‘They take care of me because they want the land’

How does a family with a hijra sibling living within the household negotiate embarrassment and acceptance?

Jaina had been working since she was ten years old. Her former jobs included milking cows for a Marwari cow trader, employment in two biscuit factories in the neighbouring district of Baripada, and labouring in construction. She was also a cook in a small roadside eatery, where she made meals for migrant workers. After working for 50-odd years and helping her mother raise her two brothers and two sisters, she returned to Bhadrak in 2006 to a room from which she sold small quantities of spices. She also ran a small flower shop, where she made garlands for nearby mosques and mazars. Although her flower shop was to be demolished to make room for bigger shops, Jaina was unfazed because she could no longer afford the flowers, which came from Calcutta, to make garlands anyway; floods had destroyed a lot of flowers in the last Ramzaan (August 2010), the month in which Jaina would have earned the most. 

Because she had a place to stay and took her meals with her brother, she was only mildly disappointed by these turns of events, which might have worried other shopkeepers far more. I asked her why she still peddled spices and flowers when both jobs were obviously not going well. She replied, “I can’t ask my brothers for money every day. They might give me money some days, but they will start complaining afterward. I can’t ask money for every little thing I need, plus the money I give to Muneeza”—referring to her brother’s third child, four years old, who would come every hour repeatedly pleading with Jaina to give money for small snacks. This sense of awareness Jaina had about the limits and possibilities of kinship with her brothers made me prick up my ears because, right at the beginning of my fieldwork in 2008, she had claimed that her brothers loved her, as did everyone in the family. “You eat here every day,” she stated. “You tell me—can’t you see how much they love me? They never insult me, and when I am ill they buy me medicines.” This attestation had led me—mistakenly—to frame the relationship between hijras and their families in terms of either acceptance or ostracism—triumphs of either filial love or family honour. 

While Jaina claimed that there was affection, she was also aware that she could not completely depend on her brothers to fund the small luxuries that arose daily. She feared that she would then become vulnerable to her brothers’ accusations of sponging money, while giving nothing in return. The restraint exercised in not asking for money every day and the love that was proudly claimed revealed a certain tension between the brothers that hijras were hard-pressed to negotiate, since they had not exactly remained “a brother”. This form of calibrating transactions of money and food at home to maintain amicable relationships and a pleasant atmosphere was also observable in other spaces and times, in which other types of transactions took place. For example, Jaina’s brothers would never come to visit her shop or the shops of her friends because raunchy conversations... Their presence, Jaina told me, would markedly change the atmosphere, and nobody would be able to tease and flirt freely...

The presence of a hijra sibling was not seen as a breach of nature so much as a breach of structure. Hijras’ not leaving the family, but rather remaining in the household, led to a conundrum that obscured and thus punctuated the movement by which brothers became householders—and who are, by this movement, positioned against each other. One day when we were returning from a visit to Jaina’s widowed sister Jaira Bai, in the neighbouring village of Nuasahi, Jaina pointed to a tract of land she had bought 30 years ago: a rectangular piece that stood out because it was the only segment of the large area that remained uncultivated, whereas its four sides were furrowed and the land around it stuffed with paddy. She said, “This belongs to me.” I was a bit surprised, never having imagined that she owned anything. She said, “The land is worth six and a half lakhs rupees [R6,50,000], but my brothers are asking me to sell it to them for four lakhs [R4,00,000].” Given that her brothers took care of her, I enquired, why wouldn’t she sell it to them? She replied, “They take care of me because they want the land; they will throw me out after I give it to them. I am a hijra. There is nobody in front of me [referring to her lack of children]. When I can no longer work, how will I expect to live? My brothers won’t look after me—they will look after their own children. They will not think twice before kicking me out on the streets.”

Excerpted with permission from Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria, published by Oxford University Press 

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