Dear Reader,

Thank you for reading the story of Mr Gorgeous and writing back with your thoughts. Today, let me tell you another story.

When one meets J, one notices two things first: his beautifully intonated voice and his shy smile. But I also noticed something else—how he mounted a bicycle. It was rather different. I, being short, used to step on the left pedal first and then hop on once the cycle was in motion, but J had another method entirely. He would slant the cycle low to one side, some 20 or 30 degrees, put his leg across, then straighten the cycle in a swish and ride off. It was like watching an artwork. But he didn’t own a bicycle—his family couldn’t afford it. Only his mother was alive, and I never heard anything about his father. He was not my schoolmate; I studied in the convent and commuted by bus, and he went to the local government school to which he walked. We met occasionally near the banyan tree that stood at the entrance to our village, where two parallel roads took people to two different places.

I, a teenager then, was not a dear friend of J’s, already a teenager then. Until the day I gave him a ride on my bicycle. I had a Hero Hansa, second-hand, which I used for my part-time career as a newspaper boy. I used to see J riding pillion in the village, laughing aloud, and he would usually be coming from the small hill that stood between my village and the one behind ours, with an old cemetery and a beautiful patch of paddy fields playing border. J did odd jobs—like assisting masons—and when I saw him he used to be returning home in the evening.

One day as I was returning from a relative’s home, I saw him standing near the small hill. It was unusually dark and as I cycled home, J’s figure suddenly popped up near a lamp post, looking like a tall troll with a burning head. I applied brakes and pulled over. Going to the village, he asked me, and when I said yes, he asked if he could ride with me. Of course. My cycle’s pillion stand was fragile, so I asked him to sit on the front rod, and we rode on. It was initially uncomfortable but in minutes it became comfortable—whether from the breeze that our downhill momentum brought or from a hidden bonhomie we found, I don’t know—but in minutes he started talking. I had to take a detour to drop off a packet of clothes that my tailor father had asked me to deliver to a customer, which meant we’d be cycling together for the next 30 minutes or so. He was cool with that.

On that trip I found out a lot more about J. He had never met his father and he said his mother was engaged in “bad” things—people came to see her at night, he said. “But I love her,” he told me. “She does it to feed me, send me to school, and she will stop the day I get a job, which is why I’m trying to get one soon. I do want to study more, but I am not having that kind of a head; I’m a pottan (stupid).” He laughed at that. His mother never visited her family or relatives because they thought she was a bad omen, and that makes me a bad omen too, J told me. I could see he meant it.

He said more. I sensed that he felt he could trust me and that was unsettling, because I was not used to people placing their trust in me. I kept quiet as he talked. Some seconds later, he turned around and asked abruptly: do you want to do that to me? What, I asked. What everybody does, he said. What’s that, I asked. You know, he said. I don’t, I replied. Well, the thing everybody expects me to do during such rides, he said. I again asked what, and he fell silent.

We reached a small incline, so we hopped off and started walking up, pushing the cycle. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and asked again what he had meant. He looked at me and said slowly: “I see that you really don’t know what I mean.” He took a long look at me, and I still remember that look, the light from an incandescent lamppost casting a beam on his face, his smile beautiful in it. In his melodious, very feminine voice, he said: “I know when I say this you will run away, so feel free to run away. I will still like you, because you’ve been kind to me, and for you I am just me, and I have never had that before.”

He paused, coughed a bit, and said: “My dear, I am not a he or a she. I am both, I am a mix, I am not normal like you.” He took my hand and placed it on his and when I didn’t hesitate, he placed it on his chest—it was soft and warm. Then replacing my hand on the cycle bar and looking away, he said: “I am an untouchable too, but everyone touches me in all the wrong ways. People who give me lifts on their bicycles and motorcycles when I return home in the evenings—they give me a lift only because they want this. I hate them, I hate what they do, but I can’t say anything because if I do, they beat me up. Once a guy hit me on the head when I refused and I was dizzy for a week and vomited all night.” As he talked, we kept walking, and he kept a watch on me, making sure I didn’t trip as I pushed the cycle.

Something was swelling inside me and my heart beat unusually fast. I feared what I heard, but there was nothing in it that made me feel anything other than close to him, and I was scared to tell him that, so I walked slowly. Then he stopped and asked again: are you sure you don’t want to do that? I said no, J, I am your friend.

He seemed taken aback. Then he came around to the other side and walked alongside me, comfortable now. A few yards later he stopped and I turned quite naturally towards him, and we hugged, like two friends who had known each other for years. He or she, it did not matter, the human being I hugged was soft but his body was tense. My eyes welled up when I realised that and I hugged him tight. Then we parted and went our different ways.

It was only years later that I understood I had encountered three ideas that late evening—transgender, Dalit, and abuse. Ally as well? I’m not sure. I’m too scared to call myself an ally, then or now, given how fallible my political and personal convictions are. I lost touch with J as life went on. But each time I hear of atrocities against trans people or Dalits, I think of J.

Which is why J came into my mind again this week, as we at Frontline planned the coverage for Dalit History Month. Parliament has just passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, a law that Amnesty International has called “a serious setback for human rights in India”. The stories we see in media and real life tell us that nothing much has changed for the marginalised, despite the enormous progress we as a society claim to have made. The National Crime Records Bureau’s latest data, for 2023, records 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes—a figure that has climbed steadily from about 42,800 in 2018. These are only the reported numbers—Human Rights Watch has noted that Dalits are frequently reluctant to file complaints, given what they describe as a lack of police support.

J faced what scholars now call intersectional marginalisation, but I don’t need the term to remember what I saw. He was Dalit, trans, poor, a teenager doing odd jobs and riding home on other people’s bicycles, paying for the lift with his body. Each of these identities, in isolation, places a person at the bottom of every index that matters—health, income, safety, dignity. Together, they don’t merely add up but compound, because a Dalit transperson in India is not just doubly marginalised but exponentially so, falling through every net the state has ever strung. The nets were never designed to hold someone standing at these particular intersections.

I am sure you too have met a J sometime—someone who told you something you weren’t ready to hear, whose trust you didn’t quite know what to do with. Please do think of them this month. And read the pieces we have already published for Dalit History Month (articles by Sambaiah Gundimeda, Sumit Baudh, and K. Kalyani; and interview with Shailaja Paik by Ayesha Minhaz) while we add many more. Also read our reporting on the Transgender Bill, which includes an insightful column by the senior legal reporter V. Venkatesan.

As always, write back with your comments.

We wish you a happy new year, happy Vishu, Bighu, Baisakhi, Puthandu, Poila Boisakh, wherever in India you are.

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor,Frontline

P.S. I recently learned that J’s mother passed away a few years ago, working with her body till the very end. J dropped out, never went to college, never held a job that gave more than to eke out a living. After his mother died, he moved away. Nobody seems to know where.