Is this asking me to talk about the character?
She was born in what is now Easten India about the time the taj mahal was completed to a untouchable family. Untouchable, dalit, scheduled caste – These were the tribes who couldn’t, or would not, be consolidated into Hindu polytheism. Since Indian independence, this has been considered a 5th caste, before then it wasn’t even that.
Is it sort of like post-slavery personal and institutional racism in the america? Sort of.
so he first 12ish years were with this not very described family – and then she was sold and her buyers tried to make her a devadasi. Yeah, they’ve tried to clean that label up to. Among the temple responsibilities was a form of sex work. She tried to flee – but her brahmin owners caught her, with a different face. The happened a few times, her owners realized they would have to occupy her in other ways if they were to make money.
She was an ‘itinerant goddess’ for 150 years. That is, traveling to different temples and festivals, she was hired out to depict different holy figures, with her handlers getting pay, buying and selling shares of her as one generation wanted to retire. Subsequent generations of owners asked more and more of her, her boneless elasticity forced to develop with their ‘innovations’. Eventually it was re-discovered she was untouchable by a new owner, and he thought he’d get better karma by invoking a riot. She survived, though she was essentially hiding as a mud puddle for a few days.
There’s always an undercurrent of ‘Life’s a stage and we are actors in it” – she tries one life for a while, moves on when she should be getting too old. Because of her fairly consistent mass, she can depict MAYBE a late teenager, given some hair black. Not a city kid, she doesn’t trust she knows all the modern mannerisms. But that can leave her in the same life for 40 years before things start to get questionable.
Of what I currently know of her past, she has been
A kid, a uncontrolled devadasi, itinerant goddess, a street performer, a childless wife (stay at home by definition at that point), a mailman (dak runner), a researcher, a live and written translator, a relativly cheap british governess, a wife giving hospice, and saree seamstress. There are gaps and presumable redundancies in this record.
She stashed away enough money during the itinerant goddess phase – licitly, her owners would say if they realized – to not strictly depend on the income of these jobs, but she has never exactly been lavish. She isn’t immortal, she just hasn’t died yet. She never wants to be despondent again, and flaunting wealth as a dalit can lead to that.
Of her most frequent physical features – and she is usually playing human, as she might put it;
- She only really started growing out her hair for her third husband, Uddyam, partially to spite him for his long absences touring with the tent cinema (though both understand he sort of needs it psychologically). There is the possibility that she’s got somthing of a hair-as-rebar setup under her skin, a sparse subdermal bodysuit, to save her some energy during the day. in maintaining human shape.
- The Glasses, of which she own a whole collection, are all different prescriptions; lacking a skull, even if she isn’t stretching, she may have to choose a differnt pair every morning for best result (Never telescoping eyes). Even too much squinting can mess up her focus or quickly exhaust her.
- The saree is only consistent after becoming a saree maker, she was stuck on 70s fashion throughout the 80s. She never did wear a flat peticoat under the saree as most do, preferring leggings of some sort.
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