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While Lynton and Rajan are not referring to the hijras’ obscene language per se, their description is in a way reminiscent of Balsę s portrayal of the impotent man as shipwrecked. The terms self-mutilation and suicide imply that the hijras volun-tarily choose to leave the “normal” world of women and men in order to be reborn into the “abnormal” hijra world—a world that, in the opinion of these authors as well as of many other social theorists, is identified by linguistic as well as sexual ambiguity. Isolation leads to a need for what M. D. Vyas and Yogesh Shingala (1987: 89) identify as “vicarious gratification”; many hijras can achieve sexual sat-isfaction, in the authors’ opinion, only by talking about the “normal sex life” of men and women.