Lakshana

You chew on your dainty porcelain with your gapless teeth. One crunch after the other, it is heard around the world and we all listen, and even though the ceramic is in your mouth, we are cut. It is not like when you sink your gapless teeth into my clay. That is silent and apathetic, with your mouthful of mush and your face full of pity. I feel sorry for you because you do not taste it right—but you also did not mature your taste buds on the third-grade-cafeteria-table-brown-paper-bag-test the way I did.

I have become used to the crunch of your gapless teeth on your dainty porcelain, and it is no longer cacophonous—no longer mouth nails on my chalkboard skin—now that I refuse to join your supper, and now that I refuse to bite.

I’ve been watching you chew for my whole life:

crunch after crunch after crunch on pretty girl

after no thanks of ugly girl after crunch on pretty boy

after ew no of my mother and all my family and now my daughter

after yet another crunch on the pretty pigments

and each crunch taught me that I need sunscreen more than they do because I may as well compensate if I am to compete and so I—begging to my inimitably dark reflection in the bodega shelf—choose the foundation that I did not grow up on and I choose a foundation that is just a little more dainty, and then I am silica and not lakshana.

That is not my lakshana because my lakshana is

my lakshana 

is beauty

is grace

is not Miss Anywhere but it is certainly not here

is really my pageant where I am judge, jury, and executioner

and it is not a poison like your hydraulic adherence to gnashing delicate dainty porcelain—not china nor a delicacy, don’t you misunderstand it. 

It is poison for me, and you have poisoned my mother—I do not forgive, much less forget—with such virulent and prescribed poison that when she taught me to carry my clay, it was fuller’s earth she gave me, and when I inquired hi I did some research and this not just an ayurvedic Cetaphil it is a facial bleach, she did not know that the purpose (not side effect) was to turn skin more normal more lovely because her mom was poisoned too and the multhani mitti was an heirloom—and now I clutch my lakshana for my amma’s mom’s mom who covered her ears from the crunch crunch crunch, and now I shield my lakshana and her small-and-attached earlobes as much as the ears themselves and I shield the crooks of my daughter’s nose and elbows and all other crooks—and now I heat my lakshana in the office microwave and take big fucking bites, and I let the smelly adoration trickle out of my mouth, and I hope you find your lakshana too—and now I pray for my mother, in the morning, in the mirror, when I throw water on my cheeks to wash and not wash away.

***

I have recently undertaken praying for my daughter. You have poisoned her, too.

***

Yesterday, I was let down. My mother was the courageous ship, I was the brave settler, and my daughter, or so I thought, would not need to be brave or courageous; this would be home, land at last. Yesterday, my daughter was calm when she walked through the door, sixty feet from the bus stop, stoic like parents are. 

Either she was afraid to tell me something, or the bus wasn’t her favorite part of the day for once, or both—and I saw in her face that her lakshana was encouraged for the first time to shut the fuck up. They probably didn’t say that, because third-graders don’t use such adult words as ‘shut the fuck up’ for their adulterated feelings—especially not in school—but they are armed with equally tasteful euphemisms for my girl to soak up, and soak them up she does because children are sponges. You do not wash your sponges after doing the dishes, airing your dirty laundry, and your sponges smell like your shit. Yesterday my daughter smelled your shit. Yesterday I was let down because I know that I was not enough to satisfy you and so you taught your kids—and I was let down because I know that she does not know that her paper bag tests have already begun—and I was let down because she thinks her lakshana is tightly wound around your fingertips. I reminded her to yank it back. This is still not home for her like I thought it would be, even though she says ‘munk’ not ‘monk’ and her clothes are from Malls not Marshalls.

She asked for hand sanitizer this morning, already late for school. We had only just buckled in, after a hurried breakfast matinée of Jessie, and when I performed the typically giggly reminder of ‘buckle buckle’ she did not reciprocate with her usual ‘okay okay’, but instead thrust it upon me that hand sanitizer was a necessity and we would leave on her terms. I knew why, and still asked.

“My hands smell”: the truth

“No they don’t”: lie

“Like paratha”: the evidence

“So?”: feign ignorance

“Please?” 

I obliged. We were not leaving on my terms. We were not leaving on her terms either, but instead on the terms of your porcelain-barbed shit sponge. I reminded her to clutch it again, to yank it back, but she is not old enough to know she has lakshana, only to think it when prompted. 

