Shilpi Suneja

Outside Her Body

Vespa

Ché had come to them, the first one ever to possess a last name, a passport with a valid home address, and an anatomy that was unequivocally male. Vespa cataloged the dissimilarities. Entire nations were constructed along the idea of distinction. She wanted to record the before-Ché picture of her kholi, because she knew the after-Ché picture would be quite different. Their kholi was their whole world, the only sea-facing room this side of the Dharavi slums, home to Vespa and Steffi, two card-carrying eunuchs , neither of them with a police record.

Ché brought with him a backpack from which he produced a camera, the lens as long as Vespa’s arm, a pair of slippers so sturdy they could kill the fat wall lizard, and the smells of airports and cafés, places they’d never been to and would likely never go. He planted his things in the center of the room, making the kholi look small, the curtains frail, the walls dirty, like the room were a choppy sea around the rooted island of his things…