Free Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Page A

natural events, such as earthquakes and fatal floods, or with historical and political events, for example, a massive-scale, British Raj – engineered famine in the early 1940s and hangings of nationalist freedom fighters. This cousin informed us younger ones that an essential rite in Hindu Bengali weddings—the wedding ceremony lasts several days—involves the brides washing the feet of her bridegroom and drying his feet with her hair. She herself had coal-black hair, long enough and tough enough to towel-dry the largest, wettest pair of spousal feet. She also confided that if a woman had reddish or brownish hair instead of black, it was inescapable proof that some ancestor of that woman had—horror of horrors!—mated with a
firangi
, a white-skinned foreigner, in the pre – British Raj past when European pirates regularly raided our bountiful coastal towns. Hindu society was divided into distinct castes: maintenance of caste “purity” and vigilant avoidance of caste “pollution” were required of each individual. My family belonged to the Brahmin caste and could marry only within that caste. Neither my cousin nor I had a way of foretelling that at age twenty-three, while a graduate student in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, I would marry a blue-eyed American fellow student and become the first in my family to commit caste “pollution.” Perhaps my opinionated cousin was correct: my husband and I have two sons, and both have brown hair.
    The girl children on our block, including my cousins and my two sisters, had healthier relationships with their hair than I had with mine. My sisters inherited my father’s thick, curly hair. Curly hair was admired. I had wavy hair, but the longer it grew, the less wavy it was. All of us parted our hair on one side or the other of our heads, preferably alternating sides to ensure the hair part remained narrow. The first time we expected to part our hair in the center would be on our wedding day during the
sindur
-application rite, when the bridegroom rubs lavish quantities of vermilion powder on the center part of his bride. The vermilion red in a Hindu Bengali woman’s hair part is the sign that she is married and that her husband is still living. The red represents life force. A married woman must wear
sindur
every day of her married life. The
sindur
containers on the dressing tables of my mother and aunts were intricate artifacts made of silver or polished buffalo horn. Though I have never worn
sindur
, I have collected these containers as homage to the anonymous craftsmen who elevated the functional to the beautiful. The vermilion used by my mother’s generation was later discovered by scientists to be cinnabar, containing mercury sulfide. Contemporary women have replaced the toxic original with a harmless vermilion-red powder. Hindu traditions survive by being adaptable.
    Unmarried girls and wives take guiltless pride in their long, lustrous hair. But Hindu Bengali tradition requires widows to keep their heads permanently shaved as one of many gestures of penance. My grandmother was the only widow in the household of my Calcutta childhood. I remember the neighborhood itinerant barber, who tended to male customers under a shady tree on the sidewalk, coming to our home to razor-scrape my grandmother’s head every week. My fine-boned grandmother actually looked elegant even when, between the barber’s trips, her scalp sprouted silvery stubble.
    My mother’s attempts to improve the quality of hair I had been born with paled in comparison to those of the more competitive mothers of unmarried girls in our neighborhood. Every weekday afternoon after we’d returned from school by bus or rickshaw and hurried through snacks at home, we congregated in the large front yard of the girl who lived next door to me to play until dusk. My sisters and I braided our hair with pretty satin or taffeta ribbons