Muskan was stifled by her biological family. Her chosen families, despite their transience, helped her grow
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On the October morning I met Muskan, she was wearing a cream-coloured saree. She had a red bindi on her forehead and her hair was tied in a bun. She had asked me to meet her in the Katara Hills neighbourhood of Bhopal—at the office of Ektara, a filmmaking collective whose most recent production featured her in a lead role. Muskan wanted to dress up in a saree for our meeting, but her brothers wouldn’t allow it in the house she shares with them. Muskan is a transgender woman and the Ektara office is her safe space— “a home by choice,” as she puts it.
Muskan was born into a Dalit family, which consigned her to a harsh place in Indian society. And her gender identity made her a target of hostility even within her own family. “I couldn't share my pain or express the turmoil within me even to my mother,” she said. Deprived of acceptance and support from the people supposedly closest to her, Muskan has spent most of her life seeking relationships in which she is truly understood. Her quest has been for a family, brought together not by blood, but by love.
Different people have filled that need for Muskan at different points of her life. Each of these chosen families eventually faded away, only to be replaced by others. But all of them left an indelible impact on her and helped her come into her own.
Chosen families or found families are a common phenomenon within the queer community. The lack of acceptance, care, and safety that LGBTQIA+ individuals often experience within hetero-normative family and societal structures pushes them to build alternative support systems with others like them. The term "chosen family" originates from anthropologist Kath Weston's groundbreaking book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Based on research conducted in San Francisco in the late 1980s, it explores how lovers and close friends ended up playing the roles of parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents in the lives of queer folks who had been ostracised by their biological families.
For transgender people in India, being rejected and ostracised by biological families is a norm. A 2018 study commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), revealed that just 2 percent of the trans people surveyed live with the families they were born into.
Around the age of 15, after subjecting her to years of physical abuse and transphobic slurs, Muskan’s biological brothers threw her out of her family’s house in Hoshangabad (now Narmadapuram) in Madhya Pradesh. Her brothers, she said, were also unwilling to bear the burden of taking care of their aging parents, so they accompanied Muskan when she relocated to Bhopal. She took up a job as a cook at a local restaurant while they did construction work. Muskan’s parents neither opposed her gender expression nor understood it. "Despite the lack of acceptance, my financial support for them minimised the significance of my gender identity," said Muskan who is 45 years old now.
Young Muskan found herself having to build a life from scratch in a new city, while struggling with questions around her gender identity, with no one around who could understand her or offer support. Then she met Prashant, who soon became “the love of her life.” They met through a friend, and Prashant, or Pintu as Muskan fondly refers to him, didn’t take too long to express his affection for her.
“I rejected him initially, but he would patiently wait for me every day near Chinar Park. Over time, I began to appreciate his persistent attention, and we started meeting more, developing a special bond,” she recounted.
Muskan, 20 at the time, was still grappling with her gender identity. She was far away from coming out of the closet — occasionally sporting her beloved high-heeled sandals was the closest she could come to expressing her desire to be femme. But it didn’t matter to Prashant. Muskan recalled him telling her, "I don't care about where you come from, what you are, or what you are not. I love you, and for me, you will always be my beloved." Muskan, who had always harboured fears that thinking of herself as a woman was abnormal or sinful, felt truly accepted and loved for the first time in her life.
When I asked Muskan what she liked the most about Prashant, she replied, "it's his love, just that," her eyes moist and her voice filled with affection. "My Pintu looked exactly like Akshay Kumar. He would fulfil all my wishes, we fought but also loved."
Nine years after they first met, Pintu killed himself. No one, including Muskan, knows why. Muskan had called him the previous day to ask if he was okay since he had been avoiding contact. “He said I’ll talk to you tomorrow, and then tomorrow never came…” recalled Muskan, her voice getting heavy as she spoke.
Muskan gradually distanced herself from the friends she shared with Pintu as she struggled to cope with his loss. “A lot of times chosen families tend to also be romantic partners and the loss of that partner sometimes also means losing the community that comes with that partner and that can be very challenging,” explained Prarthana, a Bangalore-based therapist who is queer.
