It's a warm August evening, and, like us, Dr Shashank Parekh, happens to be working on a national holiday. Being considerate, he has agreed to wrap up work and meet us at a nearby Starbucks for a chat. Turns out, we couldn't have picked a better day.

Sitting across the table at the Marine Drive outpost, the 30-year-old is celebrating his first Independence Day as a man. "It feels surreal," he says, his dimples playing peek-a-boo through his scant facial fuzz. Give it a few more months, and the dent will be eclipsed. But there's no hiding the red rakhi tied to his wrist that a cousin couriered from Aurangabad. Dressed in a casual blue t-shirt and jeans, it's also the first time in 13 years that Dr Parekh has stepped out of home without a chest binder. A reality for many trans men and non-binary individuals, chest binding is a technique used to minimise the appearance of breasts. "I would be repulsed by the sight of my b***s," he recalls. Back at his hometown in Aurangabad, he did not have access to a medical binder, so he would wrap a crepe bandage tightly around his chest. As a student of medicine, he knew it could cause grave harm. "I was scared that I'd end up breaking my ribs." Last week, he underwent a chest reconstruction surgery at an Andheri clinic. "And now I can't stop looking at it," he jokes. With one Female-To-Male (FTM) surgery done, he has two more to go—hysterectomy with bilateral oophorectomy (removal of uterus and ovaries) and phalloplasty with scrotoplasty (creation of penile shaft and scrotum).