My Mother's Sari Still Smells Like Home
Folded in my city cupboard is the one address that never changes.
I stole from my mother the night before I left home, and she stood in the doorway and watched me do it.
The suitcase was open on the bed, already full past sense: pickle jars wrapped in newspaper, a steel dabba of besan laddoos, medicines for illnesses I did not have yet. And at eleven at night, while she was in the kitchen packing more food I had told her not to pack, I opened her cupboard, moved aside the good silks, and pulled out the sari from the bottom of the pile. Mustard yellow cotton, thin green border, soft as an old ten rupee note. Her everyday sari. The one she wore so often it had stopped being clothing and become skin.
I pressed it flat under my jeans and zipped the suitcase, and when I turned around she was standing there with a tiffin in her hands, watching. She did not say anything. She just went and got a plastic cover for it, "so the pickle smell doesn't catch it," and that was the whole conversation.
I was twenty-three and leaving for Bangalore, for a job with a company whose name my grandmother never once pronounced correctly. Everyone at the station spoke about salary and opportunity. Nobody mentioned that I was about to become a monthly phone call.
The smell is the thing nobody warns you about. Not missing people. Missing smell.
My mother's sari smelled of turmeric first, then Pond's talcum, then something underneath that I have never been able to name: a warm, faintly smoky note that was maybe the kitchen, maybe the iron trunk it lived in, maybe just her.
In my paying guest room in Bangalore, with its one window facing a wall and a landlady who counted my bucket baths, I would open the cupboard on the bad nights and press my face into that mustard cotton, and for four or five seconds the wall outside my window would become the neem tree outside my old one.
I never wore it. Wearing it would have meant washing it eventually, and washing it was unthinkable.
Detergent would have made it just a sari.
The bad nights were not the dramatic ones. They were the ordinary Tuesdays: fever at 2 a.m. with nobody to place a wrist on my forehead, festivals spent watching other people's mothers arrive at the PG with tiffins, the evening my team leader shouted at me in a meeting and I came home and ate bread with ketchup standing up.
On those nights the cupboard was a door... and I went through it.
On our video calls she asked the same three questions in the same order. Have you eaten. What did you eat. Don't lie, show me the plate.
I wrote my first real poem in that room, about her hands and the smell of that sari, and posted it on a community wall for poets at one in the morning. A stranger from Coimbatore commented, "My amma's saree smells of vibhuti and Vicks. I have one too." I read that comment maybe thirty times. Half of love poetry, I understood that night, is just people describing a smell before it fades.
Because it does fade... That is the cruelty built into the trick.
Around the second year, the turmeric went first, then the talcum... until one night I pressed my face into the cotton and found only cupboard. I sat on the floor of that rented room and cried harder than I had cried at the railway station, because the station was distance, and this was erosion.
Homesickness is not missing a place. It is missing the person who made the place a place.
The Diwali after that, I went home. And on the second afternoon, hunting through my mother's cupboard for a phone charger, I moved aside her good silks and found, folded small at the bottom of the pile, exactly where the mustard sari used to live, my old college kurta. The blue one with the fraying collar that I had searched for in Bangalore for two years and assumed I had lost in some move.
It had not been washed. I stood there holding it, doing the arithmetic. She had taken it out of my bag the same week I had taken the sari out of her cupboard.
Two thefts, one night, both silent.
When I asked her, she did not even look up from the onions. "You have your ways," she said. "I have mine."
My mother has never read a poem in her life. She thinks metaphor is a kind of showing off. And she had been running the exact same ritual as me, at the exact same cupboard depth, for two years, without either of us saying a word. On the hard days, she told me later, offhand, as if reporting the weather, she would open the cupboard and check whether the kurta still smelled of me. "Less now," she said. "But something is there."
I used to think I was a poet and she was just my mother. Standing in front of that cupboard I understood we were both members of a very old tradition, older than writing: people keeping cloth the way other people keep gods.
When I flew back after that trip, my suitcase was heavier than I had packed it. Open on the bed in Bangalore, it revealed the usual pickle and laddoos, and beneath them, in a plastic cover, a sari I had never seen. Deep red cotton, new. I called her, confused. She said she had bought it two months before my visit and worn it every day since, cooking in it, sleeping in it once, "so that it becomes ready."
She had spent eight weeks manufacturing home for me, the way you charge a battery.
It sits in my cupboard now, in a city where I finally have a flat with a window that faces a gulmohar instead of a wall. The mustard sari sits beside it, retired, holding nothing but memory and the idea of a smell. I still do not wash either of them. My flatmate thinks this is unhygienic. My flatmate's mother, when she visited, opened my cupboard to store extra bedsheets, went quiet for a moment... and closed it gently without moving anything. She understood the filing system.
Six hundred miles apart, there are two cupboards. In one, an unwashed kurta folded between silks. In the other, a red sari going faint, and a mustard one gone quiet. Each house keeps the other person folded on a shelf, breathable, reachable, at exactly arm height.
People ask me sometimes when I will finally bring my mother to live with me in the city.
Soon, I tell them... But some part of her already moved in years ago. She came in a suitcase, wrapped in plastic against the pickle, the night I thought I was the only one stealing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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