Pavithra Prasad's essay, "In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief," characterises the loss of a member of a queer family as a "communal ache." The loss is felt both by individuals in the context of their direct relationships with the deceased person, as well as by a broader circle of kin. Unlike in the case of biological families, these relationships are rarely seen by society as valid or important. “There are already very limited avenues to express grief and since these families are not recognised, if a queer individual loses somebody from their chosen family, then the grieving also gets concealed,” Prarthana said. “There are no narratives for queer grief. And this leads to a lot of alienation because no narratives means no language [to articulate that grief].”
Pavithra, who is an associate professor at the California State University Northridge, defines queer grief not merely as a direct response to death but as a reaction to "the violence of relational endings." Queer people carry within them individual and shared experiences of marginalisation. The profound love and attentiveness required to find solace from that trauma, means queer kinship is often based on a sense of deep connection rooted in shared life experiences. So as Pavithra writes in her essay, “when we lose family as a queer person, for better or worse, we lose entire worlds that made us who we are.”
After she lost Pintu, Muskan lost the will to live. However, she worried that killing herself would reveal Pintu’s gender and sexual identity to the world. “Society would condemn us and Pintu would never receive the respect he deserved if I were to end my life with him,” she said. Muskan’s love for Pintu helped her survive his loss.
While Muskan was grieving the loss of Pintu, she lost her mother as well. “I had dual lives and both of them were collapsing at the same time. I was not ready for it,” recounted Muskan.
It was at this dire juncture that Muskan found family once again.
“Well built and tall like a movie hero,” as Muskan describes him, Amit was an outreach worker with Humsafar Trust, a queer rights organisation based in Mumbai. Amit declined to talk to me for this story, so we have changed his name to protect his identity. Amit and Muskan met at GTB Complex in New Market, which was well-known among Bhopal’s queers as a place to find “sometime partners,” as Muskan puts it. It was approaching 10 pm and Muskan was leaving for home when Amit approached her. She had noticed him eyeing her for a few days. “I too was looking for my ‘sometime partner’, so I talked to him,” she said.
Amit opened up new avenues of self-exploration for Muskan. Through him, she began frequenting Humsafar Trust’s office, where he introduced her to other queer people. “I never imagined a place that could accommodate and foster free thinking in terms of gender and sexuality,” she said. “You feel seen when you look at other people like you.” Shy and introverted Muskan, who had always been hesitant about being openly femme, began to change how she presented herself in small ways — she started growing her nails and painting them for the first time. She was finally beginning to embrace her gender identity and express it openly.
Amit's encouragement and support was central to Muskan’s growing comfort with her gender identity, she told me. She eventually became an outreach worker herself, joining another queer rights NGO called Naz Foundation. When the NGO conducted a storytelling competition focused on coming out narratives, Muskan won first place. “I spoke about how my chosen family, Amit, helped me come out of the closet,” she said.
But queer families, like all families, have their contradictions. While Amit was a pillar of strength for Muskan when it came to her navigating her queerness, he was also a source of immense pain in other ways. He had always been, in Muskan’s words, “a playboy,” and was romantically involved with multiple partners apart from her. His infidelity shattered Muskan.
By this point in their relationship, Amit and Muskan were living together. He had also become reliant on her financially, having quit his job at Humsafar Trust, she said. They had opened a small breakfast joint together, but the burden of earning fell disproportionately on Muskan, who also worked as a domestic worker to make ends meet, Muskan told me. “All he wanted from me was my money and that’s it.”
After five years together, Muskan gradually distanced herself from Amit. “I still cross paths with him but I no longer want to be ill-treated,” she said.
When the relationship with Amit ended, Muskan returned to living with her father. Her brothers had also moved to Bhopal by then, which meant that her home became an extremely transphobic environment.
Weston’s study of queer families devotes considerable attention to coming out as the act that often prompted separation from biological families and the quest for new forms of kinship. She suggests that a queer person’s coming out to their biological family reveals the “truth” not just about themselves, but also about their relationship with their family. “When I tell you "who I (really) am," I find out who you (really) are to me,” she wrote.
