This story was first published by Queerbeat, you can read the original here.§On some days, by the time I got home from school, their afternoon ritual had already begun.My grandmother, Shipra, and her closest friend, Nalini,* sat angled towards each other in a way that seemed intentional, even when neither was speaking. Shipra, whom I called Dimma, Bengali for maternal grandmother, would be reading. Nalini usually held a book as well, but I always suspected this was more to please Shipra than out of genuine interest. Her attention always wandered back to the woman beside her. The relationship between these two 60-something-year-old women didn’t look like anything I’d seen around me. Or anything I’d seen on TV. But in that high-ceilinged, three-storey house in a twisty North Kolkata bylane, it had become such a fixture that no one thought to question it.I learned from my mother that after Shipra’s husband died in 1991, seven years before I was born, the rhythms of the house had quietly reorganised themselves around Nalini’s visits. On most days, she travelled from her home, about seven kilometres away, to sit with Shipra in the bedroom my Dimma had once shared with her seldom-mentioned husband. I often hovered near the doorway, watching the two women in silence.They rarely touched. Shipra disliked physical affection and was open about it. At most, their knees brushed by accident, or they stood side by side when a photograph required it. Yet there was something about the glances they exchanged that seemed to fill the room. Nalini’s face softened whenever she looked at Shipra, and the silences between them never felt empty.Even as a child, I knew that Nalini was suffering in ways the adults around me struggled to explain. She repeatedly attempted to die by suicide, episodes that she referred to as her “suffocating spells.” And after each one, the connection between the two women seemed to grow stronger. What had once been monthly visits became weekly, and by the time I was around 13, they had developed into a near-daily ritual. (That was also the time I had begun taking “Am I gay?” quizzes online.)Nalini would walk straight into Shipra’s room and settle into her designated spot on the left side of the bed. There, close to my grandmother, it seemed like her breathing steadied and she found some measure of peace.One afternoon, I came home upset after getting into trouble at school. My teachers had cornered me and accused me of “going around” with boys. As I sat around sulking, my Dimma, who was a stickler for discipline and often irritable when she didn’t get her way, ordered me to stop lounging in my dirty uniform and go take a shower.“Uff, ektu jirote dao na! [Ugh, I need some space!]” I shot back sharply, irritated by her nagging me without consideration for my visibly disturbed emotional state. It was the sort of situation that could’ve easily escalated into a fight.But before Shipra could react, Nalini cut in. “Come sit with me, bhai [brother], you’ll feel better,” she said to her softly. It was not uncommon for women in Bengal to use the term bhai to refer to close friends. But Nalini seemed to reserve it for Shipra in a way that felt particularly intimate.Dimma was more agitated than usual that day. She had been pacing around, impatiently issuing orders to the house help before she turned her attention to me. But something in Nalini’s gentle tone had calmed her bhai down. The tension in the air dissolved almost instantly, and I seized the opportunity to run upstairs.I was struck by the familiarity with which Nalini spoke to Shipra. There was something very intimate, almost domestic about the tones they used with each other.That was the first time I really wondered about their bond, tried to make sense of the invisible thread that held them together. Were they friends? Companions? Romantic partners? In some ways, they seemed all of those things at once. And in others, none of those labels seemed to fit.Before we had the languageShipra and Nalini first met in the early 1940s as primary school students in Kolkata. From the stories Shipra told me about her childhood, it seemed she stood out from a young age. She boasted of her brisk gait and firm voice, of how she carried herself with a confidence so unusual that people couldn’t help but notice. Nalini often recalled in the presence of both her and Shipra’s children that it was this “boyish” confidence that had first drawn her to Shipra. Nalini brought this up so often that it became rather conspicuous, Mama (Bengali for maternal uncle, which is how I refer to Nalini’s younger son) and my mother told me.As the games captain, Shipra said she had a reputation for being somewhat intimidating. She had also informally discarded the name her parents had given her and chosen her own. It is that name I use for her in this retelling: Shipra.Captain Shipra, as she was known, liked showing off her biceps, triceps, and shoulders to the other girls at school, pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a girl at the time. Emotionally, too, she recalled identifying closely with her brothers and resenting many of the restrictions placed on the women in her family.Shipra never seemed fixed in her relationship with her gender. She and her cousins delighted in dressing up for impromptu photo shoots at family gatherings. In some of these photos, she appears conventionally feminine, draped in saris and striking poses that were considered fashionable in the 1950s and ’60s, her index finger resting against her cheek. In other photos, she presents as a man, dressed