She : Ekla Cholo Re ~ Review

The society fears what it cannot comprehend, it shuns those who do not conform to its archaic norms. She is the story of a person, for whom identity crisis has been a reality from childhood. Since Kusum did not fall into the categories of male or female, the society includng her own family has always been a bane on her.
She is the story of a woman's spirit held captive by a man's body and the struggle of the person due to this mismatch.

The story begins with the narrator offering a lift to Kusum. The journey moves forward and Kusum feeling a strange kinship with the narrator, tells her life sstory in detail; how as a little boy he had found love but how the society decided he could not love someone from the same gender and time separated them. When left to face the world alone, how she had adopted Tagore's poem Ekla Cholo Re as inspiration and moved forward on her path undeterred. She details about her struggles and talks of an author whose works and motivational books keep her going in such troubled times. By the time they reach their destination, the narrator too falls in love with her.

Contrary to what people believe, not all of them are sex workers, they are just normal people like us who struggle to make ends meet. They too are humans made of flesh and bones, they too have emotions and feelings.

The book is very small and is a quick read. It leaves you thinking about what we as a society are doing about the section of people who are not confined in the boundaries we have set for them.