Resident Alien Goddess

(My Body In India)

I. I started stretching because the foothills tied up my calves and when I got down to the plainsit wasn’t necessary anymore but it was habit because in new places habits form quickly.

II. Women touch women (she led me by the waist) and men hold hands with men (and walk enmeshed, embracing) and sometimes men try to touch women but women are never supposed to touch men – except when they’re in the street and all the sharpest edges meet and – and as I look down from a few inches above I have never felt so physically isolated and restricted – absolutely free and un-touched and absolutely not free to touch – in my life.

III. The classes were held in a KG-10^th standard school complex, and when I hit the flagstone floor of the classroom with the flat of my foot, it rocked in its setting. The mothers roosted on a long wooden bench outside the room and chattered while the fathers stood under a tree and consulted or leaned on a low wall and checked their mobile phones. No-one came in on time, but by the end of two hours of overlapping classes the small room was packed with thirty girls in miss-matched yellow and green salwar kameez’, dupattas tied around girls waits or diagonally across women’s breasts.

A dusty photo of a forty-something-year-old woman in a red and gold sari, with close-cropped grey hair and square 1980’s reading glasses presided from the wall above the glass-front bookshelves (Hindi, English, and Telugu titles locked away with corresponding-language cobwebs). The young teacher, sculpted behind acid-wash jeans and a pink striped kurta and theatrical brow bones and beautiful hands, seconded her authority from a small square of rough matting decorated with a pleather briefcase, a hefty metallic watch and the splintering, even beats of a smooth stick on a rough wooden block, matched by the drum syllables formed by tongues and the hardened heels slapping stone.

IV. I slept on a cot in the living room (draped each morning with a cheap Rajasthani block print) so that I could have my own physical sleeping space, but (like most lines) it was mostly an illusion, a stop-gap to keep the pressure of so many other surrounding bodies from silencing the shy voices in the odd corners of my mind, the ones that only come out late at night or early in the morning, when most of the others are asleep.

V. The first time I put on a salwar kameez, at a tiny store in a massive market in Delhi, I felt like I was wearing a sack. The cloth of the tunic top (kameez) hugged my shoulders, grazed my ribcage, and flowed out from there, obliterating any visible shape of my hips and legs. The (salwar) pants sat above my belly-button, held against my natural waist by a cotton drawstring and only deigning to touch base again when they reached the bottom of my ankles. The chiffon dupatta (scarf, worn across the chest with one end falling off each shoulder and down the back) conveniently covered the pretty orange-green-mirrored embroidery the ringed my neck, and further hid any potential physical shape (when I could keep it on, which took at least two weeks to master). Ten months later, I feel scandalously clad in jeans and a tank top, and when we walk through our neighborhood in makeup I feel like a harlot, and when I get to the Westernized IT side of town I feel like a prude against the occasional whispering miniskirt, but when I wear a kurta (traditional top) and properly loose plants I get better prices at the vegetable stand.

VI. There is a heightened awareness, caused by: pollution (lungs), dirty water (bowels), chilies (nasal cavities, tongues), perfectly encompassing heat (skin, every inch of it), bucket showers (scalp, hands), bucket laundry (arms), uneven streets (back, legs), lithe waists peeking out from traditional saris (breasts, hips, spines). So when I’m sick of the stares and tired of keeping my hips from swinging or my voice from singing, I pause and release and let myself swing and sing and I think: just another alien goddess, walking down the street…