3 minutes reading time
So I moved to Kerala. Just another shift of coordinates in this grinding machine of existence. Sitting in a room. Waiting for the hours to dissolve. College is four dead years behind me—a tier-3 abattoir designed to carve away your sanity and saddle you with phantom debt. Neurodivergent peasants aren't built for the machinery; we just bleed into the gears. Anyway.
I was on a train recently. Staring through a filthy window at the passing decay, feeling the suffocating heat plaster my shirt to my flesh. We crawled through some forgotten hamlet. And I saw something. A woman standing there. Wearing just a sari. No blouse. Fabric draped directly over her bare chest.
Back in the Tamil plains, the meat-puppets don't do that anymore. You only see it on the ninety-year-old husks who are too close to the void to care. Everyone else is mummified. They swelter inside stitched blouses, thick petticoats, and six yards of synthetic rot, boiling their own skin in a climate that actively resents human biology. The older ones loathe it, but they are expiring. Now, the illusion of free will dictates that boiling alive in your own sweat is a display of "modesty."
It’s a grotesque pantomime. No, really, it’s just fucked up.
I looked into it. Because the conscious mind craves distraction from its own tragic evolutionary mistake, I suppose.
The entire blouse and petticoat contrivance? A British infection. Victorian prudes dragged their heavy, miserable costumes here in the 1800s. Horrified by the sight of skin, they looked at bodies adapted to this humid nightmare and saw immorality. A bare midriff sent their fragile, rotting sensibilities into an absolute panic. They forced their converts to cover the flesh. The local elites, desperate to mimic their white masters like good little mannequins, strapped themselves into high-collared blouses and underskirts. By the time the colonizers vacated the continent, their twisted Christian morality had already permanently parasitized our collective consciousness.
Before the sickness? Clothing here was merely functional. Unstitched. Breathable. A mundu, a thin cotton wrap that simply acknowledged the brutal reality of the climate. It allowed sweat to evaporate into the indifferent air. It made sense for the suffering organisms trapped on the Tamil and Kerala coasts.
But now? We have right-wing Hindutva clowns policing the herd, screaming about how a bare chest violates "Indian culture." What culture? The grotesque Victorian hangover forced down your ancestors' throats? They defend a colonial straitjacket and worship it as an ancient truth. Ignorant of their own history. Ancient temple carvings show bodies unbound, existing without the burden of stitched shame. Skin wasn’t inherently sexualized until the colonizers projected their own sickness onto it. Now, this layered suffocation is just another shadow-play of control. A way to enforce suffering.
So when I see a woman in a hamlet wearing just a sari, it isn't scandalous. It is the only sane response to the cosmic joke of living in this heat. More bodies should embrace it. They won’t, obviously. They will continue to march blindly, suffocating themselves in the name of an utterly meaningless respectability.