November’s Digital Poet-in-Residence Prerana Kumar writes about how the ritual of draping sarees functions as an ambiguous intergenerational inheritance- symbolizing beauty, queer desire, and femininity but also veiling the gendered violence brown women are subjected to.
I dream of my Nani sharpest when she drapes. The choice of saree depends on a cacophony of variables. The practicality of a long school-day in the humid throat of summer, the little explosions of anger she cannot always stifle, the tint of heat that veils the kitchen window. She decides on a simple Cannanore cotton, handloomed for functionality. It is a silver I have only seen before on the soft underside of karimeen, flat river-fish. Peacock feathers shimmy round the starched skirt. The pleats are crisp-cut and the quills are unwavering. From a distance, she will seem clothed in fine blades. One pin at the shoulder, and the saree will not flutter. Not even in the whirlwind of turmoil, the dust-paths that lead to the school gates, the clouds of chalk-powder that break at the bell that await Nani’s long schoolmistress hours. After that, the domestic clang of the mortar-and-pestle as she prepares meals for the house.
She gathers the final pleats, tucks them firmly into her waist. Then, there is the theatre of accessory. She reaches for kumkum, a simple gold necklace, Hyderabad pearls on her ears, firmed with years of discipline. When she feels festive, she will snap them out for little gold hoops that dangle slyly in the wind. Once she leaves for school, I climb into her saree cupboard, feel the starched turn of fabric against my forehead. Already, I want each part of my body to be covered with her uneven second pleat, the drape that is unique only to her hands. I want each slanted plane of myself to be carefully constructed, unravel at no world’s hands.
A Suitable Drape Is
☐ The first time I saw Nani drape a saree;
material shrouding each sorrow
☐ Mama for her brother’s wedding
pregnancy scars silvering the gauze
☐ Dark gold with red seam pleats
a jugular fountain
☐ Lining my gums with saffron
truth liquiding under my tongue
☐ Don’t talk about how ruby shines our gentle necks
Mama’s spine bowed with the weight of a country’s men
Through the years, Nani’s saree collection grows. It is all for you, she tells me before her evening prayers. One day, all of this will be for you. The cotton, the underskirts, the deep-trimmed blouses with indigo thread. When you grow, I will fold you into such a wonder. There is already something sinking in her eyes when she says this, a wistfulness that spreads like ivy over her flowering vision. Her hands are not yet turgid with arthritis, and I am not yet in England. I am only five years old and smell, always, of mothballs.
I am six, my twin cousins are nine, and I am at the village home for summer vacation. We giggle the way young girls often do, with abandon that stops short of an unscalable wall, then slinks back like little black cats into the crooks between our gap-teeth. Our secret hisses in the crumbling brick outhouse on the border of the Kannur plantation. We flit through gathered piles of saree scraps, salvaged from ruined sarees in the laundry. We spin in our mothers’ shreds, wedding blouse, ivory comb, raven cascade, earthworm tide. The remnants that flick off the plantation’s eyelashes become adornment- rambutan seeds, snail shells, clusters of fire-ant eggs. The bobby pins we’ve stolen from the laundry basket hold down the virile mess of remains onto my shoulders, fists of them sticking up from my ribcage, the way we think our mothers do: pallu spreading its wings, pinned as if in flight.
Even here, I am the subject of the drape. The city cousin from faraway who cannot fully twirl the egg round syllables of Malayalam, who tumbles prickly streams of English out on request. Their secret hurt, perhaps, that this could have been their life, their unbelonging, so comfortable in its fancy buckled shoes with its price tag flashing yellow on the underside. One of the twins fixes a red hibiscus behind my ear. Mad fool’s flower, she says, now you’ve got to run run run while you can, and they watch me with a petalling ache as I chase the black rooster down to the stream.