in her lawyer father’s suits, oversized on her frame and carrying a cane that had once belonged to her grandfather.Yet the way she occupied space, in those photos, as in real life, often felt notably genderless. Her shoulders were always too wide in feminine outfits and too scrunched inward in masculine ones. She never smiled. She wanted to remain stoic and, in her words, “confident,” no matter how she presented.Nalini, by contrast, was unmistakably feminine. In the black-and-white photographs preserved in Shipra’s albums, she wears carefully draped georgette saris and oversized sunglasses that give her the look of a glamorous 1960s style icon—Sharmila Tagore’s winged eyeliner included. As both Mama and my mother told me, she had always been somewhat reclusive. Since her childhood, she had struggled with a tendency to harm herself, they said.In photographs with her husband, Nalini often appears withdrawn. Her body angles away from him, as if she were uncertain about where to place herself. Yet when she posed next to Shipra, she always seemed to lean in, naturally. Photographs of Shipra with her own husband, meanwhile, are scarce. He fancied himself an artist and often photographed her, alone or with her children in the frame. There are no surviving photographs of the two of them alone after their wedding. But Shipra carefully preserved the ones of herself with Nalini.As I looked through those albums recently, I found myself wondering whether the word “friendship” was too small and the language of romance too modern for what they shared. Looking back, it seems they had found each other long before the people around them had the vocabulary to label their relationship.Business as usualFor both Nalini and Shipra, age brought with it the expected markers of respectable womanhood: marriage, children, and the acceptance of lives that had been chosen for them. Going by the recollections of my mother and Mama, they never openly rebelled against their heterosexual marriages. They did what their society expected of them.Shipra, however, often said that she had never really wanted to get married. What she actually wanted was distance from her birth family, and in the Bengal of her youth, marriage was the only escape route available to her.But given her ambivalence to the institution, Dimma’s relationship with her husband was not the kind most people imagine when they think of marriage. While there was companionship, desire was scant, something both her daughters noted. She spoke openly to them about having little interest in sex. She explained that she had primarily seen it as a means to conceive children and to keep her husband happy in the early days of their marriage. Four years on, they stopped being physically intimate. This was also around the time my mother was born.“There was no reason left for us to do this filthy thing,” Shipra reportedly said on several occasions, visibly disgusted. Regardless, there was affection, perhaps even attachment, between the two of them. Her husband appeared content with the arrangement.The strains within Nalini’s marriage were harder to miss. Over the years, her sons watched the distance between their parents widen, eventually followed by their mother’s attempts to die by suicide. Nalini often found herself isolated, by the expectations placed upon women, by disappointments she struggled to articulate, and by a husband who, though dutiful in many ways, never seemed to become the friend and confidante she longed for. As Nalini’s husband grew older, he became increasingly reclusive and showed little to no interest in their marriage. To date, he refuses to engage with anyone beyond bare-minimum pleasantries, instead choosing to confine himself to his room for the most part, as he did during his marriage.Shipra visited Nalini in the hospital after each of her suicidal episodes. She brought meals and sat beside her through recoveries that became painfully familiar to both families. In the early years, she had been friendly with Nalini’s husband. Their lives naturally overlapped, and they often occupied the same spaces. But as the years went by and Nalini’s unhappiness deepened, Shipra’s disapproval of him became palpable.Nalini’s unhappiness in her marriage likely stemmed from her husband’s personality. But there were signs that his gender may have played a role too. Mama recalled that she was often disgusted by the hypermasculine male bodies she encountered in films and magazines, the oiled torsos and exaggerated displays of machismo that others found commonplace.“She somehow had nothing negative to say about Shipra’s muscles, though!” I once heard Mama tell his daughter with a laugh after she came home from a Pride parade.My mother, my aunt, Mama, and I had all heard Nalini speak with admiration about Shipra’s physique from her youth. Nalini recalled that during what she referred to as the “Captain Shipra” days, when Shipra’s fitted dresses accentuated the muscles she took such pride in, she was almost overwhelmed by the sight. With a candour that surprises me now, she often spoke of how Shipra’s figure-hugging outfits impressed many of the other girls but confessed that they held a far greater power over her than anyone else.Nalini said it without embarrassment, and no one listening seemed to think much of it at the time. Looking back, however, I find myself lingering on the ease with which she spoke about Shipra’s body, as she never did when the conversation turned to men.For decades, however, none of these peculiarities altered the outward shape of their lives. They