Velvet By Katya Surendran
Velvet spiders, the fiery red dots that I’ve only ever seen in my imagination, were my mother’s favorite playmates as a small child in India. She told me once that she and her brother would find them in the dirt outside their one-room house, entrap them in their hands and make them race each other. They’d fight to get to their crumb-filled destination, crawling over the numerous obstacles my mother set for them. I could never fathom why the spiders didn’t run away after my mother had released them. Why did they go through all the trouble for some tiny crumbs?
A velvet dress, the coveted fabric that my mother had only ever seen in her imagination, was the dress I wore to a friend’s wedding. She had always wanted one just like this as a child, so she got one for me. As a kid, she could never fathom why her father could not buy her such a dress.
Velvet curtains, the drapes that framed my Amaye’s world, protected her from the outside as she spent her days trapped inside reading about the adventures of the brave warrior prince, Ponniyin Selvan. She took breaks only to stare out the window at the cows she fed each morning. She always wanted to be a journalist, but she didn’t think she could do it, so she quit school and let her multitude of servants take care of her. She could never fathom becoming anything other than a wife or a mother.
It was not until my grandmother watched the uneducated fathers, uncles and brothers of her family spend the entirety of their fortune and end up on the streets that she realized the value of knowledge.
She realized that her education could have been her ticket out of a life that was not hers, a life that was dictated by drunken men and their poor decisions. She would not let the same fate fall on her daughter.
When there was no school in their new town, my grandma rounded up all the neighborhood kids, found someone to teach them and petitioned for the mayor of the village to construct a new school for her daughter and the children of the town. She eventually convinced parents to come forward to educate their children in a newly built school. Now, this once one-room hut is one of the biggest schools in that locality in Coimbatore.
However, getting her daughter through school to her ticket to freedom was no small feat. My mother was often prey to some illness that took her out of school for weeks while my Amaye nursed her back to health. When she wasn’t sick, my mother simply refused to go to school, climbing up the Mango trees in her front yard to escape the teachers and their knuckle-hitting rulers. But my grandma would chase her up the tree, feed my mom breakfast, and walk her to school.
When Amaye watched as her daughter suffered from the worst ailment of all, self doubt, she convinced my mother that she could do anything, that she could survive anything.
So while wasteful men controlled my grandmother’s destiny, Amaye ensured that my mother’s life would be her own.
After all the arduous labor, their hope was that I would never have to deal with the same self doubt. I would never think that I was too dumb, too feminine, or too brown to achieve my dreams. Their hope was for my life to be better and in many ways it is.
Despite our incredibly different lives, I am filled with the same fiery red-hot passion that pushed the women in my life forward and the same struggle to believe in myself that held them back. I have realized that the isolation I feel now is no different from what they experienced.
I contain the same self doubt, but I keep scrambling forward, much like the velvet spiders, towards my finish line. Luckily, I have two generations of women who crawled before me so that I could run.
Katya Surendran