“I am Moyna, I am a Hijra,”
Personal anecdotes of a Hijra
While waiting for a friend in Dhanmondi Lake, I saw a woman — meticulously bejeweled, begging money from the people walking in the park. With all her grace, she was passing, and; I called her in the mood of asking her causes that bars her to do a job. She said, “Amago keu kam dite chayna” (“No one allows us in their offices”).
She continued talking, “I am not a woman like you, neither am I a man, I am something undesirably ‘deformed’. I am unwanted by my parents and thereby the society. I am a Hijra. I am Moyna.”
Moyna goes back to her childhood and recalls, “My parents did not like me after knowing the fact that I am a Hijra. At seven I had to leave my family, all alone.”
Her powerful but sad tone made me feel drowned. Of course, the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, but being a woman what we go through often is the mental and physical sufferings from ‘home’ to the road in Dhaka (capital of Bangladesh); I can have a pinch that resemblance to hers.
As a child, Moyna came to Dhaka and started working in a factory in old Dhaka. She never let her fellow worker know about her identity, which is dominated by her sexuality. With a sigh, she uttered, “But one day someone caught me and paraded a verbal complaint against me. The owner said not to show my face from that very day at work. I never understood that what is in my identity that made other people complain about it.”
At present, 26 years old Moyna is living in Mohammadpur area with other 200 transgenders of different ages. Though she tries her fortune for work over time within and outside the border, it never shows up. Hence this begging!
Despite being young and healthy, many transgenders and Hijras I encounter in every main road in Dhaka traffic begging. As Moyna rightly described the reason of their not having any employment. “I am a strong and healthy person. But I have no other way to earn my life,” with a sinking tone Moyna shares.
There are people from Moyna’s community who are related to crime and there are some other people who pretend to be transgenders and work as sex workers to earn money, but to Moyna, this scenario is shameful and of course disrespectful. “Those who pretend to be transgender and are related to crime and prostitution are the opportunists — — the reasons maybe commonly people disrespect us.”
While talking about Moyna’s identity crisis, she words, “My body and mind is the combination of man and woman. But the beauty and the power of womanhood has fascinated me. My body looks like a man but my soul is like a woman and thus I dolled myself as a graceful woman.”
Moyna dreams to have a family one day but it seems impossible to her. “I would love to be someone’s wife; I would love to be a mother someday. But that is not possible for me as I am ‘unproductive’. Though I aspire to be, I dream this dream every night and day.”
Moyna uses her graceful smile as a tool to hide her everyday struggle and at the end of the day, she tries to make herself happy forgetting all her sorrows and pain by spending time with her friends and nearest ones at her moholla (area). She wishes to be in a better world where people like them to be considered normal.
Hijra: In south Asia a person whose birth sex is male but who identifies as female or else neither male nor female. It has traditionally been translated into English as “eunuch” or “hermaphrodite”.
This interview is an edited version of the prior published at the Daily Observer by the author
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