The First Time
by Pooja Makhijani

I stood in my room with my mother's turquoise sari in circles around my ankles. I was hot and tired. Even on this cold November evening, I could see sweat glistening on my upper lip and forehead in the closet mirror. As I held the end of the sari clamped between my chin and collarbone, I felt my neck tighten as I tried to fold the delicate accordion of pleats. My arms and shoulders hurt from being in a position that they found so unnatural. 

I fell backwards on my bed, frustrated, exhausted and angry, the five and a half yards of cloth still encasing my legs like a Slinky that's had its final days bounding down the stairs. 

Why was I doing this? I thought. I could just wear the black pants and the pink cardigan that I wore to school yesterday. And then I remembered this was my idea. 

* * *

"Mom? Can I wear a sari to Ranjana Auntie's Diwali party next week?" I stood at her bedroom door in my broken-in, boot cut Levis and a white baby-tee. She put aside her India-Abroad, and removed her reading glasses.

"Sari? You? Diwali?"

"Yeah, it's New Years," I said. "And saris are so beautiful. Can I wear one of yours?" 

She crouched down on her hands and knees, pulling a mammoth brown suitcase out from under her queen-sized bed. I had never seen her so excited about helping me choose something to wear. Whenever we went shopping at The Gap, she was never as enthusiastic as I tried on khakis, shirt-dresses and skorts. She always tried to think of something nice to say as I stepped out of the dressing room, "So the girls in your school are wearing this these days, huh?"

She opened the beat up piece of luggage to reveal all her saris. Waves of aquamarine, tufts of baby pink and fields of gold poured out of the bag and covered the fading brown carpet as she pulled each one out. At the bottom, wrapped in white muslin, was her red wedding sari. 

"Maybe you can wear this one someday." 

"Someday," I said. "But let me find something to wear next week. Move over." 

Mom grabbed her newspaper and walked into the living room where I knew she would curl up with her reading once again. I dug through the mounds of color in front of me. 

Scents of jasmine and sandalwood emerged as I sifted through her silks and chiffons. After much debate and rejecting a purple and yellow polka-dot number that had "1977" written all over it, I finally selected a blue sari with a shocking pink hand embroidered border. I rummaged through her heart shaped candy box that held hundreds of luminescent glass bangles and found a stack of thirty blue and pink ones. I slid them all onto my left forearm. They electrified it like neon lights. 

"I found something." I yelled into the other room. With a coordinating choli, the short blouse with the embroidered sleeves, slung over my shoulder and my chosen sari folded and laid imperially on my hands, I walked into my room. I placed it on the top shelf of my closet and slid the reflective doors shut. I couldn't wait until the following Saturday.

As I flopped onto my bed, I thought about the sari and how much I related it to so many facets of the culture I came from and grew up in. I pictured the statue of Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts, in her white and gold sari at the temple, an abandoned Episcopalian church that the first Indian families in the area had bought and transformed into a place of worship once again. I giggled as I remembered lounging on the couch watching some melodramatic Bollywood flick with the sari-clad heroine, dancing around trees in the rain, all the while singing to her beloved. I saw my mother in her marriage videos, the edge of her blood-red sari covering her eyes. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and flipped through the album of yellowed photographs of my great-grandmother with the youngest of her nine children tugging at her pleats. 

Strong women. Beautiful women. Confident women.

With all these images in my head I knew that next week's party celebrating the new year and new beginnings would be the perfect occasion for me to wear a sari for the first time. It would be my way of acknowledging all the women who came before me. And, my sixteen-year old mind thought, maybe a certain seventeen year-old boy would finally take some notice. I figured it would be really hard not to take note of me if I paraded into the party elegant, decked out and grown up.