Abhijit was eighteen. He had long thick curls, and wore cheap metal bangles on his wrists. He hadn't talked to his mother or sisters in two years. Like many hijras, Abhijit lived on the tips he earned going from slum to slum, dancing himself to exhaustion.
Now he stood in front of a temple glowing with light. The outside of the building looked like a rotting banana, all patches of yellow and brown. Time had worn the exterior down since he had last stood here with his mother Kashvi at age fifteen. A drummer sat idle inside. Abhijit pushed his shoulders back, went in, and started to dance. Faces and memories rushed back as his body twisted and sprung to the frantic beat of the drum—Sevita smiling at him in a red sari, his mother's look of horror amidst bags of spilled groceries, the monotony of the beach hotel and the ocean's seducing embrace, this temple he was dancing in, where he had once been forced to kneel face-down beneath the feet of a deity's statue. He lifted his face up and looked at the spinning faces of the onlooking slum-goers. He was Abhina, and he was complete.
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Abhina
Short Storyfictional short story based on a true story and inspired by the novel, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," by Katherine Boo.
