A childhood she wishes upon no one

Priya had an extremely unhappy childhood. Her parents were constantly bickering with each other and ultimately her father left home. “I must have been nine years old then,” she reminisces. “I thought he would be back in a couple of days. But he never returned.”

The situation affected her mother’s mental state while Priya’s young mind couldn’t fathom the reason for their discord. She often wondered why he never once gave a thought about his only child.

“As my mother’s condition deteriorated, we moved closer to where my maternal uncles lived. The move uprooted me from a familiar, comfortable environment – from my friends and my school. I hated the new place,” she says.

Teenage years set in and she was drawn towards feminine things and was harassed for who she was and her choices. Social stigma, her father’s absence, and sans siblings sharing her gender identity confusion came to reflect on her academic graph. Priya, always a topper, had completely lost interest in studies in class XI. To avoid bullying and harassment during college, she would spend hours commuting on Mumbai’s local trains, some days visiting her father’s family to ascertain his whereabouts.

“All hell broke loose when my mother came to know of all this – and my gender preference.” That day, she was thrown out of the house. She spent five days on the apartment’s stairs, fed by neighbours. 

“I was naïve enough to expect my mother to take me back in. Instead, she threatened to harm herself if I didn’t leave the premises. My uncles, probably thinking I would go live with my father’s family in Kalyan, too, requested me to leave.”

Priya pinned hopes on her father for shelter, acceptance, and love. That night, she boarded a train to Aurangabad where she had heard he was residing. 

“I arrived in Aurangabad cold, hungry, and penniless and walked 12km from the station to the address I had. But he no longer lived there, and no one knew where he had moved to.”

Crushed by such a cruel turn of events, she returned to Mumbai, and with nowhere to go, she made a railway platform her home. 

“I would either beg for food or eat what was discarded, bathed under a broken pipeline, hid in a bush until my clothes dried. I would spend the entire day travelling between stations to avoid being caught by cops, harassment, and abuse.”

She once fell out of a moving train, injuring her leg. The wound started to fester without treatment. Fearing she might lose her leg, she approached her uncles for help. Was destiny leading her back to her family, and to her mother?

“I sought her forgiveness, beseeching her to take me in but she didn’t want to see me ever.” 

After getting Priya’s leg treated, her uncles put her in an orphanage of which they were the trustees. “Living in an orphanage despite both parents being alive hurt me more than the vagaries I had suffered,” she rues.

Here, she faced sexual abuse and tried to make her escape with the money she was given to pay the orphanage’s electricity bill. “They took me for a thief instead of asking me the reason. All doors had now closed, and I was back on the streets.”