Piercing truths, and some yarn
When I was a little girl, my aunt took me to get my nose pierced. Cool, I thought then, and came back attached to a little gold ring. I had it till I was a teenager, when much of my annoyance against the world in general, and my parents in particular came to be expressed through this ring. I thought it to be the worst kind of rural hicky tradition and unfashionable piece of jewellery they could have foisted on me. Diamond and gold studs were bad enough, but noserings? Come on, Hindi film heroines in milkmaid-damsel get-up wore those. The first chance I got, I took it off and basked in my non-pierced urbanity. (Ears were a different matter, earrings have *always* been cool) My mother tried to tell me about ways to keep the piercing even without the ring, saying, "what if they become fashionable again?" but with strict linearity and progress, I pronounced myself and the modern world done with them and looked down my gold-free nose at all those recommendations.
It is always painful when you have to redo what you needn’t have. It is always more painful to try and heal a piercing as an adult, especially when the memory of the nice one you had adds to the stab. It is the most painful when your mother tries not to look reproachful, and manages to say "I told you so" without uttering the words even once. My sister and I determined sometime back to get the damn things back because they didn’t look so bad after all, but The Ring, it would appear has not yet forgiven us for rejecting it back then. Both of us have bonded this summer over allopathic, homeopathic, ayurvedic, yunani and last-resort-internet remedies. I felt a warm and fuzzy feeling when she confessed that she too was now angrily, but surreptitiously staring at other women’s noses, resenting their happily ensconced studs and rings.
Do-gooders and well-wishers (I am trying not to use the nose-pokers descriptor here) abound here, and over the last few weeks I have gathered several such remedies and advice about How to Deal With Your Recalcitrant And Angry Piercing. Friends call to ask about it. Strangers peer at it in the market and offer the surefire solution that their neighbour’s sister’s daughter used. These range from possibly effective to positively hazardous (I’m not going to say which is which, or which ones I’ve tried): sea salt soaks, hydrogen peroxide dabs, aspirin crushes, neem leaves paste, honey daubs, tea tree oil rinses, boroline, soframycin, neosporin, fomentation, betadine… the list is endless. Others shake their heads and say, yeh to kabhi theek nahi hoga ji (this ain’t ever gonna work). But I live in hope, as I try desperately to remember other things that I threw out the window, which might come back to bite me in the ass become fashionable again.
To cheer myself up, I went to look for some wool at the Punjab Woollen Co in Munirka Market in south Delhi.
I was happy that they were open, and that they did not laugh me out of the store for asking for pure wool in the first week of August. The shop is typical Indian wool store - reasonably priced and dyed acrylic-wool blends that wear like iron, with a few brands of pure wool
that are more expensive, and are neatly stocked away in boxes. The price differential means that most people prefer the acrylic for its durability and price. Some Merino is available, but as Mrs. Arora explained to me at great length, for a number of reasons only a few companies manufacture it locally. Knitting and the heavy consumption of yarn is not a hip hobby here as it has suddenly become in the US and elsewhere, so I imagine the high prices of imported wool would put it out of reach for those who could use it, and useless for those who could afford it but prefer to buy readymade
cashmere instead. Mrs. Arora oohed over my Kiri shawl, she showed me some of her sample swatches, and we spent some happy minutes exchanging tips and notes. Bliss. She was too shy to be photographed directly, but you can spot her behind the counter:
I almost bought a gorgeous fingering acrylic blend in a moss green shade, but then I found a few skeins of fingering yarn in a lovely light coffee shade for a pair of basic socks instead and stocked up on some metal needles.
As soon as I cast on for a sock, I’ll be ready to deal with any damn piercing.