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This story was first published by Queerbeat, you can read the original here.

On some days, by the time I got home from school, their afternoon ritual had already begun.

My grandmother, Shipra, and her closest friend, Nalini,* sat angled towards each other in a way that seemed intentional, even when neither was speaking. Shipra, whom I called Dimma, Bengali for maternal grandmother, would be reading. Nalini usually held a book as well, but I always suspected this was more to please Shipra than out of genuine interest. Her attention always wandered back to the woman beside her. The relationship between these two 60-something-year-old women didn’t look like anything I’d seen around me. Or anything I’d seen on TV. But in that high-ceilinged, three-storey house in a twisty North Kolkata bylane, it had become such a fixture that no one thought to question it.

I learned from my mother that after Shipra’s husband died in 1991, seven years before I was born, the rhythms of the house had quietly reorganised themselves around Nalini’s visits. On most days, she travelled from her home, about seven kilometres away, to sit with Shipra in the bedroom my Dimma had once shared with her seldom-mentioned husband. I often hovered near the doorway, watching the two women in silence.

They rarely touched. Shipra disliked physical affection and was open about it. At most, their knees brushed by accident, or they stood side by side when a photograph required it. Yet there was something about the glances they exchanged that seemed to fill the room. Nalini’s face softened whenever she looked at Shipra, and the silences between them never felt empty.

Even as a child, I knew that Nalini was suffering in ways the adults around me struggled to explain. She repeatedly attempted to die by suicide, episodes that she referred to as her “suffocating spells.” And after each one, the connection between the two women seemed to grow stronger. What had once been monthly visits became weekly, and by the time I was around 13, they had developed into a near-daily ritual. (That was also the time I had begun taking “Am I gay?” quizzes online.)

Nalini would walk straight into Shipra’s room and settle into her designated spot on the left side of the bed. There, close to my grandmother, it seemed like her breathing steadied and she found some measure of peace.

One afternoon, I came home upset after getting into trouble at school. My teachers had cornered me and accused me of “going around” with boys. As I sat around sulking, my Dimma, who was a stickler for discipline and often irritable when she didn’t get her way, ordered me to stop lounging in my dirty uniform and go take a shower.

“Uff, ektu jirote dao na! [Ugh, I need some space!]” I shot back sharply, irritated by her nagging me without consideration for my visibly disturbed emotional state. It was the sort of situation that could’ve easily escalated into a fight.

But before Shipra could react, Nalini cut in. “Come sit with me, bhai [brother], you’ll feel better,” she said to her softly. It was not uncommon for women in Bengal to use the term bhai to refer to close friends. But Nalini seemed to reserve it for Shipra in a way that felt particularly intimate.

Dimma was more agitated than usual that day. She had been pacing around, impatiently issuing orders to the house help before she turned her attention to me. But something in Nalini’s gentle tone had calmed her bhai down. The tension in the air dissolved almost instantly, and I seized the opportunity to run upstairs.

I was struck by the familiarity with which Nalini spoke to Shipra. There was something very intimate, almost domestic about the tones they used with each other.

That was the first time I really wondered about their bond, tried to make sense of the invisible thread that held them together. Were they friends? Companions? Romantic partners? In some ways, they seemed all of those things at once. And in others, none of those labels seemed to fit.

Before we had the language

Shipra and Nalini first met in the early 1940s as primary school students in Kolkata. From the stories Shipra told me about her childhood, it seemed she stood out from a young age. She boasted of her brisk gait and firm voice, of how she carried herself with a confidence so unusual that people couldn’t help but notice. Nalini often recalled in the presence of both her and Shipra’s children that it was this “boyish” confidence that had first drawn her to Shipra. Nalini brought this up so often that it became rather conspicuous, Mama (Bengali for maternal uncle, which is how I refer to Nalini’s younger son) and my mother told me.

As the games captain, Shipra said she had a reputation for being somewhat intimidating. She had also informally discarded the name her parents had given her and chosen her own. It is that name I use for her in this retelling: Shipra.

Captain Shipra, as she was known, liked showing off her biceps, triceps, and shoulders to the other girls at school, pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a girl at the time. Emotionally, too, she recalled identifying closely with her brothers and resenting many of the restrictions placed on the women in her family.

Shipra never seemed fixed in her relationship with her gender. She and her cousins delighted in dressing up for impromptu photo shoots at family gatherings. In some of these photos, she appears conventionally feminine, draped in saris and striking poses that were considered fashionable in the 1950s and ’60s, her index finger resting........

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