The Girth of Her Finger

Normally, she would have put a man to shame, who would run away whimpering in tears or growling in rage, but I am no such man.

You should often be the bigger person, be more forgiving and set an example in kindness, at the very least for your own sake if not for anyone else’s. However, every once in a while, a peculiar situation arises and you should be ready to give the nasty of the society a taste of their own medicine. When you do that, the spectators of the spectacle will try to make you believe that you did the wrong thing by retaliating (not an entirely erroneous moral assessment either, albeit in a vacuum) but I am here to tell you that you will be doing nothing wrong in such a case; and that once in a while you must bend the tenets of morality to make a quick trip to hell and return unscathed. Let me go one step further. If you subscribe to my doctrine and to my subculture, I shall personally be responsible for your absolute and eternal absolution. On the Day of Judgement, I will hold the door of heaven open for you and say to god, “they are with me” as his angels frisk you at the gates for ID.

In that spirit, here goes the incident that inspired this body of prose. The other day, I accompanied my aunt who was to meet her relative - a woman I used to once know. We were sitting around a dastarkhwan/dining spread, sipping tea, when she glanced at my fingers and noticed my late grandmother’s ring on my ring finger. The spark in her eye met the glistening surface of the aqeeq stone, and sin entered her body through her cornea. I could tell she had been eyeing it for a while and as soon as the ice broke between us (again, after 20 years or so since the last time we met), she pointed at my hand with a nasty look, practically salivating, and said, “what is this girls’ ring you are wearing, they make your already slender fingers look even more womanly. Such shame, tch tch”, she said.

Normally, she would have put a man to shame, who would run away whimpering in tears or growling in rage, but I am no such man. Or at least, I was no such man that day. I had had no gluten and was at my best. I am, even on my good days, known to say that which the others won’t, and I am also known to then guffaw heartily, laughing right from my lungs, my stomach, and then my larynx when nothing else is left. So, I wasted no moment in response, and with a smile, I said, “Ah! I would gift them to you, auntie, but I dont think they would look good on your lumberjack fingers.”

Her face flushed red faster than I’d thought possible. She quickly pulled back her hands into her lap, faster than a snapping turtle in shame, and smothered her bloated mittens into the gap between her crotch and her heels. If one didn’t know better, they’d think she started massaging her fingers with such ferocity, frantically squeezing them, so as to make them thinner, more womanly, more… like mine. But alas, dear reader, too late! I had already sized them up and decreed that they had no business being on a woman - this woman.

The ring(s) in question that I carry quite well.

All this while, my slender feminine fingers lay resting and composed where they were; beautifully adorned with the rings that belonged to my grandmother - my first love.

Twenty years earlier, my late grandmother, whose ring I was now wearing, had gotten morbidly sick after a trip she had taken for religious reasons. She had since been down with the worst case of jaundice which claimed her life not much later. Day by day, we watched her beautiful skin turn a sickly yellow, a sickness which had creeped up into her beautiful loving eyes the last I saw her. A month before her death, to save us from the sight of our favourite grandmother’s painful demise, we (kids of the house) were sent to the house of our relative, this woman with the meaty fingers and a meatier skull. She owed us much. They owed us much. They had after all, been living in a house we had been, inch by inch, building for our grandmother to spend the remainder of her life in. She never got to live there.

Here, at her house, Miss Girthy had abused me (barely 6 years old) and my siblings for 20 days straight, beating us at times, and starving us, even stealing the food that our mother would send us through her, taking advantage of our situation in that needy time. Her resentment came from, (in addition to being a congenitally nasty person with viciousness embedded in her at a cellular level, enough to starve children), the jobs my father and my uncle had secured in the government sector while they (her family) had slid slowly and surely into poverty within just a few years of what they thought would be a very prosperous life in business; swindling tourists and the rich of Kashmir. They had been, yet again, rescued by my grandparents, and my parents after them, gifted land that was already scarce, and resources which were already dire.

Her family and mine, we had come from similar means - a shared courtyard of the primitive downtown. In Kashmir of those times of the 90s, teeming with meagre possibilities, her family had chosen business which they thought would give them unseen riches, and my grandmother, the visionary who never saw a good thing for herself, sacrificed everything in her life, sold her clothes and food even, prolonged her personal destitution, to make sure her sons got the education she thought they needed to brave the new world. She expected nothing in return; no riches and no grand welcomes.

And it had worked. The bargain had paid off. Her sons had made it. They had climbed a step in the social ladder.

On my grandmother’s hands, these rings I now wear once looked like teardrops of yearning, like pools of hope. She had slender fingers, much like mine, and a frail body, much like mine, and a mighty resolve, which I inherited. She would come to the rescue of those twice her size in demeanor, and it is from her spirit that I learned to be larger than my body allowed me to be.

It was that ring that faced the lust of a greedy usurper that day, as we sipped tea and reminisced the glorious past we shared.