I.
Before the first yoga moms and golden chai lattes, the yellow spice was the love language of my foremothers.
I am small when my Amma and my Amma’s Amma smear it over blacks and blues, dab it where paper has grazed skin, swirl it into too-warm milk and pots of dal. Always with sweet nicknames, lullabies, prayers. I grow tall enough to see over these words, into their trailing shadows: doctor’s visits, reluctantly booked after the aches root deep in our bellies; the suffering, threaded beneath the sequins of our ghagra-choli. I learn how even this spoonful of sun holds the shadow of Other People Knowing our brokenness.
For years, I watch untouched pills in rust-orange bottles cloud with dust. I memorize the taste of turmeric. I never know the taste of the pharmacy.
II.
The first stomachaches grip me tightest at night. I watch the sliver under my bedroom door, waiting for Amma’s feet, for her hand on the ache. When I hear a sound that could be the snap of a suitcase or the slap of a cheek, I push the ache deeper into my gut. It yoyos between my appendix and ribs as I pinch my bear’s stuffed nose and blink at the flickering yellow. A flurry of flickers: Appa’s feet. Sharp, singular ones: Amma’s. I watch until the flickers grow far enough apart, my heavy-lidded blinks closer together.
Twelve years later, Amma’s cracked palm will find my belly, move the skin in circles, slip turmeric under my tongue. She’ll say the colitis is just stress, breathe it away. I’ll exhale, learn that my breath could be the sound of a storm.
III.
The first drop of blood, a pinkish tinge on toilet paper, appears during a commercial break. The TV cuts in and out with the power. Sacramento is flooding. Amma flips between KCRA 3 Weather and Zee TV. I return from the bathroom to a man in a white kurta selling ancient secrets, the vowels drawn out until it sounds like eight-cent cigarettes. A toll-free number cuts the screen, slicing photos of his cured clients.
I consider mentioning the blood.
The pills arrive in the mail a few days later, bottles dressed in bold lettering and inviting green curlicues, no fine print. I recognize only one of the labels: arshana, the Kannada word for turmeric. But inside, there are no sunny capsules. Only unmarked gray tablets, smooth as pebbles, smelling of wet earth. They will live under the chiffon in Amma’s sari closet, where Appa never thinks to look.
How do we know this stuff doesn’t have arsenic in it? I wonder aloud as I swallow. Or antimony.
Or lead, offers my brother, who hasn’t yet taken Honors Chem. There could be lead.
IV.
The first offering we make to God after a college acceptance is turmeric. Then vermilion, then rice, then fruit. At the temple, Amma holds an apple, forehead pressed to the tile.
A week earlier, in light of a dangerously low hemoglobin count, a gastroenterologist stuck a scope inside me as though he were checking the temperature of a turkey. I hadn’t known I should have been prepped and sedated. Looks like ulcerative colitis, he said, and ordered a full colonoscopy the next day at 7 A.M.
Amma had nodded, and we drove home with grape-flavored laxative. But when I was halfway through, she snatched the bottle. The procedure was too invasive, the doctor too greedy, the diagnosis unlikely. With wet eyes, I watched the drain drink the rest. I fell asleep with my mind in a knot—only years later would I realize it was denial tangled with hope, and shelter with neglect. In the morning, Amma had checked the caller ID, then let the landline ring and ring.
As the temple bells ring, Amma lifts her head, eyes still closed. I imagine she’s imagining me, healthy.
V.
The first time I wake up from a colonoscopy is two months before I graduate from college. Two years after I stop being able to sit through a class or a meal without a bathroom break. Two weeks after elevated inflammation markers. Two days after shoveling my poop into a cup.
This time, Appa sits with me. Arms crossed, squinting at the subtitles of the screen in the recovery room, digesting a dialogue between two actors I don’t recognize. You should get Netflix, he says at the TV, as the gastroenterologist pushes aside the curtain.
Hungover on Propofol, thighs sweat-stuck to the exam table paper, I watch the doctor point to grainy images of my intestines, hear the word chronic for the first time, pocket a prescription for two pills of mesalamine a day.
Absolutely not, Amma says over the phone, and I book another appointment, ask how to manage my symptoms with diet alone, write down a list of side effects, relay the information back, promise I won’t ruin my life, promise to toss the pills, promise I won’t tell anyone, especially not any boys who might like me.
When I visit home, all my food is stained yellow.
VI.
The first time harmful amounts of lead are found in imported turmeric, I’m in grad school. The New Haven ice has quieted the fire in my gut just enough to keep me seated through seminars, without any medication. In our family chat—the one without Appa—Amma captions her flurry of blue links: DANGER. I swap out the loud heap of powder in my spice box for a slim O Organics jar that slips behind the olive oil. It dusts my curries and tea through ten neat holes. Timidly, like it doesn’t belong to itself.
VII.
The first doctor to mention turmeric calls it curcumin. I’m twenty-five at the Stanford clinic, and my symptoms are starting to return.
Some of my patients find that it helps, says my new gastroenterologist, who sits on multiple FDA committees. I start taking one gram per day while I await a colonoscopy.
Three weeks later, they find fire scorching the left side of my colon. Severe active colitis, the report says. There are oozing ulcers and scarring that runs deeper than my symptoms suggested, deeper than I’ve ever pushed any ache, deeper than the curcumin could ever reach.
VIII.
The first wedding ritual is the haldi, to purify the soul, cleanse the body. Amma daubs turmeric paste onto me and a boy who has liked me through six colonoscopies, four medications, dozens of hours in ERs, and thousands of gas station restroom stops. Each month, I’m infused with an expensive drug. A decade since my diagnosis, I’m almost in remission. I lift my choli. Amma smears the paste over my belly, scrubs and scrubs the rest of my colitis away.
IX.
The first task after I’m in remission is furnishing our new home. At the Palo Alto IKEA, the straw-haired salesman spots my husband adrift among the couches, and me, returning from the restroom. He skims our brownness, points to a camel leather cushion, and winks: You won’t even see the too-meric stains on this one.
I see my Amma, and my Amma’s Amma, scrubbing palms raw after a cook, sawing turmeric
from their nails as the houseguests circle the kitchen. The way the salesman circles us, the way Amma and Appa circled each other behind the door, the way the colitis will always circle me.
I see my hands gripping the shopping cart—cuticles stained, powder caked on.
I’m neon-loud under the fluorescent light.
