“Are you going to wear sindoor today?” You should! – you look so beautiful when you wear it!”

And, almost always, I mumble something that amounts to “no, not today.”

It’s not that I don’t like sindoor in and of itself. The fine, red powder – which is traditionally worn daily by married Hindu women at the front of the center part in their hair – is fine in my books. It’s not a custom I grew up with, but I don’t think it looks bad – just different. And, yeah, sure, I have a tendency to smear it all over my forehead within an hour of application. Whatever – I do that with my eyeliner & mascara most days too, making raccoon eyes a signature Gori look.

No, my problem with wearing sindoor is that most days I’m headed into work. Where there are a fair number of Indian people. And none of them wear traditional Indian clothing, except for the occasional short kurta – certainly there isn’t any sindoor-wearing going on amoung the married ladies! One older Bengali coworker even expressed amazement that I followed the “old-fashioned” tradition of wearing a loha – a gold-plated iron bangle that serves as a wedding ring among Bengali women – on my left wrist daily.

On the other hand, though, when we have people from the Delhi office visiting headquarters, they love that I wear bangles, that I have kurtas in my regular office clothes rotation, and that I occasionally wear sindoor. (Sidenote: when one of said Delhi office coworkers messaged me with a software question that started with a “yaar, how does one…”, I was pretty thrilled at the implied familiarity. Of course, I couldn’t answer his question, since our computer software is acutally composed of ancient cryptic riddles in text files, not understandable data.)

On the third hand (yes, yes, I know), the last time I wore sindoor to the office, my boss wanted to know if I needed a band-aid for the cut on my head. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Does anyone else have problems with this?

I think I’ll be sticking to wearing sindoor strictly outside of the office from here on out.  Or put in for a transfer to Delhi.