On a Sunday morning, I woke up at 5am to put makeup on my face. I was multitasking – making myself a cup of tea while preparing my face with a primer and moisturiser. I could hear my partner and my kid, both breathing deeply in their sleep.

I’d never done drag makeup so early in the morning. Drag makeup is like creating a new face – it’s as heavy as eating a Hyderabadi biryani at the crack of dawn. No one wants to apply that much makeup first thing in the morning. But I did.

All images by: Manab Das

Aside from this occasion, I never step outside of my house in drag. My city of Hyderabad, India, is hardly progressive – you’d struggle to find someone who even wants to rent a home to a bachelor, meat eater or drag queen.

I don’t usually take the risk to out myself in full glam, but this project was worth it. To protect both my makeup and identity, I had a safety trick that I’d learned from watching Bollywood movies: sunglasses. I noticed that wearing big sunglasses would hide any hints that the eyes behind them were adorned and crafted to be feminine.

After I completed my makeup, I eagerly packed a bag with my dress, wigs and the flowers handcrafted by my partner the night before. I locked the home from outside, and boarded an Uber.

Photographer Manab Das and I had been planning to do a public drag photoshoot for some time leading up to this day.

There was a strong sense of danger and adventure in leaving the house as a queer drag queen in Hyderabad. We headed to Gudimalkapur Flower Market, South India’s largest floral marketplace, about an hour from my home.

The flower market opens in early hours each morning. Fresh flowers are sold in bulk for any occasion in Hyderabad – may that be marriages, rituals, processions and funerals. All flowers sold in the city come from this place.

Once I arrived and dressed up in drag – hastily, as I struggled to find privacy – I stepped into the market.

I could sense the smell of flowers, and hear the sounds of shopkeepers, trucks loading and unloading, and vehicles honking. As I walked, I could see all the heads turning towards me, their gazes following until I was out of their eyesight.

Manab and I took a few photos as people were staring at me. I stopped at a market stall and asked for consent from the shopkeeper to take a picture and – once agreed – we took the shot.

Initially, the shopgoers assumed that we were not Hyderabadi locals, and that we didn’t speak Telugu. Most people thought I was a foreigner.

But as people took notice, I opened my mouth and started speaking in Telugu. I gave a quick gender 101 elevator pitch, and assured people that we’d request consent from anyone captured in the photos.

The permission was like a press card for us: we were now able to seek some dramatic locations, and take pictures of both the chaos and the subtlety of the space.

I was draped in layers of Victorian opulence. I had a heavy wig cascading down my shoulders, a black leather corset tightly wrapped around my waist, a golden cape flowing behind me, and a pristine white saree adorned with oversized, dramatic white flowers.

The entire ensemble was a clash of eras: the Victorian austerity, the Indian elegance, and the flowers, which carried an air of Shakespearean sensuality and queer symbolism.

As I posed among the stalls, the scent of jasmine and roses filled the air, creating a heady mix of fragrance and fantasy. The bustling market stood still in time for a moment, watching me, an unapologetic figure of contradiction: merging past and present, East and West, masculinity and femininity.

I felt as though I’d stepped into an alternate universe, where the norms of gender and sexuality dissolved as easily as the petals of a rose.

For this photoshoot, Manab Das and I wanted to evoke not just a Bridgerton-esque sense of regal luxury, but also draw on the themes of Shakespearean gender fluidity and sexual ambiguity.

In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, flowers were powerful symbols of eroticism, desire and hidden meanings.

Take the rose, for instance, which was often used in Shakespeare’s sonnets to express the fleeting nature of beauty and the complexity of love. Similarly, in the flower-filled meadows of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, flowers were not just decoration, they were potions of transformation, capable of revealing true desires and disrupting societal norms.

Queerness has always found a way to bloom, much like flowers that burst through the cracks of a rigid world. Flowers, with their vibrant colours and intricate structures, have long been symbols of sexual diversity and defiance of norms. The Victorians, too, used floriography – the language of flowers – as a way to communicate secret desires.

A white rose might symbolise innocence on the surface, but pair it with a dark violet, and it became a declaration of hidden passion. For those who dared to live outside the confines of heteronormative society, flowers were a covert way of expressing what words or actions could not.

In the chaotic, fragrant environment of Hyderabad’s flower market, I stood as a living testament to the ongoing dialogue between history and identity, between gender expression and societal constraint. The leather corset hugged my body like a cage, but the flowers and cape set me free, flowing outward like the petals of a flower in full bloom.

Just as flowers have long been used to express the unspeakable, this shoot expressed the freedom and complexity of queer existence in a world that continues to resist it.