The Beauty We Deny Our Sons
You’ve lost count of the times
You push his little hands away
From your jewellery box.
Coral, Amethyst, Jade
Are not meant to add to his vocabulary.
What would he do with them?
The delight of savouring the way
Lapis Lazuli rolls off the tongue
Is not reserved for him.
You make peace, albeit too early,
that he will never know
Lacquer from filigree, enamel from inlay.
And that to him, bangles will always be
nothing more than a sound.
And though he found
comfort in burying his little face
In the petals of your sari,
You will keep from him the
treasured knowledge of the
Weight of brocade, the itch of zardozi,
How to tell chiffon from georgette
At a touch, reveal the secret of the age,
Of the count of a yard of raw silk.
For him, the smell of rose petals
Or mogra or magnolia
Will always be mixed with the sweat of
A woman’s palm,
Never first-hand
Will be his experience of learning
the names of spices or pickles.
The curious formulae his foremothers
formulated for the future
Will become a forfeiture.
He will grapple and stammer with
clove, cinnamon, cardamom, carom
at the supermarket because they
were lost on him by you.
Since you decided for the little hands
That your potions of keeping palms supple
Were not for him, nor was
mastering the illusion of a sharp jawline,
Beauty for him will always be a mystery
And forbiddingly, a conquest.
The heaviness of a knitted blanket,
The miracle of crafting crochet from nothing
Will be a blur in the background, not a detail.
So when his friend holds up two swatches
Of colour for the walls of their workspace,
He will pretend not to care. Look closer,
his unused mauve and magenta Crayola
are testimony to this.
And when you won’t tell him why
you clutch your abdomen every
half an hour in the middle of his lessons,
he will blame it on the guavas he plucked for you
As his father urged him
dizzyingly higher up the tree,
snarling “You whimpering monkey.”
The doors you close, not letting him in,
Presuming that some things are best kept locked
Are doors he will break into,
Sometimes on unsuspecting quarters.
What are these borders?
The beauty you deny your son
In wait of a daughter,
That there never was.
But he was,
all along.