Having grown comfortable with her gender identity, Muskan detested the idea of having to deal with her brothers’ transphobic attitudes again. “They would often taunt me saying, we have a chakka (slur for trans woman) at our place,” she said. Muskan decided to seek a guru and formally join a hijra clan so that she could fully realise her dream of transitioning.
The guru-chela system is a common form of kinship among the hijra community in South Asia. The oldest member of the clan — who is typically also the one with the most social and financial clout — assumes the role of guru. Their chelas or disciples often give them a portion of their earnings in exchange for food, housing, and other forms of care and support. Since transgender people have historically faced exclusion and ostracisation in South Asian society, this is often the only form of kinship available to many of them.
Through mutual friends, Muskan reached out to Surayya Dadi who lived in the town of Garh-Mandla, about seven hours away from Bhopal. “She arrived in a car to take me with her,” Muskan recalled. That day remains one of her fondest memories.
Although she initially planned to merely visit for a week, Muskan soon ended up living at Surayya’s place. It was there that Muskan wore a saree for the first time. When the other chelas were away, the guru showered her with secret gifts — sarees, blouse pieces, and petticoats. “Dadi has special affection for Marathi hijras [like me],” said Muskan, beaming with pride. “Her house is still the warmest place for me.”
As Muskan transitioned more and more towards her preferred gender expression — wearing sarees, jewellery, and makeup — her expenses increased considerably. Surayya and her chelas collected alms to support themselves and Muskan began to find this income insufficient to meet her needs.
And while she loved Surayya, Muskan was experiencing friction with the other chelas. Due to her decision not to undergo gender affirmation surgery, she was frequently derided as "non-trans" by her peers. Tensions escalated, and ultimately, Muskan decided to leave Surayya's place.
On Diwali of 2016, Muskan left Surayya’s house and came back to Bhopal and started living with her father and brothers again. She settled on an uncomfortable compromise with her brothers — she was free to do as she wanted out in the world, as long as she suppressed her gender identity at home and in its vicinity.
“Dadi still keeps calling me back,” said Muskan, playing a video she had just received from Surayya. The old woman in it is describing her new 70-inch tv. “This is her way of luring me,” Muskan said wistfully.
On the surface, it may seem like the dissolving of her chosen families left Muskan back at square one each time. Indeed, after returning to Bhopal from Surayya’s place, she was once again on a desperate quest for work and people who could offer her care and support.
But despite their flaws, all of her chosen families had contributed to her growth. Pintu had shown her unquestioning love for the first time in her life, Amit provided access to a world that helped her accept her identity, and Surayya had helped her transition and become part of a community. Muskan emerged from each of her chosen families strengthened by her experience of being a part of them.
This strength was soon called upon when Muskan was fired from a job as a domestic worker after her employer discovered that she was Dalit, Muskan told me. It wasn’t the first time Muskan was experiencing caste discrimination, but this time she had a network of people who helped her navigate it. “I shared the incident with some of my friends and they tried to find me new jobs,” she said. Many of these friendships came to be through Surayya. Another steadfast source of support in her life is Moni, a fellow transgender woman whom she met through her work at Naz Foundation. Moni is Muskan’s “best friend” who is always “just a call away.” Life has never been easy for Muskan, but she believes that the people she has met along the way have made it a lot more livable.
Muskan’s search for work and companionship in Bhopal eventually brought her to Ektara Collective. The production house was looking for a transgender woman to act in their then-upcoming project Ek Jagah Apni Bhi. The film is about two trans women trying to find a home in Bhopal. Muskan auditioned for the role, but as she described it, “they actually chose me as their family.”
Rinchin, the director of the film who is also a queer woman in her 40s, has built her chosen family through filmmaking. “You need a team to make a film. We met Muskan through that process, and we have all come together to strengthen this family,” Rinchin told me.
For Rinchin, the search for a family is as much about a quest for one’s emotional core as it is about material nurturing. Muskan found both in Rinchin and Ektara. Although Muskan is older, Rinchin assumed the role of the elder sister. Under her tutelage, Muskan blossomed — the Ektara office became like home, the shooting process encouraged her to wear sarees confidently in public, and once the film was finished, she began to travel to different states in India and even outside the country for screenings. Rinchin’s support was ever-present throughout. “She only wants to see me do well in life” Muskan said.
