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Rupa’s transition from what she refers to as mardana [‘manly’] speech to a morę feminine variety was a highly conscious process, one that reąuired several months of practice - or in Rupa’s own words bolte-bolte bolte-bolte [‘speaking and speaking continu-ously’] before it adat ho gayi [‘became a habit’]. Like Sulekha, Rupa is aware of the social meanings attached to her language use, so much so that she hides her feminine speech while at home with her landlord’s famiły. In contrast to Sulekha, who primarily refers to herself in the first-person feminine, Rupa consistently employs the masculine first-person plural when in her home, as in the pre-vious passage when she uses masculine-marked yerbs like cale^m [‘left’] and aye^m [‘came’]. Yet throughout her conversations with us, Rupa also emphasized how necessary it is for hijras to achieve fluency in women’s speech, sińce group members ‘always and only speak as women when together’. This necessity, precipitated by a community desire to distance itself from masculine representation, has encouraged a kind of gendered bilingualism among the hijras. When asked how she became so adept at switching back and forth between these linguistic realms, Rupa again attributed her proficiency to adat [‘habit’]: ‘Gradually, after leading this life,’ she explains, ‘you just get used to it’ (rahate-rahate adat pat jata hai).