Books: The bold and the beautiful

Kubbra Sait’s realistic and nuanced portrayal of Kukoo, the transgender woman who becomes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s love interest, in the first season of Sacred Games, marked the arrival of a powerhouse performer

Kubbra Sait’s realistic and nuanced portrayal of Kukoo, the transgender woman who becomes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s love interest, in the first season of Sacred Games, marked the arrival of a powerhouse performer. Not only did she play the role to perfection, often prompting people to actually Google her actual gender, but she also had a frontal nudity scene—an audacious decision which promptly earned her the sobriquet of ‘bold’.

Actor Kubbra Sait says that writing her memoir was a cathartic process that elicited many unexpected responses

Kubbra says, “I wanted fame for one reason: to be seen and accepted. I feel silly now to think that I gave this power to other people”

The catharsis

Kubbra’s book is candid: she details her struggles with bullying, her achievements and failures, being shy, and accepting help

The termination of an unplanned pregnancy was the hardest thing she wrote, she says. “It was something I was really talking about in the open for the first time. It was truly baring myself for the world to read me and not just what I’d written. It was a free pass for people to judge me for my choices and my morals. I also felt I had a need to speak about it… we now know how the most progressive part of the world has shown that men and women in an assembly can decide what a woman should do with her body. I am grateful I was able to make a choice for my body for myself,” she says.