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Sulekha’s clearly pronounced understanding of ‘women’s speech’ (i.e. zanana boli) and ‘men’s speech’ (i.e. mardana boli) as two mutually exclusive styles of dress, worn at non-intersecting times in order to enhance the performance of a gender role, points to a heightened awareness of the social meanings associated with the use of gendered speech. In Sulekha’s opinion, a speaker will be identified as a hijra precisely because of this versatility, her alter-nations of femininity and masculinity signalling to outsiders that she is allied with neither camp.

Even though Sulekha describes feminine speech as a spontaneous activity which merely coincides with the decision to wear a sa?i, she also details the difficulty involved in acąuiring it. In particular, she describes a kind of second-language acąuisition process that initi-ates must undergo after entering the community, a process guided and inspired by the behaviour of older community members: