Butch and Blossoming

In early spring, I press my estrogen shot to my belly and open the seed trays. Morning glory, basil, turmeric root. There is a quiet rhythm to this, ritual without spectacle. I plant gondhoraj lemon beside ajwain, methi in a terracotta pot, tulsi in red clay. Soil is memory, and each sprouting is a prayer in vernacular. Bengali and Marathi, intertwined in a single root system.

Gender, like my cultural stew, has always emerged through dirt and contradiction. I am a trans woman. A butch lesbian. Not despite each other. In tandem. A tension that holds rather than breaks. These words often disorient people. In my body, they fit like calloused palms into soil.

Hormones enter like poetry. Andrea Long Chu says, "I transition because I want to be unreadable." I know that hunger. I want to be unreadable. I want to be unbound. I started estrogen not to "feminize," but to witness the poem of myself written in a different tense. And sometimes testosterone too, like a reclaimed stanza. Gender is not merely identity; it’s familial territory. Or even a landscape. A farm we build, dose by dose, not to arrive, but to sustain.

My hormonal ecology is not biological essentialism. It is sacred compost. Something Butler reminds us of: that the category of 'woman' is not a destination but a constructed, porous site. My transness is not a correction; it's a continuity. A conversation with my past, my kin, and the earth.

Spring

In spring, nothing behaves. Neither do I. Pudina spreads too fast. Tomato vines pull the trellis. Tulsi germinates without permission. My grandmother's chalta pickles come to mind. She would grind the seeds with garlic and mustard oil, bruise the leaves with salt. My butchness feels like that: bruised, preserved, sharp, and always tasteful.

When I read Stone Butch Blues at twenty, it undid me. Not because I was Jess, but because I wasn't. I didn't need to bind or pass to be erased. I was invisible already. Trans women in India often vanish under the category of spectacle or criminality. Even as a child, I sensed religion had no room for us. Temples with signs barring "menstruating women," dargahs with silent snickers when I first walked by in a salwar. Catholic teachers telling me God makes no mistakes. So I must be one, enough of one by virtue of being an effeminate boy.

There is no such thing as being real and there never was. There is only being right now. That is what butch means to me. Not hardness. Not stoicism. But urgency. A way of being present in refusal. Of wearing softness like armor.

Monsoon

The rains arrive like absolution. Soil swells, longing cracks open. The garden turns to a lush delirium. Dhonepata returns uninvited. The malabar spinach coils like memory around the iron railing. Karela creepers invade the fences, and the tulsi begins to lean toward the rain.

This is the season of entanglement. Of roots crossing boundaries. Of companion planting. Of gondhoraj and kadipatta, ajwain and jeera living side by side, not just surviving but thriving. That is how my kinship looks: intercropped, companioned. Grafted by necessity, bonded by choice.

Desire in this season is not individual. It is spored, spread across fungal webs of friendship and longing. My lovers arrive like monsoon winds. Unexpected, humid, generous. One brings me kokum sherbet. Another oils my scalp as I hum a Tagore tune about boats.

Even my grief blooms in this wetness. I miss people who have changed names, cities, pronouns. I write their initials in wet mud with a twig and watch the rain take them back.

Summer

As the last clouds spill themselves empty, the garden prepares for a different kind of heat. By midsummer, my garden is a riot of contradiction. Mogra, amaranth, hibiscus, grief. Things die fast in this heat. Some rot at the stem overnight. Others cling on. The turmeric leaf curls into itself. I cup it anyway.

There is philosophy in this. I can speak of the absent referent, on how systems of violence erase the subject. I see that in how even queer spaces tokenize butch dykes and erase trans women, or fuse them into an idea of deviance.

And I commodify that deviance.

My body refuses singularity. I have changed shape, scent, voice. Still not passing. Still stared at on the train. Still navigating which washroom feels least hostile. Still trying to wear a sari without worry. Still undoing the "trans hierarchy" where desirability and legibility collude to flatten us.

And yet I bloom. Loud. Layered. That is my gender. Aromatic, ephemeral, intimate.

Autumn

The first golden leaves fall like forgetfulness.

Autumn strips things bare. The bhindi shrivels. The hibiscus browns. The neem leaves collect at the edge of my courtyard tiles. I sit in silence, peeling methi with my lover. My grief arrives in layers: misgendered in a clinic, misunderstood in feminist circles, mistaken for someone I have never been. It aches often to remind myself: identity is not a fixed point but a performance sharpened by survival. Some acts are dangerous. Some are holy. I happen to be one such act, at least in the world I have lived in.

Faith has never held me gently. Even progressive temples sanctify cisness. My people are revered in myth but banished in proximity. So I reject narratives of tolerance. I want integration. Invitation. In queer theory, hospitality is not just space; it's nourishment. I don't want tolerance. I want turmeric tea, offered without question.

Still, I light diyas. I chant songs my mother sang when I was feverish. I do not need institutional recognition to know my body carries the sacred. Because it is sacred. My body is my own religion. In Kannada, sogadu is the word for scent, but also longing. To carry the sacred without recitals is longing to me. The balcony garden, suspended above Mumbai's heat, holds me in a suspended, awaited becoming. It is gender to me.

Winter

Winter is subtle in Mumbai. A different angle of sunlight. The chill of floor tiles. This is the season of root-tending. I plant haldi again. My girlfriend cleans my glasses for me with her knitwear, and I think of caring as self-preservation.

Yet there is still rage in me. A butch kind. Slow-burning. I rage for trans children denied school access. For queer workers misgendered in Zoom meetings. For the erotic that is not allowed to exist outside binaries.

So I tend to joy. Because joy is defiance. I laugh with other dykes in group chats, read aloud from old issues of Samar and Sarai Reader, plan potlucks with hormone-sharing rituals. Our kinship is like the garden. Some things grafted, others grown wild. We are not just a family. We are chosen species.

Like bhindi and marigold. Like methi and mustard. Intercropped. Companioned. Sharing space, soil, breath.

Gardens are not solitary. They are webs of relationship. Sun to soil. Plant to pest. Root to rot. My kin are spread across cities, timelines, authentication, government identification and what not. But they come. With PDFs, with voice notes, with intimacy when preservation runs late. They call me Didi and Madam and Jaan and never ask why.

My neighbor, an older Maharashtrian woman, gives me tulsi cuttings. She says, "Lagavnar ka?" I nod. She nods. The world does not end.

I do not need to be decoded. I do not need to be proved.

I am not a metaphor.

I am a trans woman. A butch lesbian. A root system that refuses transplant.

I am not passing. I am not blending.

I press warmth to my belly. I cup new leaves.

Still, I bloom.