Picture perfect

Anjali Ameer | Photo: Syam Babu; Stylist: Stephy Zaviour; Hair & Make-Up: Siva; Costume Courtesy: Cover Story, Lulu Mall, Cochin

As the camera is being set up, Anjali Ameer drums her fingers on the chair, looking bored. Wearing a black jumpsuit with her hair falling in soft folds about her, she looks stunning. Then, it’s time for action and the transformation in the 23-year-old transgender actor is fabulous. The bored look vanishes, she throws her head back, pouts and arches her body. One feels like letting out a low whistle at the effortless poise with which she strikes various poses.

When I go to the makeup room as she gets ready for the second phase of the photo shoot, I watch the hairstylist pile up her hair and pin it on one side in the way Malayalam heroines of old used to. Ameer is dissatisfied. “This is very ordinary,” she whines. Yet, she says it mildly and later, decides to go with it. I’m reminded that this is no star that I’m talking to. This is someone who has been through a lot and is still getting accustomed to being in the limelight.

Ameer was born as Jamsheer to a Muslim family in Thamarassery near Kozhikode, Kerala. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be a girl. When, at the age of 15, she got into a relationship with a boy from her neighbourhood, her family was shocked. She was ostracised and, at 16, she ran away to Chennai, where she lived with the transgender community there. She came back at the death of her father, but her stepmother and brothers were unwilling to accept her.

“I lost my family, my friends and everyone I loved after coming out as transgender,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m imagining it. Maybe it’s my insecurity and my complexes that make me feel unwanted. But now, I want freedom. To mingle with people I like and live where I want to live.”

She decided to settle in Coimbatore, making ends meet by working as a beautician and a makeup artist and saving enough to do her sex reassignment surgery. Later, modelling assignments started trickling in. But her dream was to act in a Malayalam movie. Her moment came when the Tamil movie director Ram asked her to come to Chennai for a screen test. Soon, she got a call from him offering her the lead role opposite south Indian superstar Mammootty in his movie Peranbu.

“I was so excited,” she says. “The first time I saw Mammookka was more than a decade ago when he came to Kozhikode for the shooting of Vesham. It was completely different when I met him on the sets of Peranbu. I was very nervous because everyone told me that he had a short temper. But he was very friendly to me. He asked me where my home was in Kozhikode and put me at ease immediately.”

You might think that with her movie coming out soon and having landed lead roles in two other films in Malayalam and Telugu, Ameer would be one of those people who seem to have their lives sorted and without any of the baggage that most of us seem to be carrying. But looks can be deceiving. “Whenever I feel sad or unsure, I tell myself that it is temporary. ‘I’m not like this,’ I tell myself. ‘I will be the person I want to be.’ Sometimes when I feel ugly and unwanted, I look in the mirror and repeat to myself, sometimes 10 or 15 times, that I am beautiful. Slowly, I come to believe it.”

Seeing the questioning look in my eyes, she smiled and asked: “Don’t you do it?” Because I had never done it, I dodged the question, murmuring something about the need to believe in yourself. She looked sad as she said: “One has to learn to make peace with oneself because you can never predict the future. I’m in love with someone now but how can I be sure that he won’t leave me? How can I be sure of anyone but myself?” She might be living the dream but she speaks like someone who has been hurt one too many times to believe that dreams can really come true.