A few years ago, I went looking for the head cook at a friend’s wedding feast. I just had to shake hands with the person who cooked the biryani. That is how I met G Madhana, who was frying chilli chicken in the makeshift kitchen.
Today, seated on the front steps of her recently-constructed house in Coimbatore, Madhana ‘Amma’, as she is popularly known, says, “I didn’t expect to come this far when I ran away from home 50 years ago.” The 68-year-old is a leading wedding caterer in Coimbatore, and has cooked hundreds of feasts over the years, some of them for as many as 3,000 people. Thanks to the transgender community’s practice of a senior person ‘adopting’ someone younger as her daughter, Madhana is a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother to an army of transwomen in the city.
As she rose in her business, so did the many transwomen she trained. “Selvi, Thilaga, Mano, Saro…I have lost count,” says Madhana, recalling names of her protégés who are now running their own catering services.
