Every time I come back, Paati is exactly where I expect her to be.
Sitting quietly, like the afternoon belongs to her. She is wearing her nose ring, a small diamond one, and every now and then the light catches it. I have watched that little diamond sparkle my whole life. Even when I was far away and missing home, that image would find me. Her face. That small, familiar glint.
The Athangudi tiles are cool under my feet. Deep reds, blues, greens, each one a little different, each one catching the light in its own sweet way. I used to run across these floors as a child without ever stopping to look. Now I just want to sit here.
It is funny how a place can do that. Bring you back to yourself, without even trying. I have been back for three days now. Something in me is slowly settling.
Looking at Paati, my thoughts keep drifting to her nose ring. And to the fact that I have never worn one myself. For years I told myself I just wasn't ready for Indian nose jewellery. But sitting here, watching that little diamond catch the afternoon light, I think I can be a little more honest with myself.
I keep thinking about what a nose pin meant to the women Paati grew up around. It was never just something pretty.
When a young girl got her first traditional nose ring, it felt like being quietly welcomed into a circle she had been watching her whole life. Her Amma had one. Her Paati had one. Her aunts had one. And the day she got hers, she stepped in too. Just like that. No fuss. Just a warm, simple belonging.
As she grew older, it grew with her. At marriage, it became something even more personal, a new home, a new beginning, a new life starting softly. The moment it was given, and the hands it came from, meant something that nobody needed to explain out loud. Everyone simply understood.
There is something about Indian jewellery that resists being put into words. The history of nose rings doesn't live in any one place. It lives in small, ordinary moments like these, in the woman who still remembers the day she got her first one, in the feeling of something so familiar it has stopped needing a name.
Paati got her first one just before she turned thirteen. She still talks about that day with such warmth. Her Amma chose a small diamond, just right for her face. Over the years, all her loved ones gave her a different one, each a little memory she still holds close.
She told me once that somewhere along the way, the nose pin stopped feeling like something she wore. It just became part of who she was. That, without it, something felt missing.
I think about that. What it means for something so small and delicate to settle that deeply into a person. What it means to wear a traditional nose ring that quietly connects you to all the women who wore one before you.
And then I look at these tiles. The warm reds, the soft blues, the greens. They feel like they belong to the same world as the South Indian nose ornaments I have always seen on the women of this house. Cheerful and warm and completely comfortable being what they are.
Maybe that is what I have been waiting to feel too. That same quiet comfort. Because if I am honest with myself, it was never really about the ornament.
It was about what choosing it would mean. There was a small part of me, for a long time, that wasn't sure I had the right to it. That wondered, very quietly, whether the years away had put a little distance between me and the things I grew up loving.
It is not a heavy feeling at all. More like a soft little question that sits with you for a while, and then floats away. Like a cloud on a warm, sunny afternoon.
Ammu brought it up gently a few days ago. She placed the idea with me softly and left it there, without any pressure at all. I told her I was thinking about it.
And I am. The thought comes and goes, easy and calmly, the way thoughts do on slow afternoons.
I find myself wondering what I truly want to carry with me, and what it might feel like to choose a small spark of my own, something that catches the light with the same quiet magic as Paati’s.
Paati always said a nose ring should feel like it belongs to you. Not because anyone says so, but because you feel it yourself. That tradition is something you receive, and then, in your own sweet time, you make it yours.
Maybe I have been waiting for everything to feel just right before letting myself choose. As if the choosing needed everything else to settle first.
But maybe it doesn't work that way. Maybe you choose, and everything settles after. Softly. Slowly. In the wearing.
The light is gentler now. Paati hasn't moved. The nose ring still catches the sun, small and quiet, the way it always has.
And I am sitting on these colourful, familiar tiles, feeling something in my chest slowly loosen that I didn't even know I had been holding.
I don't have an answer today. But I am here. I am thinking. And in this warm, quiet afternoon, perhaps that is already enough.