India on my skin
Incense and florals take me back to South India. I am standing in a shop watching a woman with one long fingernail roll a dough-like substance onto a stick. She then roles it in Jasmin powder and declares it incense.
My hand is in the lap of a pregnant woman whose henna-stained hands are the very definition of life. After six months here I have grown resilient against the sale tactics of men, specifically those selling anything between spices and used scooters. But I was not resilient toward the sale tactics of this woman.
If all salesmen in the states could be saleswomen, I would make a habit of buying more and shopping less. If they could all be pregnant saleswomen, well, I would have no money.
Surprising because the only thing that makes me more uncomfortable than a man trying to shake me down for money in exchange for whatever he is peddling is a pregnant woman. She reminds me of a Russian nesting doll situation. I envision the fetus in her belly to be a ticking bomb, waiting to make its way into this world with no one's consent but its own.
The woman at the guest house I frequented in Kerala told me I should go check out the pregnant woman's shop and gave me a coupon for a free arm and hand of henna. I was sure she would get a commission on the pound of incense I was bound to buy but I didn't care.
I think she knew I was sad in that last week in a half before I left India. I rarely left my room because I was binge-watching Outlander and scarfing down packages of tea biscuits that came in yellow and pink packages for 20 rupees from the shop on the corner.
I hired a tuk-tuk for the day and he took me to the shop. It was the cleanest place I had ever been to in India. The tile floors were spotless even though tourist tracked their way in and out, and the smell of two dozen varieties of incense and 400 different exotic floral extracts lining the back wall was not overpowering. It was like swimming in all of the things India is, the smells, the life, and knowing that the women rolling incense did not go home to a place that looked anything like this.
When I placed my hand in her lap she shook it, not in a greeting way but in the way you would shake something dead to see if there’s still life in it. Truthfully, I felt a little dead. The only path ahead of me was getting back to the states because I had promised myself six months in Asia and with each moment before my plane departed New Delhi the life drained from my body a little more.
I sent a bit of my remaining life force into the joints of my fingers and hands so my henna surface would not be squishy like that of a dead fish. Tea biscuits have very little nutritional value, after all.
While bending over the atomic bomb that was a baby in her body, she swooped lines, flowers, and dots onto my skin. While she stained my hand with India I thought about the life inside of her, and I thought about the lack of life inside of me.
I was okay with it.
Not that I was going to die, but I thought my living was done. I thought I did the big once and a lifetime thing and now I will go home. I will engage in other people's versions of good living because at least I tried and for the next few weeks, I get to wear a bit of India on my skin.