lipstick bindi

When I was a few months old, my parents had my ears pierced at Claire’s and my dad bought bright red lipstick at the drugstore and painted a little dot between my eyebrows.

I cried the entire night after the sales associate clamped my ears with a miniature gun and shot them with little diamond studs. Afterwards, my dad marked the occasion by giving me a tiny bindi with a stick of Revlon liquid lipstick.

The bindi, as pictured on Rekha, is both as an ornament and a symbol of the third eye chakra in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain rituals. It is traditionally painted on with vermillion powder and today it comes in colorful stickers with pearls and gems, though the quintessential red circle will forever live on.

If my parents chose to raise me back in India, the ritual would have taken place at a temple, with a priest, music, chanting, sweets, and everyone they knew in attendance. But this was 1998 in Boston and there wasn’t a place anywhere near that sold vermillion or any of the other necessary supplies. So lipstick was their way of commemorating the milestone, and kind of an iconic one.

Maybe it was indicative of something. Maybe subsituting a mall for the temple and lipstick for a bindi was foreshadowing of how many other cultural modifications would eventually become the status quo.

When The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri begins, it is 1968 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ashima is standing in her kitchen frying rice krispies with spices, peanuts, lemon juice, and red onions an attempt to emulate the popular street food she used to buy for pennies every day in Calcutta, known as bhel or jhalmuri.

Fast forward 30 years later and things were changing, slowly. Communities persisted; expanding, finding meaningful proxies to build a life similar to the ones they left behind, and passing their wisdom down.

The diaspora bears witness. To my mother, Navratri was nine long nights straight of dancing outside on dry grass and soft dirt, sparklers and fireworks crackling in the humidity, live singers, flower garlands, and string lights. To me, the festival will always be Saturdays in October at a rented banquet hall. It is sarees and lehengas paired with wool coats and ballet flats, Bollywood music blaring on the sound system, chai in paper cups.

Maybe these are pale imitations of a home I have never lived in, but they are familiar and special, a culture I belong to because someone once thought of lipstick and rice krispies.

my mom and I at Navratri (Boston 2001)