Rummaging in my wardrobe.

A box of letters, all several pages long. Letters from my father, my friends...a couple of them from my grandfather, written in a script I'm still pretty much alien to. Some photographs, of roadside picnics and me climbing trees. A photograph of my mother...black and white and somewhat yellow...the pigtailed girl in the picture looks nothing like Maa, except for her super curly hair and her impish smile, both of which have remained the same. A pocket phonebook with alphebetical tabs, contacts that have confined themselves to the phonebook,but vanished otherwise. My slam book (I wonder whether my ten year old facebook savvy niece has ever heard of a slam book) from high school...the pages bear testimony to our fervent attempts at being "cool." Friendship bands tumble out in a tangle of fibres and colours, and I fail to remember who tied which one. My "School Captain" badge, rusty and worn. The dupatta from my uniform, crumpled and spotty and yellowed...scribbled all over...parting notes from people I won't meet for years to come. An email printout I still remember every word of...a single blue earring, the other one of the pair lost in the jumble of time. And I realise it's no point trying to look for it anymore after all.

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The Sisterhood of Medicine

"Sister, when will the Doctor be here?", asked a middle aged man. I turned from my examination table, where I was examining a six year old boy, and replied, " I am the doctor, how can I help you?". The man looked at me doubtfully - I was in a salwar kameez with my stethoscope around my neck - and repeated - " No but Sister, I need my child to be seen by a Doctor Sir". This is only one of the many incidents that I- as well as most of my young female colleagues at work- go through on a daily basis. Young female doctors get mistaken for nurses all the time, although the nursing staff always has a specific uniform. The young male doctors, however, do not encounter any such confusion. I have no idea whether I can label this as casual sexism or pure ignorance, but people across social and economic spectrums tend to address female doctors as "Sister" as opposed to "Madam". The men, however, get to be "Sir" throughout. S...

The Saree and its Excess Baggage

As a lanky young girl in her late teens who first stepped into Medical School, I gawked in horror when I was told that I was supposed to wear sarees to classes for a month or so as part of the college tradition for all Freshers. That the whole saree thing was to be accompanied by drippingly oiled hair parted in the middle and braided with the ends tied with fluorescent orange and green ribbons is another story in itself, of course. But for the eighteen year old me, who didn't really care how she looked, the oiled hair wasn't an issue as much as the saree was - simply because I had absolutely no clue how to drape one. Cut to a little over a decade later, as a newly married woman, the women of my husband's family and extended family are pleasantly surprised as to just how comfortably I drape my sarees, not requiring the help that was very generously offered by a bevy of aunts and sisters in law. Somewhere in these past few years, I fell in love with this quintessential...

The Matter of the Root.

In a country where your name (more importantly, your surname) is more or less a reflection of your identity- from where you belong down to your caste and religion- imagine having a name that doesn't pin you down to a certain state or territory or region, even. Given that situation, I have now come to simply laugh off the surprised reactions I get when people realise I am Assamese. I have had colleagues who simply assumed I was Bengali for years,friends of friends enquiring which part of Delhi or Punjab I am from and even random aunties at weddings judging me for gorging on chicken because apparently, I am a Marwari! I usually laugh the whole thing off, sometimes even playing a guessing game with the people who seem hellbent on decoding where I actually am from. But somewhere at the back of my mind, over the years, a nagging question has kept building up in my mind--a question I have tried to answer very many times, although not very satisfactorily--- What does being an Assamese...

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