I tried to make sense of the manner in which my grandmother’s wrist maneuvered while draping nine yards of fabric on her body. Her saree was fragile like her arms that demanded stamina to tug the fabric towards her waist. The pleats crinkled—like her skin—exposing the history of her. It was a natural rhythm for her, but nothing less than computation for me. From watching my grandmother draping these beautiful saris with thick borders and peacocks on them, to yearning to adorn them and resemble her elegance—my childhood enveloped me in a pretence of wanting to grow up. I would assume bedsheets and curtains were saris and drape them over my shoulders. When I asked Ammamma (Grandmother) when I could wear one, she said “When you’re a bigger girl.”

A saree in my culture is a symbol of womanhood. A metamorphosis from innocence to independence. I wore my first sari at nineteen for a wedding. I loathed every minute. The blouse was too tight, the silk slipping away from my body and the pleats heavily sitting on my lanky shoulders.

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I just wasn’t ready to carry the heaviness of being a woman.

No one teaches you how to carry a saree, you learn how to. And no one teaches you how to become a woman, you learn how to.

My mother persistently reminded me I am a bigger girl by imploring me to think about marriage and children. I may have become a bigger girl to her but the sensation of gentleness was yet unborn. I wondered if I had metamorphosed into a woman as intricate as her? As tender as other women? Throughout my girlhood, basking in the reverence of my mother—who wore burgundy lipsticks on her Banarasi saris—and other women—who mastered grace— I devoted myself to anatomizing their architecture, denying myself a meditation to self-actualize upon womanhood. Inevitably, that girl sculpted in stone what it was to be a woman:

In between being a girl and a bigger girl, I understood my inability to cultivate an understanding of inherently feeling like a woman came from a kind of choreography. A composition built on fragments of what other women are. My ability to feel like a woman never was born out of me, rather from what other women do. Regardless of the pattern in which I peel an orange, the intricacy of how I kiss, the way I hold my cup of tea, the rouge on my cheeks and lips, my love for basketball, the way I sit when no one is at home, and the way I burp in contentment after a meal I’ve cooked, I have inherited womanhood by birth.

This inheritance that I hold, shall be an ongoing becoming of many selves—all of who are nuanced and cannot be quantified in one sentiment or one body.

I wore the sari for the first time again. This time willingly, independently, and slowly. I wore my grandmother’s hand-woven cotton saree. The fabric danced to the breeze, forging the sensation of godliness while my pleats and I coordinated our walk. When I moved to the left, they moved to the right, easing me into the experience of carrying womanhood.

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