jokes aimed at me then. By this I mean queerness, but a specific shade of it in particular, best described by a word I referenced above: ambivalence, which most precisely summarizes the way I approach and understand my own gender and sense of self.
Another way I’ve learnt to describe myself is through the politics of negation, which I’ve felt offers a lot more radical potential than the sticky and unsatisfying politics of naming. It is much easier for me to define what I am not than to pin myself to a word or identity with any real affirmative, unequivocal emotions. In short, I often just don’t care.
This has felt an increasingly difficult motto to live by in a world whose complexity we seem to traverse (and commodify) by making each other visible through identity. For as long as I have realized, I am not a man, but not quite a woman either, and that I don’t need to be anything at all, the world has seemed unsatisfied with my answers. Without the right adjectives, it seems to tell me, you cannot be visible, you cannot be seen.
Gender, in that sense, has felt like something of a rubber band to me. I can stretch it out in various ways, play with shape, style and performance, but ultimately the words that construct gender, and create its aesthetics, seem to have no material grounding. They always, when sufficiently stretched and pulled, somehow come to mean nothing and everything at once, and dissolve into the vacuous emptiness of that rubber band’s empty centre, leaving me bemused and a little exhausted. Often, I have found the most peace in the realization that language is always incomplete, and in being liberated from the urge to find a
stable, categorizable sense of selfhood.
But more than that, this tenor is a product of the fact that, as I left the cricket field for the university, my sense of self became best expressed in conceptual abstractions. But answers to the deepest questions about ourselves are never so tidy. The world around me and the communities that we find meaning in are very messy, material things—held together, for example, by the camaraderie that makes sports teams such special communities for some. I still missed cricket because I had found a vocabulary but not a practice.
‘Why do they have the same last name?’ Appa asked, sitting up and pointing at the WPL, Women’s Premier League, cricket match on the TV screen. I was back at my parents’ home in Bangalore; it’d been a year since I’d graduated from college. On the screen, Natalie Sciver-Brunt and Katherine Sciver-Brunt were embracing, celebrating the fall of an opposing team wicket.
Our cat, seated on Appa’s lap, meowed in response, a plaintive cry protesting the slightest disturbance to his perch. But the cat aside, my father’s question was met with a pause and then an awkward silence.
‘They’re married,’ I eventually replied, my voice neutral and matter of fact, but my heart beating with a tremor of excitement. In his moment of comfort—night-time TV with a cat on his lap and a bowl of peanuts by his side—Appa had walked into a bit of a trap. As if on cue, the commentator exclaimed, ‘The off-field jodi is now on-field too!’
When I returned to Bangalore, my parents didn’t take long to realize that I was not the same person who’d left home at eighteen. It likely struck them as early as the day I returned, when they offered to help me unpack, only to find in my bag a non-zero amount of make-up and clothes that were far too flowy for their liking. My hands had regained their softness; my fingers were still slightly bent, but they’d taken on a long, lithe elegance—one I now enjoy highlighting with nail polish.
Since my return to the city, it had shown itself once before, when, during a stressful weekend, he yelled at me for wearing a pair of red pants that he finally admitted triggered him.
Unsurprisingly, Appa digested the fact that a lesbian couple was on screen with unflappable silence. But while he fended away his moment of awkwardness, my sense of excitement didn’t pass. I’ve enjoyed watching cricket wistfully, with complicated—you could say ambivalent—emotions, ever since I stopped playing the sport competitively. This was different. I felt a burning ache in my heart, a pining I’ve never quite felt before. I wanted, in that moment, to be those lesbian cricketers on the screen. I yearned for what they could enjoy that I’d never been able to in the past, which had made complicated the sport I
otherwise loved so unambiguously.
Watching women’s cricket, and seeing athleticism and queerness so visibly on screen, invoked some of the most powerful emotions of gender yearning I’ve ever had. A quick headcount would suggest that nearly half of all women’s cricketers outside the subcontinent—where public queerness continues to be frowned upon—are queer. Many are married to or partnered with each other. They are allowed to love each other, cry together and play together, all at the same time.
That moment of longing came with a hint of reinforcing clarity—not about ‘who I am,’ but about the scale at which I wanted to ask that question. I didn’t need to find new words to better describe me as an atomized, individual being, when these terms make the most sense to me at a relational level, at the level of a collective. I had rejected being a man, in part because I found the culture of brotherhood toxic and unsatisfying. In recreating my own path, it is not womanhood I necessarily desire, as much as a sisterhood. Perhaps, if I am to use the word, that is one way in which I would like to be trans: to play a sport I love with people who I am allowed to love too and be both an athlete and a darling—without any scorn involved or any contradiction between those terms.
Publisher: Penguin India
Pages: 264
Price: 499
The anthology is edited by author, translator, and editor Kazim Ali.
This excerpt has not been edited by queerbeat.