The first day back home,
my newly-minted, nose-pinned
face
confirmed
to my mother what green-grocer Girish ettan
had been saying for two years,
a hint of grandfatherly mischief in his eyes:
she's turning into an annaachi!
Annaachi: ragpicker, sometimes
woman,
mostly unclean,
always dark-skinned, definitely
Thamizh. In sane, sanitized God's
own country, tongues
wag
furiously, waging a thousand
quieter wars
on bodies
which defile its twin
deities of adakkam
and othukkam, and when
have wars ever spared
girls who come back
from college with a new-forged, nose-pinned face
and a newly defiant spine?
Mother
fears that the wine-dark
indent the nose-pin leaves behind
will affect my prospects
for marriage.
I laugh, wondering
what she'd think
of the woman
with a wayward strand of hair
who looks back from the mirror
when her straight-laced daughter
searches for herself
these days:
the one who kissed two boys, flirted
with three, fell in love with
one
and wears a nose-pin
that sits proudly
on her nose.