Dear reader — a small confession first. I have been, for most of my life, a very well-mannered woman. Prompt thank-you notes. Smiling at the man on the plane who took my armrest. Saying "no problem, no problem" when it was, in fact, a problem.
Nobody trained me into this on purpose. It was the water. Being the eldest daughter of a small-town Indian family is a soft, continuous curriculum in agreeableness. Being an immigrant professional in an American office is a harder version of the same class. By the time I looked up, I was thirty-two and I had not been genuinely displeased with anyone in about a decade.
Which is why, one evening last winter, I found myself standing in front of a small brass Kali on my altar, and I began — quietly, almost apologetically — to cry.
She is not what the tourist books say.
You have seen the images. Tongue out, blood, skulls, a sword. If you grew up outside the tradition, you were probably told she is "the goddess of destruction," as though destruction were a bad hobby she took up. That is not what she is.
Kali is what remains when everything you were performing for is taken away. She is the mother who does not need you to be pretty or profitable or promising. She is the one who says, plainly, that thing you keep tolerating — you don't have to. I am here. Cut it.
She does not want your niceness. She wants your truth. She will take it, dear reader, even if you offer it in a whisper.
What I stood in front of her and finally said — after ten years of "no problem, no problem" — was small and unspectacular. I said the name of a person whose treatment of me I had been minimising. I said what I actually thought of it. I did not raise my voice. I simply named it. And something in the room, and in me, exhaled.
Rage is not the opposite of the spiritual life.
There is a version of yoga that is exported and it is, mostly, about becoming very calm. Calm is a fine thing. But the fierce feminine — Kali, Durga, Chinnamasta, and the long line of women my grandmother would light a lamp for — is not, primarily, calm. She is accurate.
Her rage is not a tantrum. It is a scalpel. It cuts what is not you away from what is. It cuts the extra job you took to please someone. It cuts the friendship that only ever needs you when it needs you. It cuts the small daily bargain you made with your own body: I will not feel this until later.
There is no later. There is only this life, and this well-mannered woman, standing in front of a small brass goddess, finally saying the thing.
A small permission, if you want it.
You do not have to become a different woman to walk with her. You can still write the thank-you notes. You can still be, in most rooms, kind. But somewhere in your life this week — one place, one sentence — try telling the small, unpleasant truth. Not in anger. In accuracy.
Say the "no" you have been hedging into a "maybe."
Send the invoice you have been embarrassed to send.
Name the behaviour you have been calling "just how they are."
That is Kali's practice. Not the sword — the sword is a symbol. The practice is the refusal to keep tolerating what does not belong in your life.
She does not need you to be nice. She needs you to be here — all of you, including the parts that are tired of being agreeable.
— with love, and a small lit lamp.
your correspondent, from the altar.