Strands of Stories
Category B: Third Place (2025) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Shreya Kalani
The Red - Gold Saree
When people ask me if I remember the saga of my creation, I can barely answer. What I recall are flashes: being woven into existence, rotation after rotation on a handloom, and the salty scent of sweat from an old man, labouring day and night to feed the hungry mouths of his family.
I was sold soon after—red and gold, heavy with foreign hope - to fill the bellies of starving children. I do not miss my creator, nor his quiet, flickering dream that perhaps one day, his daughter might wear me. Me - a saree, handcrafted with care, often found draped over the shoulders of rich, bored wives - for her wedding.
I passed from shop to shop, until I found myself suspended behind the glass of a high-end showroom. A place frequented by the wives of colonisers wanting to drape themselves in “exoticness,” or by the guilty-eyed zamindar’s wives, who had sold pieces of their country to secure their futures.
I was growing bored under the artificial lights when I felt it: a desire so fierce it nearly seared through the glass. It came from a girl, no older than thirteen, who stared at me like I was something holy. Her mother, tired and thin, pulled her along through the market, the ravages of poverty clear on their faces. The girl stopped, tugging insistently at her mother’s arm, pleading silently, pointing toward me.
The mother sighed, touching the only ornament on her bony neck - a worn gold chain - and murmured,
“Well, the bride should at least get the saree of her choice, shouldn’t she?”
And so I was taken - by a rich wife who would wear me twice and forget me - but by a child bride, whose girlhood was suffocated under the pretence of a blessing called marriage.
I was worn only once, on her wedding day. There was no other cause for celebration in her short tragedy of a life, which ended at twenty - giving birth to her second child. A boy. Her 21-year-old husband chose the baby over her. “Wives are replaceable,” he said. “But a baby boy is not.”
Her four-year-old daughter watched silently, her eyes wide and frightened, as her mother’s lifeless body - limp like a marionette with its strings cut - was carried away. And in that moment, the child understood: if she stayed, her fate would be the same.
So, at sixteen, she ran. She ran barefoot, breathless, beneath the weight of tradition and fear. She fled the house that had denied her education, that forced her to call a cruel stranger “mother,” that prepared to send her to the same altar - or grave - as her own.
She wore me - her mother’s saree - clutched to her like a shield. Alongside her, a nation, too, was running. India was rising, unchaining itself from the British Empire. And so she did what any girl with no books but a heart full of fire might do: she joined the freedom struggle.
She marched, she shouted, she bled. Took lathis on her back and lashings to her ribs. She fed her hunger with revolution.
“I’ve had two mothers in my life,” she told a crowd once. “My birth mother died when I was four. My other mother - Mother India - must not suffer the same fate. I will die before I let her be silenced, as my first mother was.”
Those words made a young protester - a boy her age with gentle eyes and ink-stained hands - lose his heart to her. She resisted, of course. Her very ribs flinched at the thought of promises. But that boy promised differently.
He promised that she would not meet the same fate.
Years later, she stood at the gates of a school, holding her daughter’s hand, watching her walk in for her first day in independent India. The girl skipped ahead. And in that quiet moment, she was glad she had run. Glad she had worn me.
“Maa, why are you wrapping this old saree around me on my medical college graduation day?” her daughter asked.
“This isn’t just a saree,” said the mother, older now, her voice lined with memory. “This was your grandmother’s wedding saree. God bless her soul. I want you to start a new story with it - one of ambition and choice, not survival.”
And so the daughter wore me again - on the day she began practicing medicine, on the day she married the man she loved, on the day she opened a free clinic in the village her mother once fled. With each wearing, I changed. I was no longer just a thread of history - I was a transformation stitched into silk.
“Maa, I’m going to Australia - and that’s final,” said her daughter’s daughter, the next in line. “My future is there, not here. I want to start my own biotech company. I won’t end up married and tied down like you, or anyone before you.”
The mother sighed, her voice caught between frustration and pride. Her own mother, now grey-haired and retired, placed a hand on her arm and nodded with quiet approval.
“Fine,” the mother finally snapped. “You can go. But you’re not leaving without your grandmother’s red-gold saree.”
“Well, we love that you’re wearing such a beautiful red-gold saree to your Forbes 30 Under 30 interview,” the host said brightly. “What inspired that choice?”
The young entrepreneur smiled. “This saree has witnessed generations of women in my family survive, resist, and rise. I wore it to honour the lineage of courageous women who came before me.”
And in that moment, I—once a silent witness, once stained with tragedy—understood something I had never known before:
You do not inherit just cloth.
You inherit memory.
You inherit resilience.
And you choose what you become.