What My Blood Remembers, Part 2

As August 1994 rolls in, while my classmates are excited to apply to universities, planning their farewell parties, I find myself sitting in a yellow kurta shalwar, getting ready to become a bride.

While the henna is being applied onto my hands, cool at first, then tightening as it dries, until I look down and barely recognize what’s there. Intricate. Beautiful, Trapping, my classmates are singing and dancing in the room, celebrating a joyous occasion, not knowing the promise made to my parents — accepting and keeping their honor.

As the red bridal shawl drapes over me, the weight of it settles across my shoulders, across my head — heavier than fabric has any right to be. I feel it pressing into me like something old, something passed down without my permission. Generations before me, generations after me, arriving all at once in a single color.

And in that lonely moment, beneath the singing and the laughter still spilling from the next room, I think, now my hands belong to something else. Now they stir dal. Now they hold what was chosen for me, not what I chose.

I did not know then what thirty years would teach me: that my hands never stopped belonging to me. They only learned to hold more than I thought they could carry.

They held my marriage through storms that came without warning — nights I did not know if we would make it to morning, and somehow, we did.

They held my daughters, again and again, with a promise I whispered before they could even understand it: that I would raise them as independent thinkers, unafraid of their own minds. When the world tried to quiet them, my hands became a sword I kept sheathed but ready. When harsh rooms and harsher people circled too close, my hands became the umbrella I held over their heads without them ever noticing the rain. And through all of it, my hands kept one promise older than any of these — the one I made to my mother and my father, the promise to protect my sister, to protect them, no matter the cost.

Now, when I ink my thoughts onto paper, I understand what I am really doing. I am writing a love letter to myself. To my own strength. To my own mind. To the girl who was told her future had already been decided. Every page says the same thing: I am free to think. I am free to fight.

I am, in my own cheeky way, my own Dame Amore.

And these same hands — the ones that once knew only how to stir_ learned to hold a pen instead of a spoon, a microphone instead of silence. I remember the first room I walked into where no one expected me to speak — my voice shaking, my hands trembling beneath the table where no one could see — and I spoke anyway. I built an organization out of nothing but belief and stubbornness, out of long nights and unanswered emails and a refusal to be told no. I watched strangers become a community because I refused to sit still.

I did not bury the wound of July 1993 in the back of a drawer. I picked up a paintbrush and gave it color. I picked up a pen and gave it words. I turned the girl in the yellow kurta shalwar — the one who thought her story had already been written for her — into the woman who wakes up every morning and writes her own.

My blood remembers now: sacrifice was never the end of me. It was only the beginning.

I AM Cheekyda.