Musings: the khwajasera community
“Come, let the world see how proud we are of you for rising past your personal tyranny. Stand beside us, not because we are good people but because it is your right.”
Passing DHA cinema in our car on a warm summer evening with the air conditioner on full blast, we passed a grey Corolla driven by a man clad insalwar kameez of a material so thin that you could make out the shape of his vest even in the darkness without much difficulty. In the backseat sat three to four women whose complexions were fair and even, skin glowing as brightly as the diamonds they were clad in, lips painted with bold colours and of course, smiles.
My sister turned to me and voiced what was already on my mind, “I hate to say this but that was the first time I saw someone who is visibly from the khwajasera community in a car.”
This statement, as true it was, was evocative in the way that it made me ponder the deep inequalities imbedded in our society. Identifying the inequality is hardly the difficult part but rather, the real task is explaining it. What makes us as a society decide that being a member of the trans (gender or sexual) community is so sinful that they must be permanently ostracized from the mainstream society? What makes parents decide that they cannot explain to their children why there are women with conventionally “masculine” builds roaming the streets begging for money? What makes families disown little children merely because they have fluid gender identities? How can a privileged mother from a so-called educated family have the audacity to call a transsexual son or daughter a “khusra”, which is a term that in actuality simply means transsexual or transgender but it is used as an insult simply because, in the eyes of the wider society, for them to exist is shameful enough?
It would not be fair to deny that the khwajasera community has had legislative victories recently. In 2013, they were issued National Identity Cards, which although a right of any citizen, was previously denied to them. Recently, they hoisted a seven hundred foot long Pakistani flag to celebrate the nation’s sixty-ninth year of independence as if to say, “we have the right to love our country just as much as the rest of society, to be sheltered and protected by the white and green, to have the light, no matter how dim, of the crescent and star to lead us to protection in times of darkness.”
Take a closer look. From an aerial view, all we see is the brilliant flag, dignified and larger than life. What the media does not show us, however, are the bruised and calloused fingers of our oppressed people who worked tirelessly to erect it with only their empty wallets and dimming hopes. The term “tolerance” simply means to endure people who are somehow different than us. But why is being tolerant something to be proud of? Are we as humans really so terrible that saying we endure the existence of a person is something to be celebrated? Maintaining a cold “live and let live” attitude should not make anyone deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Let us instead say, we are unified. We are not accepting because the fact that the khwajasera community exists is not and should not be a bitter pill to swallow. Their existence is not an obstacle or a shame to our honour as a nation, or any nation’s honour, for that matter. No one’s existence should ever be enough to make them a grey cloud to compensate for which we must conjure up a silver lining. Let us instead give them the warmth of the spotlight we have had for way too long anyway, saying, “Come, let the world see how proud we are of you for rising past your personal tyranny. Stand beside us, not because we are good people but because it is your right.”
In the twenty-first century, I find myself having to reiterate what our Founding Father Jinnah once said about Pakistanis being “free” to go to their mosques and temples, but taking it one step further and saying you are free to be a person, and hoping there will at least be one reader I am able to convince.
The blogger has recently finished her O’Levels from Lahore Grammar School. Her interests include feminism, animal rights and poetry. She has written for different forums in the past and has served as a writer for Animal Care Association of Pakistan.
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