I was finally born—a girl, dusky and crooked, into an orthodox Brahmin family where perfection wasn't just a desire, it was a demand. I entered the world with my feet tilted inward, turned toward each other like a quiet apology for daring to exist. My skin bore the color of deep earth after rain—rich, alive, but not the fair, glowing hue my relatives believed was the mark of beauty. I was born wrong. They didn't say it out loud, not right away. But I saw it in the tightened lips, the quick glances, the sighs that filled the spaces between congratulations and disappointment.
The doctor told my parents I needed surgery. Something clinical. Corrective. Something to fix the mistake of my body. But again, my paternal grandmother intervened—just as she had when they considered aborting me. She waved off the doctor's concern with the certainty only age and patriarchy can give. "Massage," she said. "Age-old ways. She doesn't need knives and stitches. She needs touch. Warmth. Patience."
And so she began. Every single day, she rubbed oil into my twisted feet with strong, stubborn hands, hands that had raised generations, birthed children, buried dreams. I don't know if it was love or duty or pride that moved her fingers, but they worked like prayer. Each stroke, a silent insistence that I could be made right—at least physically. That I could be redeemed, not by medicine, but by tradition.
They even hired a Dhai Buri, a seasoned village woman with time-creased hands and milk-sweet breath, who massaged me and my mother day after day. She sang as she worked, low lullabies that folded into my skin. I don't remember the words, but I remember the rhythm. And slowly, the crookedness began to fade. My feet straightened under pressure and oil, pulled into line by the weight of rituals older than my pain.
But even as my feet were being fixed, I was already branded. The relatives came with their careful cruelty, cloaked in concern. "Poor thing," they said. "She's so dark. And look at those legs—thank god they're improving." I became a whispered warning, a story mothers told their daughters. *Don't eat too many mangoes when you're pregnant or your child will be dark like hers. Pray harder, do more fasts, or you'll end up with misfortune like that girl.*
I wasn't a baby—I was a blemish. A matter of shame wrapped in swaddling cloth. My mother, already exhausted, bore their words like wounds. And I? I absorbed it all in silence. Children always do. I didn't have language yet, but I had feeling. I felt the burden of my skin, the shame in my shape. I was learning my place in the world before I could walk in it.
Even now, I wonder if my grandmother massaged my feet to straighten them—or to straighten my destiny. Maybe she believed that if my legs looked right, the world would look at me differently. But crooked feet are easy to fix. It's the gaze of people that warps you forever.
And yet, I survived. Even bent and brown, I survived. Every stroke of oil, every whispered insult, every sidelong glance—I endured it all before I even knew how to speak. And somewhere in that survival, a fire began to grow.