remained wives and mothers, bound to their heterosexual marriages. They attended weddings, raised children, managed households, and fulfilled the obligations expected of respectable Bengali women.Members of the LGBTQIA+ community participate in the annual rainbow pride march, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu on June 28, 2026. Photo: PTI/R Senthilkumar.But through it all, Nalini and Shipra spoke nearly every day. After late-night calls became free under a BSNL plan around 2015, I remember them constantly being on the phone with each other after dark. Nalini and her husband occupied separate bedrooms by then, so she had total privacy. She talked about whatever thoughts happened to occupy her mind. I often saw Shipra listening to Nalini’s monologues on speakerphone, even during Kolkata’s frequent power cuts, when the heat left her uncomfortable and impatient.“Why do you call so much?” Shipra complained on one such evening in the blunt manner that was so characteristic of her. I overheard the exchange and froze, half expecting a quarrel. “Don’t you have anything else to do? I need my own time.”After a brief silence, Nalini’s voice softened over the loudspeaker.“I just wanted to talk a bit, bhai.”But Shipra continued, her irritation shifting into concern. “Being involved in everything won’t make things better,” she said. Nalini had a tendency to interfere in the marriage of her only surviving son, it was perhaps her way of dealing with the disappointments of her own life.“Okay,” Nalini replied gently. “Then tell me, when should I call?”I remember being utterly baffled. Did she just swallow her pride yet again?At the time, I could not understand it. Their relationship seemed strangely free of the emotional boundaries I associated with friendship. There were disagreements and irritation, certainly, but very little score-keeping. Nalini rarely expected Shipra to become someone she wasn’t, and Shipra, despite her sharp edges, never truly stopped showing up.Many ways to loveShipra disliked physical affection, a preference that later generations of our family have come to see as a combination of neurodivergence and asexuality. So her bond with Nalini was never defined by touch. Intimacy found other routes.One of those routes ran through Madhupur, a small town in Jharkhand, which was home to Nalini’s husband’s ancestral hawa bodol (“change of air” in Bengali) home—a sprawling, slightly dilapidated mansion surrounded by farmland and guava, mango, and papaya trees. To create space for their relationship to stretch a little further, Nalini often took Shipra to Madhupur. After Shipra was widowed and Nalini became emotionally estranged from her husband, these trips became more frequent. The two women usually shared a room unless Shipra asked for one of her own. When she did, Nalini never protested. There, the two women spent their afternoons gardening, taking walks through the fields, and sitting beside a lily pond, a place they would later introduce their granddaughters to.I remember one such sunny afternoon vividly. I was six. Shipra, then in her late fifties, was crouched beside a clay stove, breaking coal to cook baby potatoes. A few feet away, her former classmate and forever companion, Nalini, sat on a chair in the shade, smiling to herself as she peeled the potatoes. There was no need for conversation or any sense of urgency, just the familiarity of being together.Power cuts were frequent in Madhupur, and whenever darkness swallowed the house, Nalini and I shared the same instinct. We would scramble to find our flashlights and turn them on. My rush was a childish desire to be the first one to light up the room, but Nalini was driven by the urge to comfort Shipra before she could complain about being in the dark. Looking back, the urgency in Nalini’s body language seemed disproportionate to Shipra’s discomfort. Yet her determination to anticipate Shipra’s needs stayed with me. At the time, I found it excessive, the way her otherwise composed self became so preoccupied with taking care of Shipra. Now, at 27, I know I would do exactly the same for my girlfriend.I often return to a photograph of Nalini and Shipra gathered around the dinner table in Madhupur with their old college friends. The women are happy and animated, passing bowls and stories across the table with the ease of people who have known one another for most of their lives. In another photo, five-year-old me is also in the frame, sitting beside my Dimma, who is absorbed in conversation with someone else. But Nalini, as always, is looking at Shipra. A peaceful smile inhabits her face, as though simply watching her is enough.When they couldn’t share space the way they did in Madhupur, food became another language for Nalini and Shipra to express their fondness for each other. Nalini cooked incessantly. With a generosity that seemed entirely natural to her, she regularly sent dishes over for Shipra and her family. Shipra didn’t reciprocate with the same frequency. But whenever she cooked a meat dish that she knew Nalini would also enjoy, she invited her over without ceremony. Shipra, who was raised in a vegetarian household, mostly abstained from eating meat herself, so when she cooked it, it was always an act of love.As Shipra ladled food onto our plates, she sometimes pushed her gold bangles back with a distinctly unladylike jangle. When I caught Nalini looking at her in the midst of this act, a Cheshire Cat smile spread across her face, I wondered if it was Shipra’s unselfconsciousness that had drawn Nalini to the