Almaarii
Almaarii (closet/cupboard) is a collaborative storytelling project that has a simple idea- to collect all kinds of narratives surrounding what closets mean for people in South Asia. This project puts together real stories and real illustrators together to collect narratives on closets often withheld, hidden, or lost in translation.[description taken from their wonderful blog]
​
​
CONCEPT
I wrote and illustrated my own closet as a testimony of my queer experience on the inside. The focus in this illustration was on the extremely detailed fabric of the sarees — both on my mother as well as the ones in the closet — that occupy the central space in the piece I wrote. These were thus created with painstaking detail. Personal memory colours and morphs the illustration, however, as I invoke a fresher memory of my mother than what she looked like when I was as tiny as I've drawn myself here. It is how I see her now, as opposed to what she was back then — a confused woman in her early twenties, so much nearer to the age that I am now. Time is fluid in our heads and the same fluidity makes this supposed youth inconceivable, falling somewhere outside my imagination.
NEVER WORN, NEVER TORN
My closet was a single drawer within a wooden cupboard that was, I think, older than the house itself. One year a mold set in its bones and I was then allotted a shared space at the very bottom of my mother’s Godrej almaari. From then on, every new article of clothing was subject to rigorous scrutiny and value assessment. Can the item in question it be folded, washed, battered, and slept in on particularly exhausting days? Have allowances been made for stains and assurances offered that it would never leak colour? Can it survive Dadi’s weekly laundry and hold within its fold all that unwashed, hard soap? If the item checks all boxes, it would be stowed at the very bottom. These were mostly my clothes that I’d have to prostrate like a pilgrim to dredge. The only clothes that made the cut for space and were thus delicately perched on the hangers above, were Maa’s sarees.
​
​
My closet – if I can call it mine, is dipped in every shade under the sun. Light cotton dhotis and heavier and holier than thou rivers of silk; clouds of pure pastel crepes and airy georgette jewels; benarasi and chikankaari and kantha tapestries on fabrics that looked like anything but cloth.
​
I grew up looking at those shifting northern lights, imagining how it would be to wear them.
​
My closet is hardly mine, I was barely ever in it. I wasn’t on its creaky panels or in the photos plastered on its sides. I wasn’t on the bare walls of my home, nor was I under the heavy diwan, waiting for the seasons to turn, seeped in the scent of naphthalene balls. My truth exists somewhere outside the four walls of my home, travelling ear to ear, word to paper, paint stroke to beholder. I filled every space I stepped into with my own colours except my own home, my own closet.
I open the rusty metal doors of the almaari and stare at the selection. She’s standing somewhere behind me, fixing her hair in the mirror, waiting for me to put on what she’s set aside for me.
​
“Maa, tum samjhogi nahi.”
​
But she does. She understands everything. What she doesn’t understand is what’s even there to understand. “It’s my own story.” She says. “It’s everyone’s story. I don’t think any woman likes men, it’s just something we have to do, that I had to do, and you’ll have to do too. What’s there to understand?”
​
“Maa, tum samjhogi nahi.”
​
But she does. She understands absences and she understands silences. She understands repression and she understands what it takes to fold and wash and stuff all your leakages and stains and fades into the lowest drawer of your closet. She understands because that is the compromise she made – a lifetime caressing an unacknowledged hole in her being that she dares not let out of the closet. What she doesn’t understand is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
​
“Maa, let me wear one of your sarees today, na”
​
She doesn’t even look at me when she says,
​
“Nahi, tum kharab kar dogi.”