the breast tax
neena pottoore

My father, brother, and I came to the United States in the late 1970s to join my mother, who had already settled in Detroit, Michigan. To her surprise, I was no longer the little girl she had left behind in India to create a new life for us in America. I was ten years old and already close to her height.

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Excitedly, she opened the suitcase to unpack and get us settled. She knew that modern clothing from India and the outfits for pre-teens in the United States were different, so she had asked my father to bring over traditional outfits that weren’t available in the States. But inside the suitcase were not the colorful pavadas, lenghas, or salwar kameezzes that she expected. Instead, heavy white, cotton petticoats fluffed out. No, not the kind with full skirts or lacy hems. These were simple cotton, A-line slips that hit right above my knee. My father had them tailor-made at his brother’s clothing store in Kerala, a state in South India. I watched as my mother plopped down on the bed, crossed her arms over her chest as if in pain, and darted her eyes to my father, then me, and then to the contents spilling out of the luggage. 

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At that time, I did not understand her reaction. But years later, I understood. In my father’s eyes, I was still a little girl playing in the sand, wearing frocks all day long. My mother saw a pubescent youth. She foresaw the fashion trajectory of my developing body. As an American pre-teen, I wore jeans and shorts, not dresses and long skirts. Within three months, the buds on my chest were a size B, and the cotton petticoats had no stretch to them. 

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My mother, a registered nurse, made $5 an hour. Her salary paid for the two-bedroom apartment, groceries, a car, and Catholic school tuition for two children. A bra from Woolworths costs about $6. During her breaks and shifts in the hospital, she took out the stitches from the petticoats using a seam ripper. On her days off, she remade those petticoats into bralettes with elastic grips to cover my budding chest. 

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At thirteen, I had real bras, the store-bought kind. The kind of bra that had a hook and eye closure, where you have to bend your arms at the elbow behind your back to affix. The kind of bra that molded the breasts gave them a lift and provided support during gym class. I learned how to take off my bra without taking off my T-shirt. An unwanted touch trained me to keep my bra on as an added layer of protection.

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When I was sixteen years old, I preened in the mirror, admiring my cleavage in my size C cup Cross Your Heart Playtex bra. That’s the same year my mother discovered a lump on her left breast. We had no family meetings or discussions about what to expect. She simply came home one day with one breast cut off: an angry red stippled stripe created a diagonal trench from the middle of the sternum into her armpits. I wiped it gently, soothed it with aloe, and covered it in gauze. When she put on her clothes, you could see that a mound had vanished, the body was lopsided. 

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Pennamma peramma, my mother’s eldest sister, came to stay to assist my mother and us. She looked at her sister’s mutilated body and said, “I thought the days of cutting off our body parts would be over, especially in this modern world.” Beating her breasts like she was at a funeral, she wailed that women seemed to be always making sacrifices to pay debts to the deities, mankind, the government, and their children. 

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“When does this end?  When do we have complete control?” she lamented.

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Oiling my hair, she shared stories about her grandmothers who walked around the house wearing a parambu, which only covered the lower body. Their breasts were exposed and would swing freely, often with a child attached, suckling, while they went about their chores around the house and fields. Covering of the breasts was a privilege afforded to the Upper Castes, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. 

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Lower-caste women had to pay a tax if they wanted to cover their breasts in public. Many could not afford to pay that tax, and in the world of colonial sensibilities, they were shamed for their exposed breasts. Before the European ideas of civility, shame was only imparted for bad deeds, not for nudity. When the poor women protested, they were stripped naked and beaten to death. 

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As I sat hunched up in the cold porcelain tub, my aunt scrubbed my body with loofah and told me the story of a young, newlywed couple. They were of the lower Eshava caste and could not afford to pay the breast tax. On a chilly morning, the young bride opened her thatched door to the tax collectors. She refused payment as they stared at her linen-covered chest. When they began to pull her out of the house, she ran inside and came out with a sickle-shaped toddy knife. She took off her covering and hacked off her breasts, serving them to the men on plantain leaves.

 

Two women from The Cancer Society sat on our sofa drinking coffee. On the mirrored coffee table lay an array of breast prosthetics in different shapes and sizes. Mummy undid her shirt and filled the empty sac of her bra with different sizes. Modesty was not present when her chest was uncovered. She wanted the prosthesis so she could look good, feel good, give balance to her frame, and not let anyone know that she had an amputated breast.

 

When I was eighteen, I wore a sari for the first time at a cousin’s wedding in Kerala—the fan-pleated pallu draped diagonally over the matching blouse tailor-made to my chest measurements. The breasts need to be pointy and perky underneath the blouse, a look achieved by the spiral stitches on the bra. To buy this special bra, I had to go to the basement floor of the sari shop. A man behind the counter looked over my body. Selecting a cardboard box, he placed it on the glass counter. Opening it, he lifted the tissue paper to reveal the undergarment.

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Without meeting his eyes, I picked up the bra, went behind the curtain into a hollow niche covered in cobwebs and dust mites, and tried on the bullet bra. It fit. The man at the counter flattened the bra, wrapped the tissue paper around it, placed it in the rectangular box, and handed it to me like a gift.

 

When I was thirty, at the suggestion of my OB/GYN, I started a ritual on my birthday that I’ve enacted every year hence. I perform an artistic dance, hoping to rewrite a different ending. I raise one arm and place my hand on the back of my head. My other arm is shrugged up and thrust forward to clutch a curved, cold plastic tube. While I stand against the cold metal,  my breasts are compressed like chapatis, allowing images of fibrous fat, tissues, lobules, ducts, lymph nodes, blood vessels, and ligaments to be captured on film in translucent silver emulsion. 

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While waiting for the results, I wonder if my inherited genes have mutated and cells have divided. I hope and pray. After age forty-five, follow-up letters suggest an alternative method to examine these D-sized, dense, and voluptuous breasts that weren’t amenable to X-ray imaging. I am now beginning my perimenopause stage.

 

On her forty-seventh birthday, my mother took her last breath two years after her breast was cut off. The Eshava woman bled to death from her self-mutilation, giving way to a century of protests and uprisings. Distraught, her husband jumped into her funeral pyre. By the time my aunt was born, breast-covering restrictions were lifted, and the choice of whether to cover her breasts was left to the woman and her degree of comfort.

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On my forty-seventh birthday, my results indicated that my breasts were in good health, albeit a bit dense. I don’t have my mother’s mutated genes. Is it strange that I was almost disappointed? I wanted to conquer her malignancy and have control over the parts of a woman’s body that nourish, enhance, and debase. I wanted to relive my mother’s scars and chemical fires and emerge like a Phoenix; to give her story a happy ending. Instead, I fulfilled her dreams by creating a life for myself of my own choosing. I lived. 

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I live.