Love, No Matter What by Komal Ahuja gives you a peep into the world of the transgenders and the intersex and describes the suffering of a mother and her child to continue to grow her child and is a story of misunderstandings, mental closures, bigotry and misinformation with the novel might not seem just a story, but like a motion picture.
Transsexualism is not a taboo subject which invades the pages of newspapers, television debates, the fantasies of the Indians in search of exoticism in the house. It either speaks of trans male, or transvestites, ignoring that the first term is a mistake, and the second is considered an insult.
Set in Rajasthan, Naina and Manish are waiting for their second baby as eagerly as Khushi waits for her sibling but their existence takes an out of the blue turn when Naina gives birth to an intersex child. Manish doesn't make out how to handle the circumstances, with his family worries more for the world than the child, who Naina names Devi and has to fight the world and give her child the living she really deserves.
The book also, in fact, tells of a love story, of an adoption and the relationship that is created between three people linked by a bond called the family. The title is enough to clarify that the novel is about respect for their own identity and is full of sweetness as well as reality, a reality in which it happens as happened in this case the rest of their that the problem is not homosexuality but homophobia.
Written with a much more mature style, the result is a compelling book, almost the stereotype of a young love story, full of sentimental outbursts and big plans for life. The author want to insist once again on a lacerating inner pain exposed without any restraint, and in which the feeling of dignity is now subjected to the despair of a love no longer paid.
The book helps to put some order in the confused magma of fears, prejudices and ignorance to photograph the situation today of transiting people, beings in the making, of an ever-changing style. As if to ask people to reveal the author would in turn agree to extend into the frame and wait for the self-timer.
The book in the first person realizes a variety of lifestyles, concepts, self perceptions and representations, which invariably lead us to question ourselves about ourselves, about what it means to be, for us, man or woman, and our conception of the world, culturally divided into "male" and "female."
The result is a book that does not provide pre-digested answers, but leaves the tough convictions. The pleasantness of the story lies in the realism and good-naturedness in the world that the protagonists of the story has preserved, in spite of difficult experiences for having conducted the path of rediscovery of self, failing to make words come out even where the protagonist had no intention of returning with the memory, because it was too heartbreaking to remember.
The rediscovery of even the most painful parts, much of the spirit of adventure, there is the urge to survive for the door to escape through very different experiences. These compromises that arouse attention and flowing into a newfound modernity, where past and present are not as linearly graded and there appear with the load of the warning and the promise.
Publisher: Srishti Publishers ○ Published: January 2016 ○ ISBN-13: 9789382665618 ○ Language: English ○ Binding: Paperback ○ Pages: 144
