Priya, in Blue

Priya Menon meets me on a Tuesday, in a bar in Bandra that used to be a printing press. She is late by exactly the right amount — late enough to be interesting, on time enough to be kind. She is wearing a blue jamdani sari that her grandmother wore to a wedding in 1974, and a t-shirt she bought at a petrol pump in Alibaug last month.

This is, in a sentence, what she does. Priya is twenty-six, a textile revivalist by trade and a quiet radical by temperament, and for the last three years she has been dragging the Indian sari out of the museum vitrine and back onto bodies that treat it like a Tuesday.

“I don’t want to be styled,” she says, ordering a lime soda with the confidence of someone who has never once been the loudest person at a table. “I want to be understood. There’s a difference, and Indian fashion has been confusing the two for a long time.”

It is easy, sitting across from her, to see why this magazine wanted her on its first cover. There is a legibility to Priya — she wears her contradictions on the outside and lets you make of them what you will. Bandra and Palakkad. Instagram and altar. A grandmother’s sari and a boyfriend’s t-shirt. She is not, thank god, a brand.

The rest of our conversation happens in a kind of shorthand: about the tyranny of the bridal industry, about why softness is not the same as smallness, about a specific blue that only exists in Kerala after the monsoon. She has thoughts on all of it, and none of them are opinions she borrowed from a Reel.

When we finally step outside, it is raining in a way that is embarrassing for March. Priya pulls the pallu of her grandmother’s sari over her head, laughs, and walks. This, I think, is Bindee — a girl in a sari, in the rain, unbothered, entirely herself.