A GIFT OF GODDESS LAKSHMI

Manobi Bandopadhyay with Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey

This autobiography by Manobi Bandopadhyay is a frank account of what it is like to grow up feeling like a girl trapped in a boy’s body in small-town West Bengal. Bandopadhyay writes of the role played by progressive theatre, political groups and mentorship by professors during her student life, which provided her with the social space to come out as transgender. She went on to do a PhD in Bengali literature and is now the principal of a women’s college in Krishnanagar, a district town in West Bengal.

Penguin Random House India, 187 pages, Rs 399