Despite Muskan’s estrangement from her biological family and her lifelong struggles to find other people she feels more at home with, legally, she is still tied to the circumstances of her birth. Whenever she travels for screenings of her film, she is forced to use her deadname since that is what her ID cards mention. “I have made an identity for myself now, should I not have a card with my own name?,” she asked. Muskan is currently in the process of getting her ID cards changed.
Legal structures in India define family strictly as biological relations or those enabled by marriage. Queer folks like Muskan who are seeking to build chosen families are forced to reconcile with the fact that their families will always remain “unofficial.” Meanwhile, the official strings still bind them to families that have rejected them — parents’ names on passports and PAN cards, next of kin nominees on pension schemes, spouse’s names on joint insurance plans. And since these relationships are often abusive or otherwise unreliable, queer folks find themselves excluded from using systems and institutions that rely on them. They mostly exist in the unofficial world, like their chosen families. “While the discussions over same sex marriage is necessary, there is also a need to strengthen and articulate discourse around families and partnerships that are not tied by blood and aren’t romantic as well,” said Rinchin.
Ultimately, chosen families — often born out of dire necessity — are as much a creation of the heteronormative world as they are of queer folks. “Chosen families have to come together as our own families abandon us,” said Muskan.
As Muskan and I chatted at the office of Ektara Collective, evening descended upon us. Rinchin was in another room, listening to music. With the interview concluded, Muskan hurried to the kitchen to see what had been made for dinner. Rinchin’s voice echoed from the other room, “Today, you’ll have to manage with lauki ki sabzi (bottle gourd curry). If you had told me earlier, I might have prepared something to your liking.” Muskan responded with a joyful nod as she made her plate.
This story was produced in collaboration with Suno India, a multi-lingual podcast platform covering underreported stories in India. Listen to the podcast here.
On the October morning I met Muskan, she was wearing a cream-coloured saree. She had a red bindi on her forehead and her hair was tied in a bun. She had asked me to meet her in the Katara Hills neighbourhood of Bhopal—at the office of Ektara, a filmmaking collective whose most recent production featured her in a lead role. Muskan wanted to dress up in a saree for our meeting, but her brothers wouldn’t allow it in the house she shares with them. Muskan is a transgender woman and the Ektara office is her safe space— “a home by choice,” as she puts it.
Muskan was born into a Dalit family, which consigned her to a harsh place in Indian society. And her gender identity made her a target of hostility even within her own family. “I couldn't share my pain or express the turmoil within me even to my mother,” she said. Deprived of acceptance and support from the people supposedly closest to her, Muskan has spent most of her life seeking relationships in which she is truly understood. Her quest has been for a family, brought together not by blood, but by love.
Different people have filled that need for Muskan at different points of her life. Each of these chosen families eventually faded away, only to be replaced by others. But all of them left an indelible impact on her and helped her come into her own.
Chosen families or found families are a common phenomenon within the queer community. The lack of acceptance, care, and safety that LGBTQIA+ individuals often experience within hetero-normative family and societal structures pushes them to build alternative support systems with others like them. The term "chosen family" originates from anthropologist Kath Weston's groundbreaking book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Based on research conducted in San Francisco in the late 1980s, it explores how lovers and close friends ended up playing the roles of parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents in the lives of queer folks who had been ostracised by their biological families.
For transgender people in India, being rejected and ostracised by biological families is a norm. A 2018 study commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), revealed that just 2 percent of the trans people surveyed live with the families they were born into.
Around the age of 15, after subjecting her to years of physical abuse and transphobic slurs, Muskan’s biological brothers threw her out of her family’s house in Hoshangabad (now Narmadapuram) in Madhya Pradesh. Her brothers, she said, were also unwilling to bear the burden of taking care of their aging parents, so they accompanied Muskan when she relocated to Bhopal. She took up a job as a cook at a local restaurant while they did construction work. Muskan’s parents neither opposed her gender expression nor understood it. "Despite the lack of acceptance, my financial support for them minimised the significance of my gender identity," said Muskan who is 45 years old now.
