Threads of Blood and Oil: A Turbans Weight

As I sit on the woven carpet in my warm-toned living room, my mother pours coconut oil into the roots of my hair.

This is a weekly ritual for us—the only time she and I truly see eye to eye.

The only time my mother allows herself to cry.

She gently massages the oil into my scalp with her frail fingers.

I begin to feel the individual strands of hair clumping together—a sensation I hate to remember.

I ask her to apply more pressure, and for a moment, I feel the pads of her fingers lift off of me.

I hear a sigh, and then all I can hear are cries.

My mother tells me she doesn't have enough strength, and so I ask her why.

She leans over my shoulder and whispers that it’s because of Sikhs in 1984.

She sits there and tells me how she's scared to die, even though we live in modern times.

How every time she takes the train, the vision of bodies upon bodies floods her mind.

I ask her how old she was in 1984, and she says, "Only five."

Only five, and she had to learn the words, "You must die."

She still remembers the day her father came home with his pag soaked in blood.

My grandfather was a military man, but at that time, he was just a man—a man with a turban and a kara, a man with the same blood as mine.

Suddenly, the oil on my head felt heavy, like the blood on my grandfather's turban.

Suddenly, my heart began to race, like the Sikh victims every time they were about to answer their door.

Suddenly, my feet turned cold, as if I were in the Golden Temple between June 1st and the 8th.

And suddenly, my mother’s tears were soaked into my body, and were returned into the world through my own tears that felt as heavy as the bloodshed of Sikhs in 1984.

My tears, with nowhere to go, were then soaked up into the woven carpet.

My mother then gathers my hair, enriched with oil and tears. She braids it neatly and tightly, until finally, our weekly ritual comes to an end.

And I am left with tear-stained hair and skin that resembles the colour red.

about the poet

Ramneek Panchi (she/her) is a Sikh philosophical poet. Growing up she struggled to make sense of the world and human nature, so she dedicated herself to the arts to understand exactly this. She is now a published and performative poet who thrives off capturing the human experience through the soulful understanding of personal and external connections.