I celebrated my 40th birthday recently and there was only one thing I knew I had to wear: my wedding sari from my forced marriage, 20 years ago.
And would you f**king believe it, it fit.
I didn’t choose the man or the life it represented when I first wore it. The only choice I was allowed was the outfit. I chose virginal white instead of our customary red. To me, it symbolised purity, compliance, control, none of the things I wanted, all of the things I was expected to accept.
When I took the sari off on my wedding night and saw it crumpled on the floor, I could already see the narrative written for me.
Overnight, I went from asking my parents for permission to now asking my husband. The ritualistic, “can I be back by midnight?”, every Friday night felt like going through PMQs, except Parliament was now made up entirely of my husband, my parents, and a rotating committee of aunties. I could go out, but I had to say where. I could offer an opinion, but only if it matched the pack. I could choose as long as the choice had already been approved. I had a curfew.
It looked like agency. It felt like respect. I cosplayed what a wife was meant to be. I cooked. I cleaned. I kept a nice house. But I very quickly discovered it was a hollow kind of freedom.
Poppy on her wedding day 20 years agoI barely recognise that version of me now. Like a lot of South Asian girls from conservative, traditional households, my life had been meticulously planned out. I was meant to get 18 and a half As, a medical degree, a husband, four children, and a Volkswagen Passat parked neatly outside a cul-de-sac.
I was the eldest, foul-mouthed daughter of six kids from a working-class immigrant Bengali family in east London. The unpaid third parent to five younger siblings, and a terrible one at that. I tried to fight the marriage when I was doing my A-levels, but by the time I turned 20, I had no fight left in me. I accepted that I was going to be that girl.
The problem was, I couldn’t behave. I came home too late. I talked too much. I talked back. I asked questions. I didn’t want to live with his brother and his wife. I didn’t really want him going into the restaurant trade; I’d grown up barely seeing my dad because of it.
No matter how hard I tried to fall in line, I kept fucking it up.
So after a massive fight, I left. Two days turned into a week. A week turned into a month. And somewhere in that stretch of borrowed time, the noise started to fade. The longer I stayed gone, the clearer it became who I was and who I wasn’t.
I filed for divorce within a year of separating and though my parents were initially supportive, living back under their roof made another thing clear to them. The marriage hadn’t failed because it never should have happened. It failed because I was never that girl in the cul-de-sac.
In the years since I made mistakes. I laughed. I danced. I lived. Some of it began under my parents’ roof, Thursdays out with nothing but a thong, a toothbrush and pure excitement about where I’d end up, reappearing on Sunday mornings claiming I’d just finished a brutal “night shift”.
Then, when I moved out, my world expanded. I fell in love. I fell out of love. I bought a flat on my own, I did the thing I thought I never would: co-host a s-e-x podcast, building a community of brown women who would hold me for life. We took it to the theatre. Two brown women on stage talking about sh** that we were never meant to say out loud. We had crossed a line. We told the truth.
Every decision I made came at a cost: disappointment, shame, being othered, shunned and quietly blamed. My parents paid a price, too; the community blamed them for the failure of my marriage despite them pushing for it. I forgave my parents a very long time ago. Which brings me back to my birthday.
That same piece of clothing that once carried so much pain brought me something I never expected: joy. I wore the sari not to rewrite the past, but to take authorship of it. Once a piece of fabric frozen in time, now worn by a completely different me.
I wasn’t asking for permission. I wasn’t being told what to accept as my kismet. I was standing on a chair, off my nut, looking out at a room full of people I love, thinking the girl who wore it at 20 didn’t disappear. She survived. I survived. Same cloth. Different woman.
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