Did you grow up combing your Barbie’s blinding blond locks? Rooting around a Crayola box for the “Burnt Umber” or “Ochre” since “Flesh” looked nothing like your own? Ahh…those self-conscious days are over (for the most part) since that crayon is now “peach,” Bratz dolls come in all shades of colors (and flavors of sluttiness), and there’s even a magazine for young South Asian kids (Kahani) that’s as awesome as Highlights! (OK, fine. Kahani’s a lot smarter. If IQ=DQ aka “desi quotient,” I wouldn’t be writing in this space, mmkay?)
Anyway, adding to this glorious list for sepia kids - longtime Sepia commenter, meetup regular, and all-around lit-star Pooja Makhijani just published another book! Mama’s Saris is a beautifully illustrated children’s book about a young girl mesmerized by her mother’s luscious sari collection, yearning to play dress-up, to grow up to be like just like her mother.
Pooja is already well-known as the editor of the sensitive essay collection Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America and has written for many youth/teen magazines. Most remarkably, she writes about universal childhood themes (such as wanting to wear your mother’s clothes to feel grown up) in a South Asian context, with very specific desi details.
While most of us look back on our childhoods with adult eyes, Pooja somehow retained the uncanny ability to delve into the past and write about it with a childlike sensibility intact.
Reading this book, I remembered my mother helplessly shooing me away as I tried to catch the gold lights in her party saris with my grubby hands…and the time we went shopping for the first sari I could call my very own…
I think I’m going to buy another copy as a gift for Mother’s Day. I’m keeping this one for a daughter I may have someday.
In her Author’s Note, Pooja writes:
When I was a child, my friends and i used to pull out our mother’s fancy clothes and play “dress up.” I remember all of us trying on hats and shawls and scarves and gloves, falling over in leather pumps and getting tangles in colorful costume jewelry…
For me, it was my mother’s saris - her dress-up clothes - that were captivating. They were every color you can imagine - apricot, olive, green, sepia - and had names like Baluchari (saris woven with animals and kings and scenes from Indian myths), Banarasi (timeless silks from the nothern city of Varanasi), Kalamkari (hand-painted saris)… Since her saris were too much for me to handle, I would instead steal her dupattas… and drape them the way I thought a sari would be arranged. This compromise sufficed until I was tall enough to wear her saris and, finally old enough to buy my own.
I wrote Mama’s Saris after realizing that my own fascination with my mother’s fancy clothes was not unique. It seemed as if each of my female friends, regardless of ethnicity or age, remembers being captivated by her mother’s grown-up clothes. By dressing up like their mothers (and emulating everything else that they did), they would be just as beautiful, too.
Oh, and she keeps her own collection of saris, “carefully folded in a suitcase under her bed, just like her mother does.”
Damn. That’s it. I’m off to go call my moms before I embarrass myself by dissolving into a flood of sentimental tears right here.
