xiiGreen Thumbs and Sari Shops

Phone calls with Papai ammakkaiyya always circle a familiar loop: like the train home from Kacheguda station to HITEC city, or the weekly circulation of curries in our household (bendakaiyya, aloo fry, the occasional dondakaiyya kurra). A slick, well-oiled machine, with all parts humming along smoothly. Dependable.

First, after a bit of small talk about Alia Bhatt’s recent short size (“five inches above the knee is just absurd!”) or the latest Nani movie to come out of Tollywood (the Telugu film industry—we’re second biggest in India after Bollywood, baby!), I ask her about her garden. She asks me about university. I say I miss India; she says to come visit. I tell her about my internship, she is grateful that it is paid; she tells me about my Smitha akka or her grandson, Suchir, a football [Americans, read: “sawwwcur”] player. Then, we land on some variation of the same joke where she promises to send over some gold jewelry or a pattucheera with a gold-embroidered jari and I hit back with a sly comment that she talks over in her enthusiasm to get out a good joke. We collapse into self-indulgent giggles—thinking too much of our own wit—and I tell her I’m handing the phone back to Amma.

She praises my Telugu, tells me to take care of myself, and—maybe it’s a trick of the fragmented phone connection—I hear: “I love you, I miss you, don’t forget home.”

Beneath the jokes are the memories unfolding in every direction like thread spooling out from a handloom. Sometimes, I gather the threads of history, remembering the agility of her hands—hands mapped with the callouses of motherhood and freckles of age—as she embroidered a paisley onto a green sari blouse; remembering the dexterity of her fingers as she clipped the pallu to her shoulder, a safety pin tucked between pursed lips; remembering how she would tell Ashok to set aside two khadi pieces for her and her sister when they would go to the shops the next day.

Indian sari shops are like a two-hour long re-creation of the experience of getting stuck under your mother’s sari pleats every time you attend a wedding. Mostly all the ladies just lean together with their heads pillowed on judgmental palms, talking about the neckline of a blouse that would look good with that jari or the likelihood the green cloth to the side there is khadi. I would steal Amma’s phone off her clinking, bangled hand and, in the domed world of her underskirt, play Temple Run.

There are also rules: If you so much as breathe in the direction of a particular red silk, the shopkeeper whisks it off the shelf and unfurls it in your face, like a cow’s tongue coming out to lick you before retreating hastily back to the roof of the mouth. And like a cowshed, eegas would hover around the sweaty shopkeepers’ faces, their buzzing drowned out by the persistent whizzing of completely non-functional, power-cut-inducing fans. If Hyderabad was picked up and dragged about eight degrees north longitudinally, out of the tropics, we’d probably have a steady flow of electricity throughout the summer.

Anyway, while I’d tap and prod at the figure on screen, attempting to beat my record with the skinny stick-like man in the cowboy hat, Amma and Papai ammakkaiyya would pore over saris. The muted sounds of people bargaining for auto-rickshaw rides and the beeps of cars attempting not to ram into people—or each other—through the walls of shop became the soundtrack to the sari-selection process. As light filtered through Amma’s petticoat, would see flashes of veiny hands, skin folded over like sari pleats, tracing the cloth; sweat coiling at the nape of ammakkaiyya’s neck; the smirking questions she tossed the shopkeeper’s way.

Then, how we’d huddle together in the auto home, her slender fingers gripping the sari bag, back ramrod straight against the peeling upholstery of the seat (ammakkaiyya wasn’t the kind of person to slouch or droop). How she’d open her beerva—a sandalwood-scented cabinet worn soft after years of use—and hang the saris up or deposit them in neat stacks inside. How I’d lay on the bed, stomach to the sheets, legs crossed in the air, eyes closed; letting the rhythms of her voice pass over me, trancelike. How she’d remember about a recent embroidery project or stitch she had tested out and pull them out to toss up into the air and then onto the bed, to show me while I nattered on about a crochet project. How we’d repeat this ritual for years (and even to this day), through puberty and then high school and college applications and university; through shitty WhatsApp connections and Saturday afternoons after a filling portion of rava dosa and chutney, during those hot summer evenings in the talcum-scented air.