woman she called bhai.What everyone knew (and didn’t say)Over time, the two women’s families, especially their four grandchildren, two of whom are queer, became increasingly aware that whatever Shipra and Nalini shared did not fit neatly into platonic friendship.My mother often reproached Shipra, for treating Nalini the way an arrogant husband treats his wife. Ever since their school days, Shipra had a habit of snapping at Nalini and teasing her for not being as academically accomplished as she was. Ironically, in their later years, Nalini proved far more adept at dealing with the changing times than Shipra. She embraced technology with enthusiasm and was, in fact, somewhat addicted to her smartphone. Meanwhile, Shipra had to write down instructions on how to switch on her television after a set-top box was installed in early 2013, and even then, she was easily confused and eventually gave up watching TV.Nalini’s older son had shown interest in marrying my mother, Shipra’s younger daughter. Nalini was keen on the match; a formal proposal was made. Shipra, however, declined. She explained to my mother years later that she did not want to complicate her relationship with Nalini. She knew how deeply unfulfilled Nalini was in her marital family and said she didn’t want the same for her daughter.Still, Nalini never seemed to hold the refusal against Shipra.In many ways, Shipra was luckier than Nalini. She received handwritten letters not only from Nalini, but also from her husband, who was often away for work as he rose through the ranks at the State Bank of India. His letters to her were more romantic than anything Shipra could bring herself to say to either of them.I remember reading one of his letters when I was about 15. He wrote of how the wind blowing through the window had whispered Shipra’s name in his ear while she had gone away to Madhupur. Shipra’s reply did not even acknowledge his longing, let alone reciprocate it. She wrote instead about the cows near the mansion and how much milk their daughter had had. Romance seemed to float right past her!Perhaps Shipra’s way of expressing desire was the steadiness with which she remained by Nalini’s side throughout. She might have loved her husband in some way, but what endured most visibly across the decades was the place Nalini occupied in her life.In 2021, Nalini, who was in her mid-70s, was diagnosed with cancer. I was away studying in Chennai at the time. She messaged me on Facebook to tell me that she wanted me to have a pair of heirloom gold earrings that, by tradition, should have been passed down within her own family.She handed the earrings to my mother and said, “Give these to Sohini. She’s my granddaughter.”By then, we didn’t really need words to describe their relationship. None of the other sweet old women who sometimes came over to spend time with my grandmother had left me something so precious or cared for me so deliberately. Today, the earrings sit safely in my bank locker. I plan to wear them on the day my girlfriend becomes my wife.After NaliniThe final photograph of the two of them was taken in 2021. It was Nalini’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, but she spent almost all evening beside Shipra. The picture shows the two women surrounded by an army of friends who had seen one another through decades of marriages, births, illnesses, triumphs, and losses. Shipra was looking outside the frame at my Mama, her head held high and a barely concealed smile playing about her lips. But her body, as always, was turned towards Nalini. Nalini, who had been largely unenthusiastic about the celebration of her marriage, seemed to have eyes only for Shipra.Shipra later had that photograph framed in her house, a rare act of sentimentality for her. The only other framed pictures she kept were of her parents, her late husband, and her daughters after their weddings.Within a few months of that celebration, Nalini died.Shipra, my mother, and I wept together. Over time, Shipra became quieter.She had always kept diaries, though they were practical rather than emotional—shopping lists, reminders, recipes, phone numbers. Feelings rarely appeared on those pages. After Nalini died, however, she wrote something else. In the shaky handwriting of her late seventies, she wrote only three words with no dari (full stop) to end the sentence: “Nalini chole gelo” (Nalini has gone away).Two years later, after Shipra had also died, I found the diary while sorting through her belongings. Dust had settled over it. I flicked a spider aside and turned the pages. I found that sentence waiting for me.Understanding the two of them has changed the way I think about queerness. It does not always announce itself or fit into available language. Sometimes, it survives in the rituals built over decades. In phone calls and shared meals, in arguments and forgiveness, in the instinctive, stubborn turning of one body towards another.*Name changed to protect identity.Sohini Sengupta (they/she) is a journalist, writer, and now (trying to be) an essayist. Their bylines include Hindustan Times, Feminism in India, India Today, and other niche U.S.-based publications. She loves all nine of her dogs equally.If you know someone – friend or family member – at risk of suicide, please reach out to them. The Suicide Prevention India Foundation maintains a list of telephone numbers they can call to speak in confidence. Icall, a counselling service run by TISS, has maintained a crowdsourced list of therapists across the country. You could also take them to the nearest hospital.