I grew up being perceived, and accepting that perception, of being a cis man, and was never comfortable with it. After I went to university, and had a bit of a vocabulary to understand myself, I came out as neither cisgender nor heterosexual. I know now that I’m nonbinary.

My journey with sports started back when I was like a microbe, at the age of four, navigating a pretty Desi community in the United States. I'm from a decent amount of privilege that gave me access to a lot of sports opportunities. I moved back to India later, and started going to an Academy.

The way cricket works in India, is that if you’re talented as a kid, they fasttrack you into a world where you start dreaming and fantasizing about playing sport professionally.

The coaches and the world around you encourage those dreams, and become a driving framework for them. From the age of eight up until I was 20, I was training and playing with the intention of making the sport a profession.

Somewhere along that way, I realized how unrealistic or far-fetched that dream was. Still, I played regularly and passionately for a long time.

Eventually, the toxicity started creeping in, and that toxicity wasn’t specifically centered on queerness – I know a lot of non-queer people who were victims of it too.

A lot of cricket is gendered, particularly when people go through puberty, physical attributes like height, strength and masculinity, are no longer neutral categories. They inform how you are perceived in terms of being capable or talented.

It's a currency that you need to live in that world and to make your way through it. Even before I came out, I struggled with that because I wanted to play the sport. I loved it, I still love it, and I was pretty good at it.

But we were expected to be aggressive or assertive, and we had to be comfortable with an environment of misogyny, to demonstrate and prove our masculinity in ways I couldn’t.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]