“You see that lady over there?” Jan pointed out an elegantly dressed woman with immaculately manicured nails sitting under an umbrella at the cafe we were at. It was an exceptionally hot day and I was glad we managed to get a table indoors where there was air-conditioning.
The lady outdoors was chatting animatedly with two girlfriends and all three of them gave the impression that they were once the popular kids at school. They were studded with branded accessories from head to toe - Hermès, Chanel, Prada were just few of the bigs names I spotted. “Of course, birds of a feather....” I thought. “What about her?” I asked Jan expecting her to tell me that she was some celebrity or famous person that I ought to know.
“She used to be my friend’s brother, Harry” she replied. I looked at Jan blankly and it took a while before it dawned upon me what she meant. I studied the lady’s face and physique again. I would never have been able to tell she was once a man. Her features looked so delicate and there was no indication of an Adam’s apple.
Jan told me how Harry had always known he was a girl at heart. Growing up, his Asian parents never encouraged nor acknowledged his feminine fantasies. They bought him stereotypical masculine toys and dressed him in blue. Harry had never fit in but he didn’t even try to. He was most himself when in his sister’s dresses and mother’s stilettos. When his teachers asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, much to their discomfort, he always unflinchingly replied “a lady”. The moment he turned 21, Harry arranged for his transgender rebirth in Thailand. In the nine months he was gone Harry had multiple surgeries to transition into Harriet.
Harriet’s return brought great discomfort and shame to her parents. Her transformation was too radical for them to come to terms with. Being their only son, they had hoped to see him carry their family name. Harriet’s sister on the other hand embraced the change and made her the maid of honor at her wedding.
Long after Harriet and her friends had left, Jan and I continued talking about her. Her courage in the face of the conservative society we lived in was something to be greatly admired. “To Harriet, for the challenges she went through to stay authentic to herself” I said as Jan and I clinked our glasses of cold water.
“We must attack, now!” The virions made their way past her tonsils and ventured into the dark depths of her craw. The lazier ones snuggled into the dark mucoid folds of her pharynx while the more determined virions made their way further down into her larynx. The rebels of the lot went against gravity towards her Eustachian tubes. These troublemakers had no qualms about the pain they were going to cause their ignorant little female host who would notice their presence only two days later.
Their ancestors had bestowed upon them a gift somewhat like that of a Trojan horse. Sneakily, they invaded their unsuspecting victims using their structurally complementary appendages to latch onto the respiratory receptors of their favourite species. They favoured the young who lacked hygienic boundaries and the old who were immunocompromised.
Three days later, after complaining of a sore throat, ear pain and a runny nose, the little girl was diagnosed with influenza.
Germaine Kepler had too many flaws. But the one that irked her the most was her need for conformity. Moreover, her family depended on this very trait of hers for their business to run seamlessly.
Having taken over the family business from her retired father nine years ago, she now spear-headed the operations department of their company. Her younger sister Alex, the one accustomed to going against the grain, and also the bossier between the two of them, was naturally suited for the position of CEO.
Growing up in an industrialized part of the country where only a few families dwelled meant that everyone knew everyone else’s business. This would not have bothered Germaine were it not for the type of business her father ran. Alex and her were perpetually teased especially by the boys in high school who lacked maturity. She tried hard to ignore their taunts and upped her dress sense to fit in with the cool crowd as much as she possibly could in the hope that they would stop. Alex on the other hand grew up unperturbed by the teasing. This was easy for her though since she was the prettier sister and attracted the right kind of attention no matter what she wore.
Twenty eight years later, Germaine now a forty two year old woman who had long become desensitized to taunts and teasing and who no longer needed to keep up with the latest fashions, was starting to realize that the family business was no longer congruent to her newly acquired values. Having become more aware of the long-lasting global impacts of climate change, she tried to do her part by adopting the use of bamboo straws and going cold turkey on drinking water from plastic bottles. The sanitary napkins that their business produced was by no means environmentally friendly with the amount of plastic that was required.
It was an uncharacteristically warm winter’s day that got the ball rolling. As Germaine was watching the last of her homemade almond milk trickle from the funnel into a bottle, an idea started formulating in her mind. What if....what if we replaced our production of sanitary napkins with flexible funnels that could be reused? Would it be too avant-garde for society? In fact, would she herself even use one? She pitched her idea to Alex that evening over mulled wine and her normally unconventional sister just stared at her asking if she had gone off her rockers. The next day however, Alex being Alex, who always needed to be the maverick of the family, agreed to building up a prototype of Germaine’s idea.
By the following summer, with the help of their product development and marketing teams, the newly revamped family business, now manufacturing menstrual cups, soared with profits almost doubling. Germaine had managed to integrate her environmental values with her business and couldn’t be any happier. And that, was how the Kepler sisters went from rags to riches.
