From Somnath to Manabi

PiyasreeDasgupta
Posted: Sun Sep 18 2011, 03:46 hrs New Delhi:

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/from-somnath-to-manabi/848084/0

Manabi banerjee's room greets you like a palette tossed carelessly aside, its colours flowing and drying into each other. Its walls, an eroded yellow, have known struggle. Banerjee settles herself on the four-poster bed and asks testily, "What do you want to know? Every detail of my love life?" Cynicism comes to Banerjee, in her late 40s, a professor of Bengali literature at a college in Jhargram, West Bengal, as naturally as breathing. She spews it at the world. Born Somnath, the youngest son in a middle-class family in Naihati (North 24 Parganas district), she underwent a sex-change operation in 2003.

"There was a time when I used to ask myself, what is wrong with me? Why is it that every bone in my body cries out to be a woman?" she asks. Decades later, Banerjee gathered the courage to construct a body that her spirit agreed with.