Of Second Skins

Disclaimer – No offence intended. A must share, though.

My husband, like his father, had a rather quaint but endearing habit of maintaining a scrapbook of sorts. A hard cover exercise book, in which he’d note down important dates, events, milestones, poems, and stick articles, letters. A year and 3 days into our marriage, he discovered a lovely poem about the Saree which had been published in the New Straits Times, Malaysia on the 11th of December 1992.
Because of my growing fixation, obsession with the Saree, he reminded me of this poem. Yesterday, I saw him rummaging through an old sports canvas bag while I was getting ready to go for the Auckland Diwali Festival performance. He kept pulling out various old photos and memoirs from his childhood. Suddenly, he extracted his old scrapbook, leafed through the pages excitedly and found this poem. He read it aloud, then asked me to share it on our Saree Speak page.
So here it is. A beautiful bitter sweet poem. I shall reproduce it here to ensure it is accessible for one and all. Will post photo too.
The article with the poem reads as follows :
‘To the organisers of The Kuala Lumpur (why not Malaysia?) World Poetry Reading, we commend the following poem titled The Second Skin by Satyendra Srivastava, from London, by the way :
This one is not
The Sita of Ramayana
Nor from Ayodhya
She is Sita from Chapel Street
Hounslow Middlesex
Sick with
Chronic heart disease
When the nurse asked
her to change
Into something more comfortable
Sita replied
This is the most
comfortable thing
Next to my skin I have
The sari is my second skin
I would like to die
wearing it
It is my pahchan
my identity
Her husband standing nearby
Smiled happily and
Told the nurse
‘My dear
Not very long ago
But certainly long
before you were born
Some strange
Englishmen went to India
They wanted to turn
Indians into
Dark coloured Brits
But they miserably
failed
You know why
Because the
Sitas of India
Like this one
Never discarded
Their second skin’.

Here I am in My Second Skin, a gold and cream checked Kanjivaram silk, with gold and peachy pink borders and pallu. Clicked during my students’ Navarathri temple performance. One photo with fellow Sakhis edited out, the other shows them also draped in their comfortable second skin – Melanie Jeyakumar, ravishing, in a flame red and orange silk, Urvashi Shinde, gorgeous, in a baby pink tussar silk while Punguzhali is the epitome of grace and calm in a sea blue embroidered Saree with purple and gold borders and pallu.
Embrace your second skin, Saree Sakhis.