Story of Aditya Singh
Aditya Singh was born in a Rajput family. Unlike other boys Aditya liked playing with beauty dolls and notoriously played dress up with his mother’s jewellery and sarees. Aditya used to dress up as a bride and would dance his heartful to the Bollywood wedding mix.
Aditya in an essay about himself, had emotionally written about his relationship with his father. He stated that unlike others his relationship with his dad was not friendly. Aditya’s father did not accept him as he wanted to be more feminine. He wrote, “papa resided into relentlessly beating me even at the slightest of my mistakes. He detested my speaking of Bhojpuri, our mother tongue as he felt it made me sound like a ‘mauga’ (a Bhojpuri word for effeminacy).”
Aditya mentioned that not just his house, but his school was also a place that gave him so much trauma for him being more feminine. He said that his school was an unsafe place as his friends and classmates would refer to him as chakka or hijra. “The notion of your name reflecting as your identity became a blurred idea for me. There were a very few days of my school life when I was not bullied or humiliated, and hence, it is hard to forget the rest which had become ‘my normal’ for not being normal.”
Aditya Singh said that he remembers an incident from his school days like it happened yesterday. He said that one of his classmates had written the word ‘sixer’ on his back. Sixer is a word used to abuse queer people. He said that all the incidents from the school made him fell to never go back to school. “I had led down my shield of masculinity and had cried in the warm and secure arms of ma, cursing my birth and my own existence.”
Aditya soon changed his school. He stated that he developed a false hope when he believed that people referred to him as Aditya and not as ‘Chakka.’ Fearing that he might once again be traumatized, he became an introvert and kept to himself. “I started keeping to myself, an introvert who only found the resolute to breathe in the reality of his own identity either through comic books, TV series or movies. At times, I danced in front of the mirror, in my dad’s dhoti wrapped around as a gaghra to live my veracity.”
In his essay Aditya wrote that, “Standing on the stage in a yellow long- skirt, resonating my faith in blurred gender roles and belief in masculinity beyond the idea of clothing, in an auditorium stuffed with people, I was not only accepting the award for topping the second year of college but also sinking in the realization of how past three years in boys hostel has empowered me to accept myself the way I am, to love myself beyond the horizon and to believe the notion that the sky can be your only limit.” Aditya Singh accepted who he was when he gained the maturity to understand his sexual orientation.
