“Kaisi yeh paheli mua dil marjaana! Ishq mein jaldi bada jurmana.
(What is this dilemma, oh stubborn heart! To be hasty in love will incur too heavy a fine.)
All love stories need a beginning. Ours began with Shah Rukh Khan, a Twitter bracket, and a stubborn refusal to let Bollywood be the only thing dramatic about our lives. What followed was not just romance, but the slow, deliberate making of a queer, disabled household that insists on joy.
In September 2023, Anushree was burning with fever in Delhi while I was unraveling in Visakhapatnam under the weight of anxiety attacks. And yet, as in Bollywood, the winds began to shift. We met not in person but across Twitter timelines, rivals in the #2000sBollywoodBracket. Five hundred and twelve songs went to war for the decade’s crown; noble judges of Twitter decided the fate of anthems that once ruled our childhood bedrooms and wedding sangeets.
Come October 2nd, the bracket had ended. Our hangover had not.
Through what Anushree swears was a carefully laid trap, I learned they had never seen Veer-Zaara. What choice did I have but to step into destiny and introduce them to the epic? Until then, we had only been Twitter mutuals trading memes and banter. But suddenly, this was bigger than a film bracket. Maybe Veer-Zaara wasn’t the real opportunity at all — maybe Anushree was.
What should have been a three-hour film stretched into five and a half, thanks to my endless trivia and interruptions. But somehow, my yapping didn’t send them running the other way.
From Rivals to Lovers
True to sapphic gospel, the following week blurred into friendly flirting, Bollywood lyric battles, meme exchanges, musings on gender euphoria, dysphoria, and childhood scars. We texted from the moment our eyes opened till sleep dragged us under.
Seven days in, we decided this was a relationship. Only a fortnight later did we realize we hadn’t even video called each other yet. Two years later, loving this tender, luminous trans non-binary autistic queer person, I often pause to ask: what is it about us that isn’t like anyone else? The answers come in ripples.
We are chalk and cheese, or perhaps cheese and chalk. Anushree experiments with food; I remain indifferent, perhaps numbed by disability. They are reserved in social settings; I am the fast-talking loudmouth. Where they take their time, my ADHD brain insists on haste.
And yet, what binds us is fierceness — the need to stay politically alive to the world. Our nights alternate between watching a Bollywood classic and watching press conferences on election scams. Our debates stretch into breakfast, as passionate about the previous day’s test match as about government distraction ploys. Between communist reading circles and theatre pieces on caste and food, what we never say to each other is the tired refrain: “don’t overwhelm yourself with politics, you can’t change the world.”
Guarding Each Other’s Worlds
Anushree and I are careful not to become each other’s whole world. We protect each other’s instead. Their soul juice changes with seasons of autistic special interests — astrology, tarot, books, or a new mobile game. They guard mine — painting, singing, wandering in nature, world cinema. Gratitude abounds in the sharing: reading together, painting side by side, laying out a tarot spread, watching a Brazilian film late into the night.
Our love is not only montage and music, but also resistances and survivals. When we decided to move in, neither of us cut our hair short to sell the image of “cisgender friends” to landlords. Our queerness hides in curtains drawn tightly against a middle-class, cis-heterosexual neighborhood — yet spills out in the ways we resist: insisting on they/them pronouns at a doctor’s office, draping the inclusive pride flag across our shoulders at a military monument, Anushree strutting in masc shirts, me in rainbow eyeliners, kisses and handholding unbothered by the uncomfortable onlooker.
A Disabled Household
Behind those drawn curtains, comfort takes priority. Pet names multiply (Anushree invents a new one almost daily), chores bend around neurodivergence: they tidy extra so my anxiety doesn’t spiral, I slow down so their demand avoidance doesn’t bite. We fumble, adjust, try again.
And then there are the sick days. I live with ME/CFS; when a crash flattens me, or when Anushree falls into autistic shutdown, the house falls silent. Chores aren’t split evenly — we never know who will be able to get out of bed. Some weeks I cook and clean like a ninja; others, Anushree shoulders it all. Caregiving isn’t romantic. It is hard, slow, and demanding. But it is also love, stretched across time, patched with patience and laughter.
If abled life isn’t an option, then I would choose this disabled one: falling asleep to the rattle of medication, Anushree’s sleepy hand warm against my belly, waking to tangled legs and forehead kisses. Through it all, we’ve found ways to laugh: at my illness, at our madness, at the larger systems that are the real roots of suffering.
Joy as Resistance
Our love is no tidy victory. It is something rarer: a long game that insists on showing up, scene after scene, day after day. What began with a song bracket and a Teleparty has become a household, a language, a resistance stitched from Bollywood lyrics, cricket commentary, and quiet acts of care.In a world that refuses to script us, we keep writing anyway — our own trans disabled Veer-Zaara, unruly, and stubbornly joyful.
About the author :
Pratyusha (they/them) is a 27 year-old mad nonbinary lesbian & ME/CFS survivor. They are engaged in disability and LGBTQIA+ justice and advocacy work and feel passionately for the intersection of these movements. They give their big feelings™ an outlet through a variety of artistic expression – photography, painting, free verse poetry and prose. In the wild, Pratyusha will often be spotted watching an arthouse film (or a cringe sellout one) and writing essays about it on their Substack.
Social media handles:
@pratzhell on twitter
@pratyushavaranasi on instagram
Substack: https://substack.com/@pratzhell?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=a560j
Story behind the write-up:
This piece germinated in the softness and comfort of my home, a home I am building with my partner, a home that is intentional in it’s non conformity to neurotypicality, ableist expectations and cis heteronormativity. I have felt a lack of stories of T4T love stories in the landscape of trans stories on the internet, let alone stories of neurodivergent folk with disability, especially from South Asia, which called me to share mine as a drop of hope to invite more people to share theirs and for young trans kids to take on hope that a safe, compassionate future is possible too – a hope that we must all fight to have in the face of all majoritarian forces uniting to suppress trans voices, hope and joy.