Young Muskan found herself having to build a life from scratch in a new city, while struggling with questions around her gender identity, with no one around who could understand her or offer support. Then she met Prashant, who soon became “the love of her life.” They met through a friend, and Prashant, or Pintu as Muskan fondly refers to him, didn’t take too long to express his affection for her.
“I rejected him initially, but he would patiently wait for me every day near Chinar Park. Over time, I began to appreciate his persistent attention, and we started meeting more, developing a special bond,” she recounted.
Muskan, 20 at the time, was still grappling with her gender identity. She was far away from coming out of the closet — occasionally sporting her beloved high-heeled sandals was the closest she could come to expressing her desire to be femme. But it didn’t matter to Prashant. Muskan recalled him telling her, "I don't care about where you come from, what you are, or what you are not. I love you, and for me, you will always be my beloved." Muskan, who had always harboured fears that thinking of herself as a woman was abnormal or sinful, felt truly accepted and loved for the first time in her life.
When I asked Muskan what she liked the most about Prashant, she replied, "it's his love, just that," her eyes moist and her voice filled with affection. "My Pintu looked exactly like Akshay Kumar. He would fulfil all my wishes, we fought but also loved."
Nine years after they first met, Pintu killed himself. No one, including Muskan, knows why. Muskan had called him the previous day to ask if he was okay since he had been avoiding contact. “He said I’ll talk to you tomorrow, and then tomorrow never came…” recalled Muskan, her voice getting heavy as she spoke.
Muskan gradually distanced herself from the friends she shared with Pintu as she struggled to cope with his loss. “A lot of times chosen families tend to also be romantic partners and the loss of that partner sometimes also means losing the community that comes with that partner and that can be very challenging,” explained Prarthana, a Bangalore-based therapist who is queer.
Pavithra Prasad's essay, "In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief," characterises the loss of a member of a queer family as a "communal ache." The loss is felt both by individuals in the context of their direct relationships with the deceased person, as well as by a broader circle of kin. Unlike in the case of biological families, these relationships are rarely seen by society as valid or important. “There are already very limited avenues to express grief and since these families are not recognised, if a queer individual loses somebody from their chosen family, then the grieving also gets concealed,” Prarthana said. “There are no narratives for queer grief. And this leads to a lot of alienation because no narratives means no language [to articulate that grief].”
Pavithra, who is an associate professor at the California State University Northridge, defines queer grief not merely as a direct response to death but as a reaction to "the violence of relational endings." Queer people carry within them individual and shared experiences of marginalisation. The profound love and attentiveness required to find solace from that trauma, means queer kinship is often based on a sense of deep connection rooted in shared life experiences. So as Pavithra writes in her essay, “when we lose family as a queer person, for better or worse, we lose entire worlds that made us who we are.”
After she lost Pintu, Muskan lost the will to live. However, she worried that killing herself would reveal Pintu’s gender and sexual identity to the world. “Society would condemn us and Pintu would never receive the respect he deserved if I were to end my life with him,” she said. Muskan’s love for Pintu helped her survive his loss.
While Muskan was grieving the loss of Pintu, she lost her mother as well. “I had dual lives and both of them were collapsing at the same time. I was not ready for it,” recounted Muskan.
It was at this dire juncture that Muskan found family once again.
“Well built and tall like a movie hero,” as Muskan describes him, Amit was an outreach worker with Humsafar Trust, a queer rights organisation based in Mumbai. Amit declined to talk to me for this story, so we have changed his name to protect his identity. Amit and Muskan met at GTB Complex in New Market, which was well-known among Bhopal’s queers as a place to find “sometime partners,” as Muskan puts it. It was approaching 10 pm and Muskan was leaving for home when Amit approached her. She had noticed him eyeing her for a few days. “I too was looking for my ‘sometime partner’, so I talked to him,” she said.
Amit opened up new avenues of self-exploration for Muskan. Through him, she began frequenting Humsafar Trust’s office, where he introduced her to other queer people. “I never imagined a place that could accommodate and foster free thinking in terms of gender and sexuality,” she said. “You feel seen when you look at other people like you.” Shy and introverted Muskan, who had always been hesitant about being openly femme, began to change how she presented herself in small ways — she started growing her nails and painting them for the first time. She was finally beginning to embrace her gender identity and express it openly.