A Pleasing Skin-Tone Is
☐ My first full drape at fifteen
☐ My Papa clapping to a tabla as Uncle Ramesh
said cut up my wheat body if I look at him wrong
☐ Red, purple, gold
all those mud-girl colours
☐ Each darkness is a kind of bruising
the jamuns mashed in the hammer of a palm
☐ The darker goats are led to the woods first
before their darker bleating colours the air
☐ Not pink my skin isn’t talcumed
for that shade
☐ Don’t talk about how ruby shines our gentle necks
Mama’s spine bowed with the weight of a country’s men
I have carried only one saree to Durham. A light auburn mesh with an amber zari border weighing it down. I think of drooping jamun just before the bite, promise of a fleshing. I know it will be too cold here, that I will fold it in newspaper from the corner shop, then wrap it in cotton cloth. I know it will stay deep in the recesses of my wardrobe, filled with faux leather and spiked boots. A netted crop top that says something about toppling a vague patriarchy. Here, I am melting into the pavement in my black jeans, and so lonely. I make a habit of running to the weekend market with its single stall selling scarves. I reach towards women’s shoulders as they browse, just shy of touch. Yearning sears through the fabric into my fingers, but here I am so sectioned. There are scraps of my past everywhere, bloodstain in the tie-dyes, lotus in the Indian prints, a bird in chiffon, its chest puffed out at the edge of my sightline.
I think back to our ancestral temple, the sanctum feathered with women, flowing in through a thick brass door. I am eleven and barely a bud. Oval in promise. Older girls mill around the holy green pond, many stairs deep, pregnant cobras lazing along the wet stones by their feet. They are dressed in the matrilineal namboodri drape, a white spread with a flashing gold border, tucked under the arms. Drape of courtship. They have come to pray for good male suitors, merciful if a miracle. Their hair is coiled high on their heads to a side, serpents of ixora carving out trenches in the heavy locks. The moonlight lusters the downward draw of their spines. From where I sit, their nut shoulders are graceful eagles, stroked with gold. I shiver at the hours they have spent wrapping their fresh-bathed bodies, their fingers lingering at the knots, dousing their joints in sandalwood. I am only eleven, I am only starting to feel saliva pool in the back of my mouth, anticipating something that wants to be held in the cheek, not knowing quite what. I chew mogra from their falling garlands, I am in a partial state of undress, and nobody can bear to look at me.
Graduation morning at Durham, and I am sitting in a coiffe of fabric. Kanjivaram silk, three months of my mother’s salary on an endless fountain of clashing colour. On this fabric, sacred harp strings when the deep belly of the sun clashes with the palate of bougainvillea. A bobby pin juts out of my bleeding foot from when I have stepped on it while pleating. Down a third of the saree is a massive rip, jaws separating every time I move so I try to be very still. Try to stitch a mending with non-movement. I have failed my grandmother’s draping and my mother is stranded in Newcastle, waiting for a late train to Durham. The edges of this treasure are smeared rusty antshell, and I can smell the silver of my anklets on the blood. More than the tremendous amount of money, my mother’s quiet disappointment, the unbridgeable rend in the fabric, it is this smell that overcomes me. I don’t remember when I emerge from the nest, pull out a vermilion cocktail dress, slit at the thigh. I still believe I must be loud with my shame, that spectacle is my atonement. I don’t stop crying until I pull on my suede boots, step out without looking back.
The Best Camera-Angles For Your Body-Type Are
☐ You’re asking if I’m north or south Indian
four languages carve my waist-tuck
☐ You’re asking me what breaks a body
in another country
☐ You can never tell, it doesn’t matter yesterday
I soaked through my bandages and giggled
☐ I left five years ago
count the rings in my back
☐ I am always draping in windows I cannot tell
if it’s for the view or the fall
I am in the crematorium in Norwich, beginning to understand the language of my loneliness. How it is another tongue below my tongue. How I cannot choose with which to speak. I start ironing in the evenings, choosing silence of the fold instead. I have learned to wield a lighter fabric, the elusive kumudini. No pleats, just twirled around my body as many times as it can go, thrown over a shoulder, knotted at the waist. My mother has just told me she cannot afford to come visit me this year, and I am spinning my grief into a new kind of drape, a new shape with the hands. Still a remembrance of love, stubborn in its loose ends at my hips. It holds Nani’s knowledge where it curves. It only serves what it can. I have draped it backless, covered all the mirrors. I will roam amongst the headstones with a flickering joy.
