Chained by tradition

All mom really wanted that day at the doctor's office was a rubber band for her hair.

She dug deep into her purse and found everything else, including the mangalsutra she had misplaced two years ago coiled like a golden snake against the dark interior.

“Oh, my god,” thought mom, her eyes widening in disbelief, “how many times has this very same handbag passed through airport screening without beeping even once?”

Despite the time difference, the occasion warranted rousing the maternal grandparents in India out of deep slumber.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am,” gushed grandma, as though mom had stood first in the civil service exam. “My prayers have been answered.”

A vada malai to the neighborhood Hanuman was duly commissioned, and coconuts were cracked in front of various temple deities - the halves then distributed to the Gurkha guard and the chappal keepers out front.

The hullabaloo her parents had created when they first learned of the missing mangalyam reminded mom of the similar bedlam she had generated when she awoke with a stinging red eye on her wedding day and couldn’t pop her contact lenses in.

If it hadn’t been for her cousins who clustered around her during the ceremony and guided her every action, mom would’ve married the closest pandal pillar for all she could see.

Unlike the premarital red-shot right eye which was blamed on jitters, mom had no one but herself to blame when she mislaid her marital symbol many years later.

“What do you mean you can’t find it?” exclaimed grandma over the phone. “First of all, who told you to take it off? Have you looked in your bed?”

“That’s the first place I searched,” said mom defensively, happy to note that she wasn’t the first godfearing Hindu woman to stow her chain under the pillow.

Perhaps the traditional Tam Bram thaali needs a serious redesign if generations of women have been taking the chain off at night at the behest of their husbands, lest the jingling awaken a sleeping household at the most inopportune moment.

When grandpa first learned of mom’s errant mangalsutra, he promptly dipped into his retirement savings and sent her a shiny new replacement through the next visiting relative.

“Find a good day to take off the yellow thread from around your neck,” grandma had instructed over the phone.

Mom touched her bare neck and gulped.

“Do puja and then wear your new thirumangalyam. And don’t you dare lose this one also,” warned grandma, silencing mom’s protests of needless expenses.

Mom’s neck is now dutifully weighed down by guilt and her cleavage raw with dent marks from the new mangalyam's sharp edges.

“What are you going to do with two chains now, Amma?” asked Anu, echoing the question in mom’s own mind when she recovered her jewelry.

That's a good question.

I wonder if wearing two thaalis simultaneously would doubly impress the maternal grandparents when they visit next week.