Amit's encouragement and support was central to Muskan’s growing comfort with her gender identity, she told me. She eventually became an outreach worker herself, joining another queer rights NGO called Naz Foundation. When the NGO conducted a storytelling competition focused on coming out narratives, Muskan won first place. “I spoke about how my chosen family, Amit, helped me come out of the closet,” she said.
But queer families, like all families, have their contradictions. While Amit was a pillar of strength for Muskan when it came to her navigating her queerness, he was also a source of immense pain in other ways. He had always been, in Muskan’s words, “a playboy,” and was romantically involved with multiple partners apart from her. His infidelity shattered Muskan.
By this point in their relationship, Amit and Muskan were living together. He had also become reliant on her financially, having quit his job at Humsafar Trust, she said. They had opened a small breakfast joint together, but the burden of earning fell disproportionately on Muskan, who also worked as a domestic worker to make ends meet, Muskan told me. “All he wanted from me was my money and that’s it.”
After five years together, Muskan gradually distanced herself from Amit. “I still cross paths with him but I no longer want to be ill-treated,” she said.
When the relationship with Amit ended, Muskan returned to living with her father. Her brothers had also moved to Bhopal by then, which meant that her home became an extremely transphobic environment.
Weston’s study of queer families devotes considerable attention to coming out as the act that often prompted separation from biological families and the quest for new forms of kinship. She suggests that a queer person’s coming out to their biological family reveals the “truth” not just about themselves, but also about their relationship with their family. “When I tell you "who I (really) am," I find out who you (really) are to me,” she wrote.
Having grown comfortable with her gender identity, Muskan detested the idea of having to deal with her brothers’ transphobic attitudes again. “They would often taunt me saying, we have a chakka (slur for trans woman) at our place,” she said. Muskan decided to seek a guru and formally join a hijra clan so that she could fully realise her dream of transitioning.
The guru-chela system is a common form of kinship among the hijra community in South Asia. The oldest member of the clan — who is typically also the one with the most social and financial clout — assumes the role of guru. Their chelas or disciples often give them a portion of their earnings in exchange for food, housing, and other forms of care and support. Since transgender people have historically faced exclusion and ostracisation in South Asian society, this is often the only form of kinship available to many of them.
Through mutual friends, Muskan reached out to Surayya Dadi who lived in the town of Garh-Mandla, about seven hours away from Bhopal. “She arrived in a car to take me with her,” Muskan recalled. That day remains one of her fondest memories.
Although she initially planned to merely visit for a week, Muskan soon ended up living at Surayya’s place. It was there that Muskan wore a saree for the first time. When the other chelas were away, the guru showered her with secret gifts — sarees, blouse pieces, and petticoats. “Dadi has special affection for Marathi hijras [like me],” said Muskan, beaming with pride. “Her house is still the warmest place for me.”
As Muskan transitioned more and more towards her preferred gender expression — wearing sarees, jewellery, and makeup — her expenses increased considerably. Surayya and her chelas collected alms to support themselves and Muskan began to find this income insufficient to meet her needs.
And while she loved Surayya, Muskan was experiencing friction with the other chelas. Due to her decision not to undergo gender affirmation surgery, she was frequently derided as "non-trans" by her peers. Tensions escalated, and ultimately, Muskan decided to leave Surayya's place.
On Diwali of 2016, Muskan left Surayya’s house and came back to Bhopal and started living with her father and brothers again. She settled on an uncomfortable compromise with her brothers — she was free to do as she wanted out in the world, as long as she suppressed her gender identity at home and in its vicinity.
“Dadi still keeps calling me back,” said Muskan, playing a video she had just received from Surayya. The old woman in it is describing her new 70-inch tv. “This is her way of luring me,” Muskan said wistfully.
On the surface, it may seem like the dissolving of her chosen families left Muskan back at square one each time. Indeed, after returning to Bhopal from Surayya’s place, she was once again on a desperate quest for work and people who could offer her care and support.
