Some of my fondest childhood memories were those special days when I would get off the big yellow bus at the end of the school day and see Amma standing in the doorway in a sari, waiting for us, her beauty radiating in that special way an Amma looks to an adoring child. Sometimes it was a pandigai and she was in one of her gorgeous, timeless Kanchipurams; other times, she just felt like wearing one of her fabulous everyday saris, in those particular prints of the late 70s and early 80s that somehow evoke that Ilaiyaraaja era in Tamizh film music. (You know what I mean.) Small flowers bursting across the fabric in pinks and purples or those brown-orange-mustard geometric situations.
By the time I was a preteen, I couldn’t wait to graduate from my childish pavadai to my first pavadai davani. I felt so grown up, so sophisticated to have that fabric flowing over my shoulder, down my back. It somehow made up for the chronic awkwardness of being an adolescent — flashes of metal in my mouth, finally getting contact lenses so I could ditch the thick, dorky glasses I had earned from years of extreme nighttime reading, everything about me growing and changing at different speeds. For this scrawny, anemic, extensively nerdy brown girl from a white suburb of New York, my davani was like a magical cape. Whoosh! Drape it over my scrawny shoulder and all of a sudden I was elegant and worldly.
