The Man Behind the Tinted Glass

I watched Dorothy recently, and it took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting: back to my childhood, to a printing press opposite my father’s shop, and to a man whose story I had never quite understood.

I must have been in fifth or sixth grade when I first noticed how transgender people were treated in our neighborhood. What I remember most is that one man treated them differently from everyone else.

Let me take you back.

Opposite our house, one of my father’s friends ran a printing press. It occupied a long room divided into three sections. The printing machine sat at the far end, where pamphlets, visiting cards and other small-business stationery were produced. The middle section was for sorting and packing. At the front, the owner sat, overseeing a business that seemed to run almost on autopilot.

He was a respectable man by the neighborhood’s standards, considered fairly wealthy for the locality. He had inherited the property and carried himself with a certain style. Tall, dark and handsome, he was the sort of person you noticed.

Our neighborhood was neither a slum nor particularly developed. It was a laid-back place where small businesses depended on one another. The same tea shop served everyone. The same tyre puncture repairman kept everyone’s vehicles moving. People contributed to the local Amman temple celebrations, and business owners knew one another, even if their families didn’t necessarily socialize.

My father ran a grocery business across the road. It was a relatively upscale operation for the area, selling rice, lentils, spices and other provisions. A large house had been adapted for the business, with a few rooms for the family and considerably more space for storage, packing and retail.

My father and the printing press owner interacted whenever business required it. But there was an unspoken boundary between our families.

I had been told not to go to the uncle’s shop.

As a child, I filled in the blanks with my own assumptions. I wondered whether he was a womanizer. I had no evidence for this. I had never seen anything that would justify the suspicion. It was simply the explanation my young mind came up with for the distance our family maintained from him.

Then, one day, I noticed a group of transgender people visiting the neighborhood’s shops.

I was frightened of them. I watched from a distance, sitting in the retail section of our business, and wanted to run inside.

My father stopped me.

“Go slowly,” he said. “They won’t come here just yet.”

I looked at him, confused.

“They’ll go to the printing press first. They’ll spend some time there. You don’t have to rush.”

And that was exactly what happened.

Shop after shop, the group moved through the neighborhood. Most people didn’t let them inside. But the uncle did.

I later overheard my parents discussing what happened behind those tinted-glass doors.

Apparently, the visitors would enter the press, dance in front of him, and perform a ritual for his business. There was dancing, and, according to the account I overheard, some of them would expose themselves. They would then perform a puja, wishing prosperity for his business, before leaving.

The press had a tinted-glass facade and an aluminium-framed entrance. Whatever happened inside remained largely hidden from those outside.

As a child, I had no way of knowing what to make of any of this.

Was he seeking cheap thrills? Was there something transactional about the arrangement? Was he simply being kind to people whom everyone else turned away? Was this his way of acknowledging their place in a society that otherwise preferred to keep them at a distance?

Perhaps it was some combination of these things. Perhaps none of my explanations comes close to the truth.

I never asked him. I never knew him well enough to understand his motivations. And now, looking back after all these years, I realize how easily we construct stories about people from fragments of information, inherited assumptions and things we don’t fully understand.

What I find interesting is that my opinion of him today is not negative.

I don’t know whether he was progressive, empathetic, indulgent or simply following a local custom. I don’t want to turn him into a hero without evidence, either. But I do remember that, in a neighborhood where most people kept their doors closed to these visitors, he opened his.

I wonder what that meant to them.

And I wonder what it meant to him.

When cinema reaches into memory

This is what Dorothy brought back to me: not just a childhood incident, but a person I had filed away in my memory without ever really understanding him.

That’s one of the things I love about cinema. A film doesn’t always give you new information. Sometimes, it changes the way you look at something you already know.

And the filmmaking in Dorothy felt almost unnervingly precise to me.

It was as if the director were sitting inside my prefrontal cortex, deciding which visual should reach which part of my brain, and when. Every image seemed calibrated to trigger a particular emotion. The experience felt less like watching a story unfold and more like someone carefully conducting my emotional responses.

I could feel the machinery of cinema working, and yet I was completely immersed in it.

Long after the film ended, I found myself thinking about a man behind a tinted-glass door in a small Indian neighborhood, sometime in my childhood.

I still don’t know what motivated him.

Perhaps I never will.

But I’m grateful to the film for making me look again.