But despite their flaws, all of her chosen families had contributed to her growth. Pintu had shown her unquestioning love for the first time in her life, Amit provided access to a world that helped her accept her identity, and Surayya had helped her transition and become part of a community. Muskan emerged from each of her chosen families strengthened by her experience of being a part of them.
This strength was soon called upon when Muskan was fired from a job as a domestic worker after her employer discovered that she was Dalit, Muskan told me. It wasn’t the first time Muskan was experiencing caste discrimination, but this time she had a network of people who helped her navigate it. “I shared the incident with some of my friends and they tried to find me new jobs,” she said. Many of these friendships came to be through Surayya. Another steadfast source of support in her life is Moni, a fellow transgender woman whom she met through her work at Naz Foundation. Moni is Muskan’s “best friend” who is always “just a call away.” Life has never been easy for Muskan, but she believes that the people she has met along the way have made it a lot more livable.
Muskan’s search for work and companionship in Bhopal eventually brought her to Ektara Collective. The production house was looking for a transgender woman to act in their then-upcoming project Ek Jagah Apni Bhi. The film is about two trans women trying to find a home in Bhopal. Muskan auditioned for the role, but as she described it, “they actually chose me as their family.”
Rinchin, the director of the film who is also a queer woman in her 40s, has built her chosen family through filmmaking. “You need a team to make a film. We met Muskan through that process, and we have all come together to strengthen this family,” Rinchin told me.
For Rinchin, the search for a family is as much about a quest for one’s emotional core as it is about material nurturing. Muskan found both in Rinchin and Ektara. Although Muskan is older, Rinchin assumed the role of the elder sister. Under her tutelage, Muskan blossomed — the Ektara office became like home, the shooting process encouraged her to wear sarees confidently in public, and once the film was finished, she began to travel to different states in India and even outside the country for screenings. Rinchin’s support was ever-present throughout. “She only wants to see me do well in life” Muskan said.
Despite Muskan’s estrangement from her biological family and her lifelong struggles to find other people she feels more at home with, legally, she is still tied to the circumstances of her birth. Whenever she travels for screenings of her film, she is forced to use her deadname since that is what her ID cards mention. “I have made an identity for myself now, should I not have a card with my own name?,” she asked. Muskan is currently in the process of getting her ID cards changed.
Legal structures in India define family strictly as biological relations or those enabled by marriage. Queer folks like Muskan who are seeking to build chosen families are forced to reconcile with the fact that their families will always remain “unofficial.” Meanwhile, the official strings still bind them to families that have rejected them — parents’ names on passports and PAN cards, next of kin nominees on pension schemes, spouse’s names on joint insurance plans. And since these relationships are often abusive or otherwise unreliable, queer folks find themselves excluded from using systems and institutions that rely on them. They mostly exist in the unofficial world, like their chosen families. “While the discussions over same sex marriage is necessary, there is also a need to strengthen and articulate discourse around families and partnerships that are not tied by blood and aren’t romantic as well,” said Rinchin.
Ultimately, chosen families — often born out of dire necessity — are as much a creation of the heteronormative world as they are of queer folks. “Chosen families have to come together as our own families abandon us,” said Muskan.
As Muskan and I chatted at the office of Ektara Collective, evening descended upon us. Rinchin was in another room, listening to music. With the interview concluded, Muskan hurried to the kitchen to see what had been made for dinner. Rinchin’s voice echoed from the other room, “Today, you’ll have to manage with lauki ki sabzi (bottle gourd curry). If you had told me earlier, I might have prepared something to your liking.” Muskan responded with a joyful nod as she made her plate.
This story was produced in collaboration with Suno India, a multi-lingual podcast platform covering underreported stories in India. Listen to the podcast here.
Sejal Patel (they/them), originally from Sirali, Madhya Pradesh, is an independent journalist and writer at Khabar Lahariya. Apart from micro-analysing bollywood masala films, they also write about climate, cities, labour, and people's movements.
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Visvak (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Goa.
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a journalist, writer, editor and strategist who splits her time between Bombay and Bangalore. She’s worked in culture, health, gender and science across publications over the last 10 years.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