In the car ride back, when she was unsafely tucked away in school for a few hours, I called to mind the faces of each indiscriminate child I had seen her with. Who was it? Was it the fat boy with the ginger hair? That ugly child with the crass father who wore shit-stained Skechers and basketball shorts to the second-grade play? The school’s name begins with ‘St.’ and he chose shit-stained Skechers. He looked the type to gleefully infringe on my lakshana, and his son, my daughter’s. I heard his beer-bellied laugh, and saw his full grin, and condemned his son’s raucous behavior from the one time at Parent’s Visit Day when his son threw the class fish across the room at another boy. I saw son in front of father, both with:

face muscles erect in a pumpkin’s smile

plaid shirt selfishly unbuttoned

derelict sneakers with a margarita rim of mud, dirt, grass, and dogshit. I gifted the fat ginger boy the same shoes, not only because I could not remember the (I’m sure, tasteless) shoes the fat ginger boy wore, but also because it fit my narrative.

I did not ever ask my daughter who her arbiter of hand smell was, and why they were so merciful to peanut butter jelly and cinnamon roll and french toast—but not the savory kind, not any breakfast I make. 

It did not matter. I was grateful for this artificial father-son pair. To hate two in theory is less suffocating than to hate you in truth. I sat in the garage.

***

There was no smile on my daughter’s face, today, again—only defeat, betrayed by vacuum eyes. We ate dinner quietly. Time moves so quickly for children, but I was more impatient. She noticed. I waited for her to talk. She had plenty of time because she was not eating with my daughter’s gusto: no haldi peppering her chin from the mouthfuls too full, no fervor to mix together the dahi and the chawal and the kadhi, and no lackluster attempts at napkin use. No big fucking bites.

I asked if I made dinner poorly today. I didn’t. She said I didn’t.

I asked what was wrong. She said nothing was wrong. I should’ve known.

I asked why she didn’t want to spend this Tuesday afternoon at the after school YMCA, the commune of all her best friends, especially Isa who she adores the most and always wants to sleep over with, come to think of it, Isa has been absent in her chattering this week, so is it Isa? I hope it is not because at least you can laugh off the little fat shit-stained-Sketcher-adorned white boy—not another brown girl. 

I asked myself if it was worth it to push all these buttons. She looked about to cry.

I asked her if she wanted to talk. She said no.

“Okay. I love you.” We finished dinner, and she went to her room to do homework. We did not watch Jessie tonight, but maybe it is best—she finds the Ravi voice funny and I do not want her to think that she can make you laugh like that ever, so

***

Ten minutes ago, my daughter entered my room, inquisitive but not curious. She did not want to learn. She wanted to know. At eight years old, she wanted to know—but I didn’t know how to tell her to stop the hurt without looking the hurt in its vacuous blue eyes and rejecting its perverse advances again and again and again.

I told her they did that to me too: the cafeteria tables; the high school resistance friend group I was in that was labeled the Nonwhites; watching my father receive citizenship after me and the officer correcting him when he pronounced it indievisible and not indivisible (which I have since never fucked up) in the pledge of allegiance. I told her that I never pledged allegiance again. I handed her every ounce of my resentment and told her that here is the homeschool education my daughter will receive and it will help my daughter compete and not just compensate for the homeschooling that you received and will pass on to your children. My daughter will learn to eat clay, and porcelain, and everything else she wants to eat, but she will never eat dahi and chawal and kadhi without taking big fucking bites and letting the adoration spill all over the place, the peppered haldi-stained orange-colored adoration that will stain her clothes until she is old enough to cook for herself, having moved out, and then once again when she remembers that what she misses most about being my daughter is ghar ka khana, having watched a Youtube video on Sindhi kadhi.

***

Tomorrow, when my daughter comes home, there may not be a smile on her face. There may be bits and pieces of her that your kids’ bite-corrective-braces (soon to be gapless) tore out of her 8-year-old heart again—and your kids, with their shit-stained Skechers and splintered porcelain and proper elocution and pretty faces and thrown fish for which there was no punishment nor castigation, will walk the sixty feet from the bus stop having blissfully chewed another day. It will not always be like this. Some of your children will learn to taste, and I thank you and/or them, sure, but others will sink their teeth in and

deny agency and

bite at my daughter’s not-as-pink areolas and

for a moment relish in the shame of having put themselves out for unrefined clay and

tell her to feel grateful for the missionary work and

assume their missionary works and

relish in the pride of having taken a dose of something different, abnormal, not from here, from someone who is not at home and I imagine your children as such because, after all:

they are your children, and my daughter is my own.