‘No Blushes’ is a first-person narrative chronicling Renju Renjimar’s journey from marginalisation to self-fashioning. It is an autobiographical narrative, “as told to” Sonya J Nair. Nair recalls, “I first met Renju Renjimar when she came to All Saints’ College, Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala, in 2018. I was working in the English Department and was in charge of the Equal Opportunities Cell. She was leading a group from Dhwayah and was visiting the college to perform for the students. This was the first time trans people had ever entered this college, and the students were really excited to see and listen to the great Renju Renjimar and other trans-activists.”This chance encounter turned the academic into a close ally of the transgender Renju Renjimer. The threads picked up in the many discourses between the two conclude in a unique tapestry of mediated self-representation. Nair shapes, structures and textualises Renju’s trajectory from “gender anxieties to self-assertion”.The title ‘No Blushes’ signals a refusal of shame and reclamation of dignity, challenging the disgrace historically attached to transgender bodies. The narrative traces a movement from a brick-kiln worker to becoming a celebrated makeup artiste. The metamorphosis of the body and the mind — the process of becoming a butterfly in Judith Butler’s sense of gender — not as an innate, biological fact, but as a socially constructed, performative act from a site of exploration to one of artistic creation is captured deftly by Nair.Beyond the individual success of Renju, ‘No Blushes’ is also “the story of Kerala’s transgender community and their ongoing struggle for rights and dignity”. It situates Renju’s life within broader activist and community networks. Nair’s clairvoyance prevents the narrative from collapsing into neoliberal ‘success story tropes’. The volume also centres on “love and heartbreak… friendships lost and gained”. These affective registers mellow the narrative, resisting reductive depictions of transgender lives as merely sites of trauma.The work contributes to the evolving corpus of Indian transgender autobiographies like ‘Am Vidya’ by Living Smile Vidya, Dr Lakshmi Ajoy’s biography titled ‘From ‘Ka’ to ‘Ki’ — Biography of a Transgender Woman: A ‘Trans’formation through Strength and Resilience’, ‘Me Hijra, Me Laxmi’ by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, and ‘The Truth About Me’ by A Revathi. Together, these texts subvert hegemonic literary canons by foregrounding marginalised subjectivities.The stylistic registers oscillate between narrative simplicity and reflective passages, thereby retaining oral authenticity and articulating broader socio-cultural critique. “Thus my body that came from the very depths of my mother… was finally cast away… I fashioned a body of my choice. This is who I choose to be, and this is who I wish to be seen as… It doesn’t matter who you see when you look at me,” declares Renju.‘No Blushes’ offers an intersectional account of gender, class and labour, maintains a fine balance between personal narrative and collective political consciousness and functions as both literature and social document. The edition invites deep engagement through multiple frameworks: gender performativity, affect theory, and subaltern studies. It has a new leaf to turn in contemporary Indian literature, gender studies, and cultural studies and gives rise to a new direction in scholarly engagement.— The reviewer teaches at Tarakeswar Degree College in West Bengal