WHAT WE WEAR IS WHO WE ARE

I love Pongal. This festival, celebrating the harvest as winter withdraws, is one of my earliest (and most beautiful) memories as a child growing up in Madras. We would all wake up really early—I would be scrubbed, buttoned into my white cotton Bengali kurta, and sent off to visit my friend’s home. The girls I went to school with, and was used to seeing only in the sameness of uniforms, would magically transform this day, resplendent in their pattu pavadai (a fitted blouse and a full skirt, both cut from jewel-toned silk with borders of woven gold). As the sun rose, it set ablaze the colours in their skirts and they would twirl to show it off.

If you closed your