Soman was an eight-year-old boy leading a normal, middle-class life in New Delhi when he and his brother began to realise he was different. Soman felt like a girl, played like a girl and wanted to be a girl.
'My elder brother suspected something. He kept saying: 'You walk like a girl, your gestures are like a girl's'. I didn't want to leave my family but God made me like this. I couldn't go against my nature,' says Soman as 'she' spits a betel nut into a rusty tin can.
Soman is a eunuch, one of an estimated 500,000 to one million men in India who believe they are women. This belief prompts them to undergo castration. Other eunuchs are so called because they were born with deformed genitalia.
Whatever their story, almost all eunuchs in India feel compelled to leave their homes and families at some stage in their lives - usually aged between eight and 18 - to join a community of hijras (from the Urdu word meaning 'impotent one').
Soman is now a middle-aged, Junoesque 'woman' with thick make-up, lots of jewellery and a full head of dark-brown hair that she's proud of. She says she idolised her father, a timber merchant, but tension crept into their relationship. 'My father hated it when I played with my mother's make-up and walked in a certain way. He knew there was something wrong but couldn't put his finger on it,' she says.
When neighbours began to make snide remarks, causing her parents distress, Soman decided to run away. She joined some hijras first in Rajasthan, then in Mumbai and eventually resettled in the capital. Like other hijras, she has made no attempt to re-establish contact with family members.
