Sisters of the Staircase

Every Indian woman I know learned how to get dressed on a staircase. Yours, mine, someone’s dadi’s — it does not matter. The staircase is where the pallu got pinned, where the lehenga got hoisted, where someone’s cousin whispered, wear the gold, not the silver, and was right in a way that changed the whole evening.

Nobody taught these women, either. They learned it the same way, half a flight down, from someone older who had a safety pin and an opinion and about thirty seconds before everyone had to leave. Getting dressed, in a lot of our families, is not a solo act performed in front of a mirror. It is a relay — knowledge handed down between women who may not even like each other very much, in the narrow minutes before a wedding, a puja, a party.

I have been dressed by aunts I see once a year. I have dressed cousins I will not see again until the next wedding. There is a strange intimacy in it — someone else’s hands at your waist, tucking, adjusting, deciding — that we don’t have a proper word for. It isn’t quite love. It’s closer to inheritance.

This is a story about those staircases, and the women who stood on them, and the small acts of styling that got passed down like a recipe nobody wrote down. The internet can teach you a lot now. It cannot pin a pleat from memory, or tell you to wear the gold, not the silver, and be right.