By HEMA PADHU
The first time I pick up a razor, I’m twelve, sitting on an upside-down bucket in a poorly lit bathroom. I touch that part of me tentatively and think about making myself bleed. All the other girls at school have had their first period. They huddle together, whispering. When I join them, an air of hushed discretion settles. My father’s razor has a knurled gunmetal handle. A glistening blade is screwed between two metal plates that open like a butterfly’s wing. I squeeze my eyes shut. It’ll hurt. There’ll be blood. Amma will give me a Carefree pad, and it’ll hang awkwardly between my legs. I will no longer be innocent.
I haven’t a clue about what makes a girl bleed, or how babies are made, or how these two things are related. Such matters are not discussed at home. But that monsoon day, my courage abandons me, as it tends to do when I need it the most. I lather up my legs instead. My amma tells me not to shave my legs. Shave now, she warns, and your hair will grow faster and coarser. You’ll look like a chimpanzee. I dry my shaved legs. My skin feels as soft as the belly of a cat. The next day, I’m helping in the kitchen, and Amma stares at my legs. Her lip twitches. She picks up an ugly tomato with brown lines running along its misshapen contours. A fruit that ripens too quickly is no good, she says, dropping it into a pile of rotting vegetable scraps.
I look like my amma. She has wide eyes, a high brow, and thin, brown skin. She grew up in a village milking cows and working the fields, rising with the sun. Her own mother died young, but she had a loving grandmother who gave her a thick pad of folded cloth to put between her legs when she got her first period. When she turned eighteen, she was married off to an older man in the big city. Now she’s up before dawn caring for four children and a pair of fussing in-laws in a tiny flat in a building full of tiny flats. She has greasy hair, cracked heels, and calloused hands. She is not yet forty. She’s never used a razor or put anything but coconut oil on her skin. I remember how she used to look before my siblings arrived. Her long braided hair and slim hips. The way my father gazed at her before his eyes became hooded with fatigue. She catches me staring at her as she grinds batter for idli. Beads of perspiration dot her neck and forehead. She grasps my chin with batter fingers and says, study hard, or you’ll end up like this.
*
On my twenty-first birthday, I’m standing in front of a dazzling array of razors. In America, razors come in pink, lilac, and peach. Double and triple blades. Scented razors. Disposable razors. Razors that cost three times a man’s razor. This must be what they mean by free will. The right to make a thousand variations of the exact same thing. The pink razor has built-in soap stubs. Back home, time was time, and money was money, but in America, a minute saved is a dollar earned. When I start using the white tea-scented, triple-action razor, my hair grows back twice as fast. My amma was right. She was right about a lot of other things, too. America is the best and the worst thing that happened to you, she says. You love yourself more but others less.
I marry an American man who never shaves. His beard is as soft as his hands. Hands that have never scoured pots or scrubbed floors. I visit my home country with my American husband, and my amma takes to him immediately. I find this both endearing and irritating. When she learns I’m pregnant, she rubs coconut oil on my barely noticeable bump. She drags us to Hindu temples. My husband puts his hands together and asks, is he the preserver or the destroyer? At the temple, Amma disappears for a little while and reappears with her head shaved. She has offered her hair to the Gods so I can have an easy pregnancy. I’m speechless. This is how she loves. Wow, my husband says, you look sooo cool. My amma’s laughter rings like the temple bells.
*
When my daughter turns ten, I try to talk to her about breasts and periods. My daughter laughs and pulls a tampon from her school backpack. No big deal, Mom, she says. At sixteen, she wants none of the things I coveted but couldn’t have—razors, tweezers, dermaplaners, perfumes, and makeup brushes. She wears faded tanks and shorts with holes in them. Tufts of hair sprout from her armpits. Soft shag covers her legs. On prom night, I offer to do her makeup but she shrugs me off. She’s wearing a jumpsuit the color of new dawn.
I’m older now than my amma was when I was a teenager. When my daughter comes home from college, she finds me in a shower cap, hair dye dripping down my neck, my face in a collagen mask. She shakes her head and says, what do you think will happen if you stop? Probably nothing. But I’m unable to stop. I belong to my generation.
In the morning, my daughter is making coffee, her eyes crusted with sleep, her hair crackling like angry bees. I wrap my arms around her. She smells like sour milk and toothpaste. I bite back the urge to instruct her. You are beautiful, Kanna, I say. Her brown eyes flash with irritation. It just doesn’t matter anymore, she says. You know that, right? I want to believe her.
Hema Padhu’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Pinch, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She is an Indian immigrant living and working in San Francisco.
