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

and looped the two braids like hoop earrings, using the ends of the ribbons to anchor them behind each ear. I loved my collection of ribbons, which I stored in cans that had originally contained imported chocolates. My worry was that during energetic games of hide-and-seek, the ribbons would slip off my skinny braids, which would be humiliating enough, and be lost, which would have been tragic. The girls who were obsessed with hair protection wrapped their braids tightly with ugly, black cotton tapes to protect them from sun damage and dust during playtime. At bedtime, they probably rewrapped their braids with clean cotton ribbons so that heads tossing against pillowcases wouldn’t result in split ends. My oldest girl cousin was the only one in our family to wrap her braids during the day. On the nights she suffered from what she called “growing pains” in her calves, she repurposed the black ribbons to neutralize the pain by winding them tightly around her legs.
    The first wedding of a Mukherjee relative I witnessed, that of a paternal uncle, took place when I must have been five or six. Marriages were “arranged” by family elders on the basis of economic and social compatibility, the groom’s career potential, the bride’s physical comeliness and fair complexion, and the spousal candidates’ families’ medical histories (which had to be free of heritable and communicable diseases). The groom was a tall (at least by our standards), handsome young man with a full head of fastidiously groomed, wavy hair. Hindu weddings are elaborate, some ceremonies having to be performed in the bride’s home, and a lesser number in the groom’s. I remember with astonishing vividness my uncle, dressed in the Bengali bridegroom’s fine
dhoti
, silk
kurta
, and tall wedding head gear, ushering his bride in through the front door of our flat as the conch-blowing, ululating women in our family swarmed around her to welcome her. I also remember each adult woman relative sticking honey-dipped fingers into the bride’s ears and mouth so that she would hear and utter only sweet words. The literal and the symbolic merge in Hindu rituals, and though I didn’t recognize it then, I was learning a lesson useful for my future as a writer. During the wedding rites performed on the day after her arrival in our home, I recall witnessing this new aunt cooking and feeding her bridegroom rice and curried fish, giving him the whole fish’s prized head and torso, and keeping (as tradition demanded) the bony tail for herself. Did she wash the bridegroom’s feet and dry them with her hair before that ritual meal? I witnessed this ritual act of wifely obeisance, didn’t I? I can no longer be sure. A dear New York – based friend of mine, a naturalized US citizen, confided to me that she knew her first marriage was over when, on an impulse, she went to a salon and asked for her long hair to be chopped off. She wears her hair short and is happily remarried.
    In the winter of 1948, after India had been a sovereign nation for nearly a year and a half, my father, mother, and we three sisters sailed for Europe, my youngest sister wearing a scarf over her recently shaved head. My father would work for a few years with pharmaceutical companies in Switzerland and England. We returned to Calcutta, but not to the extended-family household with its oppressive allegiance to ancient traditions. We began life as a nuclear family, and I found myself no longer fretting about my fine hair.
    I now live in two cities: New York and San Francisco. When I first moved to San Francisco, I felt lucky to have been befriended by a California-born neighbor, who knew the answers to all the settling-in questions that I hadn’t yet thought to ask: for example, where to find the freshest fish, the most inspired florist, the masseuse with magic fingers, the caring yoga instructor. The only question that stumped her was where