FOR MAHLUI, it was love at first sight. One day, when he was in the tenth grade, Mahlui’s friend brought along a new acquaintance to visit him in his hostel room. With her pale complexion, long black hair and large eyes lined with kohl, Mahlui was instantly infatuated with this new girl. Although they became friends, he did not confess his feelings towards her. Besides, they met each other infrequently, since the girl lived far away from the city, and commuting options were limited.

“She was my dream girl,” Mahlui said to me about that first, but lasting, impression. He did not want to be identified by his full name. In his adolescent years, Mahlui was at constant loggerheads with his parents, who insisted they wanted to see their daughter dressed in clothes meant for girls. He reluctantly wore the uniform skirt to school and dresses with ballerina shoes to church—the two places that were non-negotiable for his family. “Six days a week, I was a boy. Only on the seventh day, I had to dress up like a girl,” he said, recalling his teenage years.

Mahlui and his dream girl lost touch in the years after school and moved on with their lives. She dated a few guys before marrying a much older man, a Revival speaker in the Presbyterian Synod, and had two kids with him. Meanwhile, Mahlui dated other women, even getting married twice. In the midst of this, if they did run into each other, there would usually be an air of formality, nothing beyond an exchange of pleasantries. There was one particular encounter, however, on a day when she was on her way to pick up her daughter from school, which stuck in Mahlui’s mind. There was something different about it. “That day, after we crossed each other, I turned back to look at her and so did she,” Mahlui said. “It was like the way they show lovers crossing paths in the serial Kasauti Zindagi Ki.”